Which Indian News Channel Won the Election Coverage War Online?
In a recent news report it apparently emerged that CNN IBN and Aaj Tak won the viewership war on TV during the elections (English and Hindi respectively). Times Now and NDTV followed IBN in that order and Star and Zee News followed Aaj Tak in the battle of Hindi eyes. So it made me curious on what was going on in the online front, and did a small research using some basic tools, and it gave a little different picture.
Here’s what I did:
- Took a trend shot on Google on May16th, and as expected the Indian elections covered almost all the top 100 keyword trends. And as I was hoping it also involved searches for specific news channels. I am including the screen shot of the top 25 trends below.
- Then I took the 5 most popular keywords for news channels in the trend list and did an Alexa comparison.
- And thirdly put my mind to figuring out the three images that I took
And here are the results:
Top 25 trending topics on May 16
If you simply go by the number of people searching for news channels, Aaj Tak won hands down the battle of both languages online. So apparently Aaj Tak was the most wanted news channel during election results day in India. Good for them, but not good for me, because trending topic doesn’t paint the perfect picture of viewership. So I went and did the next best thing a free research needed – Alexa.
And surprise, Aaj Tak didn’t come on tops here, nor did CNN IBN. NDTV instead came on tops and by a huge margin. So much so that it was impossible for me to analyse who came second. Look at this:
NDTV tops Alexa numbers
Now that doesn’t give scope for any analysis, so I took the logical step of removing NDTV from the list and do a comparison with the other four.
Alexa Without NDTV
Even in this case CNN IBN came out with the proverbial wooden spoon. Times Now had come second to NDTV, follwed by ZeeNews with Aaj Tak following them just above CNN IBN or IBNlive.com. What is interesting to note here is also what followed the 16th of May. While almost all channels dropped in traffic in the week that followed, NDTV’s dropped the smallest amount and continued to stay on top, while Zee News (Perhaps this strategy worked well for them) pipped Times Now and the winners of TV viewership Aaj Tak and IBN almost tying for the last place. Aaj Tak in fact showed a significant drop in traffic.
Does all this mean that the reports of TV viewership is wrong? Probably not. There are high chances that there is a set audience for all these channels on the web and on TV and therefore this difference in ratings and rankings online. In any case these are Alexa data and therefore not the perfect sample to work with. Regardless, I tried one more parameter to judge this theory of set audience -the bounce rates.
It did prove right. NDTV and Times Now even more so has a set stable base of web readership, while Aaj Tak and IBN Live don’t with Zee falling somewhere in between. So NDTV already had a regular stream of visitors (mostly South Indian techies – and I am not being parochial in saying this) who constantly use NDTV.com and so does Times Now, in Aaj Tak case a lot of their TV users came to the web to see live results fast (the perception of web being faster) and therefore formed the Google Trend and later dissappeared back to oblivion, while IBN has a stronger TV viewership compared to web readers in general. On the contrary it can also mean the audience that visits IBN’s site is a different demography that doesn’t use Alexa toolbar as much as NDTV (this although Alexa has moved beyong Toolbar collected information).
So who won the online elections coverage war – Purely from the above statistics NDTV and Aaj Tak did.
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Interesting analysis…however there is no correlation between viewership on the Web and Television. Some channels have far better web-sites (NDTV) and this is reflected in the Alexa Figures / Google Searches…
For now…TAM is the best rating system we have.