Ratings at the three major kids’ cable broadcasters – Nickelodeon, Disney Channel, and Cartoon Network – are in an unstoppable free fall. Everyone knows the cause, but no one knows how to stop it.
Children are abandoning traditional cable in droves, according to a story in Bloomberg Businessweek, with this year’s ratings shaping up to be the worst yet. The culprit in general is streaming services, and more specifically, Netflix.
If you’re an executive at one of those three cablers, the numbers are downright ugly: ratings are down 20 percent from just a year earlier; ad sales haven’t grown in five years (currently stuck at about $1.2 billion annually); and between 2010-2017, children’s viewership of conventional tv dropped 30 percent.
