By Stevie Antonioni, Managing Director UK at Adnami
Take UK news broadcasting. GB News has now beaten Sky News and the BBC News Channel on average live viewership for six consecutive months. Not reach. Not clips. Not social impressions. Actual people watching live TV, minute by minute, across the broadcast day. Historically, that metric has mattered because it reflects how many people are present at any given moment – the core currency of linear TV trading.
Yet ad spend hasn’t followed.
The standard explanation is reach. GB News reaches fewer people overall. Its digital and social scale is smaller. All true. But that defence avoids a harder question: what does average viewership actually tell us, and why are we so quick to dismiss it?
Average viewership isn’t attention in the strict sense. It doesn’t prove eyes-on, ad recall, or persuasion. But it does signal something reach alone does not: concentration. How many people are choosing to stay, not just pass through. It’s a proxy – imperfect, but meaningful for loyalty, dwell time, and repeat behaviour. The very signals digital marketers now claim matter more than raw impressions.
In digital media, we’ve spent years arguing that exposure is cheap and attention is scarce, that time-in-view beats viewability, that engagement beats scale & that quality environments outperform cluttered ones. Until, it seems, those signals point somewhere uncomfortable.
GB News has a smaller audience, but a more concentrated one. Fewer people, watching for longer, returning more often. That doesn’t automatically make it a better advertising environment – but it does make it analytically interesting. Especially when compared with digital platforms and safer broadcast environments, where ads compete with infinite scrolls, background tabs, and declining appointment viewing, yet continue to attract spend because they carry less political and reputational friction. This isn’t simply a measurement problem. It’s a planning hierarchy problem.
Brands don’t buy attention in isolation. They buy reach, frequency, outcomes, and risk management – all at once. Average viewership can’t replace reach. Loyalty can’t substitute for scale. And no metric overrides concerns about audience composition or brand association. Those constraints are real, not imagined.
But the industry’s behaviour still exposes a tension. We celebrate attention as a principle, then default to reach as a shield. We criticise fragmented digital environments, then fund them because they offer cover through scale. We say context matters – until defending that context requires explaining who the audience is and why they’re worth reaching.
The honest position sits in the middle. Average viewership is not attention. But it is a signal of focus in a media landscape built on distraction. Loyalty doesn’t guarantee effectiveness. But it increases the odds that ads are actually processed, not merely served. And environments that deliver sustained viewing deserve more scrutiny than they currently get – not automatic dismissal.
If attention really matters, it should be evaluated consistently, across media, with the same scepticism and the same curiosity. That means fewer rhetorical commitments to “quality” and more willingness to interrogate where ads genuinely have the chance to land.
Until then, attention remains what transparency once was: a word we admire, a slide we agree with, and a principle that quietly gives way whenever it becomes inconvenient to defend.
