The Broadcasting Authority has released the audience assessment survey for October 2018.

For this assessment, forty daily questionnaires were compiled by the NSO giving a total sample of 1,240 respondents with the youngest being 12 year olds. Overall, this sample gives a margin of error of ±2.78%. The data was analysed demographically by gender, by age-group, and by six geographical districts.

The audience survey took place during the whole month of October 2018.

As many as 274,000 persons (aged 12 years and over), or 60.7% of the population followed television regularly during October 2018. Compared to previous data, there was an increase of 4.9% of viewers over the previous assessment period of July 2018 and a minimal decrease of 1.0% over that of the same period last year (October 2017 - 64.7%). However it has to be pointed out that for the assessment of October 2017 12-15 year olds were not interviewed.

The average number of hours spent watching television amounts to 1.84hrs per viewer. This was just 36 seconds less than that registered during the previous assessment in July 2018 [1.85hrs] and higher than that of the same period last year [October 2017: 1.55hrs]. Over the whole of the population aged 12 years and over, average viewing was at 1.70hrs which was higher than at the previous assessment of July 2018 [1.51hrs] and higher than that of the same period last year [October 2017: 1.11hrs].

Television Audiences
TVM has attracted the largest number of TV-viewers (35.41%) with approximately 141,000 viewers. This station was followed by ONE with 18.69% (≈75,000); Net TV with 8.86% (≈36,000). The other local TV stations' reach ranged between 0.12% and 1.51%. Furthermore, 31.57% (≈126,000) of the population followed a foreign TV station. On average TV viewers spent a total of 1.44hrs every day watching their favourite programme.

Respondents were asked what type of programme they like to watch on local television stations.  Local & Foreign News were the most favourite programme genre [26.3%]; Drama programmes ranked second [16.4%]; Discussion & Current Affairs programmes ranked third [11.1%];

Radio Listening
On the other hand, radio listening has increased by 2.1%. While in February 212,000 persons (aged 12 years and over) listened to radio regularly, in July this figure rose to 225,000 persons (February: 50.9%; July: 53.0%).