ITV restructuring CITV - Boss faces the axe

Also the BBC's 2 kids channels has around 33% of the audience to all kids tv channels. The commercial sector (of about 25 services - inc +1) makes up the rest.

Obviously this doesn't include any viewing on the mainstream channels ie. C5 Milkshake, main ITV,etc.

Bigger audience share, but almost always lower ratings.

What a short sighted decision by ITV, I believe they should be increasing their spend on Children's programming not reducing it. It's all about money now instead of looking at providing for the future audience.

They never seem to learn...

Well that doesn't quite add up.

I'm not sure where Square Eyes got his info from. But from looking at BARB ratings from the last few months, CBBC had higher ratings generally than Disney Junior.

Ratings over the last 12 months. Like I said, Disney Jr includes +1. It's not a bigger audience share every month actually, but for most of the last year.

Isn't Disney Junior more in competition with CBeebies?

Yes, I don't think it's really a like for like comparison.

To bring this back to CITV, here's a comparison of CBBC vs CITV % audience share in the last 12 months.

CITV has been on the rise in recent months, not sure what caused the August spike ?



Incidentally, POP has had quite a meteoric rise in share this year and is bigger than CITV.

What learning is that exactly?

Are you saying that if kids don't watch CITV now, they won't watch ITV later in life? I bet half those kids already watch X Factor or I'm a Celeb anyway.

I expect most kids are more likely to watch YouTube videos or probably a more cool, hip and trendy American series than anything home grown in this day and age. It was even like that in the 90s to some degree when Nickelodeon started and of course large parts of the CBBC/CITV schedules were Nickelodeon shows in those days. Plus of course there are so many advertising restrictions these days that it must be hard to make any money at all.

That might have been around the time the new series of Pokemon started which had a little extra buzz thanks to Pokemon Go.

Not all the shows were from Nickelodeon, CBBC did show quite a bit of Australian kid's programming, primarily the (fabulous) Round The Twist series which they were still airing, according to Genome as late as 2004 having first shown the first series in 1990. But yes, Clarissa was aired, an early Nick show and later also Kenan & Kel.

CITV on the other hand probably shot themselves in the foot in 2001 when Janie Grace, formally of Nickelodeon, came to the network and applied stripped & stranded scheduling. While it was successful scheduling technique on Nick where a typical season can be on average up to 26 episodes, it didn't really work over here where most series of that time were "only" 13 episodes if that so an entire show came and went in the space of two weeks.

Anyway it's an entirely different world for today's kids - six million channels, programmes on demand, fast internet, YouTube, Spotify, Facebook, Twitter, smartphones - there's so much more choice for them now to get what they want to see or hear when they want it. In the 1990s and more so in the 1980s it was a case of "this programme is on at 4:40, I will sit and watch it at 4:40 or tape it and watch it later". If you didn't tape it you couldn't get it back later unless somebody else had taped it, and if they hadn't you would have to go without.

Could also be related to the Olympics - as they caused a bit of disruption for some services as BBC Four changed transmission hours, which had a knock on for some of the kids services (particularly HD?)?