COVID-19 has seen many Ugandans confined in their homes given the restrictions put in place by the government. A Geopoll study shows that radio continues to be the number one coronavirus news source at 44%, followed by TV at 34%, social media in third place with a share of 20%, and other government sources at 18%.
The spike in digital media usage was long predicted and a similar trend expected in traditional media but at least we can now put numbers to it.
GeoPoll also conducted another research study on media consumption and their findings more or less re-echo what was predicted earlier.
The research focused on national television viewing whereas radio looked at Kampala listeners between 6 am to 12 am with respondents of at least 15 years old. Both look at viewership and listenership between 1st – 17th March compared to 19th March – 08th April 2020.
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TV viewership at a national level
Averagely, viewership between 01st – 17th March was 4.5million only to decline to 4.3million between 19th March – 08th April 2020. NTV & NBS are said to have been the main beneficiaries amongst the 10 stations surveyed. Both have been reporting heavily on the evolving COVID-19 situation at a national and international level.
Qatar based Aljazeera also saw a spike in viewership over the same period as it gave an international perspective on coronavirus reporting.
Notable gains were experienced by the likes of UBC by as high as 3%, and we suspect government-related communications being the main driver here, on top of the channel being free across PayTV and Free-to-air services.
How about radio listenership in Kampala?
Radio also saw a spike in listenership between 01st – 17th March, averaging 273,482 listeners only to increase by 25.4% to 343,048 between 19th March – 08th April 2020.
CBS Radio Buganda was the main beneficiary here with its share increasing as high a 3%. It had an increase in all timebands across the day between 6 am – 10 pm and Capital FM had the most listeners during the breakfast show from 6 am to 4 pm whereas Bukedde took the mid-morning show after 10 am up to 4 pm during the drive show.
Galaxy FM and CBS Emanduso saw a decline of 6% & 3% respectively during the same period while other stations like XFM, Dembe and Radio One declined by 1% across.
