Current Situation and Trends of China’s TV Media Market 2017

Over the past ten years. China’s TV market has become saturated with almost 99% coverage rate, meaning Chinese audience are losing their interests in watching TV yet with a rising digital media consumption. According to data from 2015, Chinese audience tended to spend less time on TV with 156 minutes of daily TV watching length. Moreover, TV coverage rate has dropped year by year with the number of TV viewers also shrinking.

China’s shift from traditional to digital media is also reflected in declining spend on TV ads. According to eMarketer, China’s TV ads accounted for 24.2% of total media ad spending, or $18.92 billion in 2016. That’s less than half of digital’s share. Chinese advertisers are spending more on mobile instead of TV due to a growing share of Chinese young internet-savvy consumers. The slower economic growth has also caused advertisers to look more closely at ad budgets, with some preferring to spend more on digital formats.

However, there are still 37% of the total marketing budget contributing to TV ads in 2016, making TV remain one of the most important media in China. TV advertising effectiveness has remained steady during that time period and outperforms digital and offline channels at driving key performance metrics like sales and new accounts. TV averaged four times the sales lift of digita, if comparing performance at similar spending levels. Moreover, in terms of brand image promotion and coverage rate, TV can obviously beat other types of media.

However, with the rise of Internet TV, users can enjoy Internet content through a large screen in the living room; moreover, promoted by the Internet TV industry, a large number of users have begun to try some new entertainment in the living room. It is forecasted that TV-only audience will continue to decline in the future, with more audience choosing both TV and online media. The smart TV also wins a growing popularity in the coming years.

In 2015, rounding out the Top 3 were CCTV-Comprehensive, Hunan Satellite TV, and CCTV-News (Chinese), standing out from all Chinese channels. Another fact is that the market shares of the two CCTV channels saw a decline, while Hunan TV's market share kept increasing significantly. CCTV-Comprehensive got the highest rating among all CCTV channels, and other hot CCTV channels included CCTV-Movie, CCTV-Variety Shows and CCTV-News (Chinese).

Programs such as TV series, News and variety shows, accounted for 57.1% of all the programs in China in 2015. CCTV and provincial TVs have different focus, as provincial TVs relied more on TV series and variety shows while CCTV channels would broadcast more TV series and News.

Top 10 provincial capital city TVs have seen a declining ad placement. In 2015, Jiangsu satellite TV was the favorite channel for advertisers to place ads among the Top 10 provincial TVs.