Citizen is King, but Kenyans Are Dumping TV – Media Council

The Media Council of Kenya (MCK) has published findings from its State of the Media Survey 2021, offering some interesting insights into Kenya’s ever-evolving media landscape.

The survey used questionnaires to collect data from respondents across the 47 counties. A sample of 3,589 respondents took part in the survey.

It explored consumption habits across TV and radio as well as print. Unsurprisingly, Royal Media Services-owned Citizen TV topped the list of the most watched TV stations. It was mentioned by 78% of respondents.

Standard Group’s KTN Home came in second, mentioned by 31% of respondents, while Nation Media Group’s NTV placed third with 27%. Another RMS property, Kikuyu vernacular station Inooro TV, came fourth with 18% of respondents mentioning it.

Mentioned by 15% of respondents, Multichoice Africa channels placed fifth driven by the likes of Maisha Magic, Supersport, National Geographic. Multichoice Africa channels tied for fifth with Mediamax’s K24.

KTN News, KBC, Kameme TV, Switch TV, Kass TV, Star Times and Kiss TV occupied positions six to twelve respectively.

Interestingly, however, the survey found that less Kenyans were consuming TV content compared to last year. 58% of Kenyans interviewed consume TV content on a typical day, down from 74% in the 2020 survey.

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The drop among Kenyans consuming less TV content may be attributed at least in part to the rise of social media, digital streaming apps and other web-based content platforms.

70% of the TV consumed is local while 30% is foreign. The most watched TV content includes news, entertainment, religious and sports content.

Consumption of radio content, on the other hand, has remained consistent at 74% – unchanged from the 2020 survey. The average time per day spent listening to radio was calculated to be 2 hours, higher than the global average of 1 hour.

The most listened to radio stations were Radio Citizen (27%), Radio Jambo (22%), Kameme FM (15%), Radio Maisha (13%) and KBC Radio (11%).

Only 25% of respondents interviewed consume print media content. Only 46% of respondents buy hard copy newspapers while 27% access them via online subscriptions.

The newspaper most read by respondents is The Nation (59%), followed by Standard newspaper at 28% and the People Daily with 5%.

12% of all respondents admitted to consuming online news content. Here, digital-native platform Tuko took the cake with 34% of respondents mentioning it ahead of legacy media operations Standard group websites (22%) and NMG websites and social pages (21%).

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