Ad Buyers Weep Loudest As Soap Ratings Fall

In case you missed it, TheWrap recently published an interesting story about the future of daytime soaps and the take of media buyers on the future.

As daytime soaps move toward extinction, it's not just restless housewives and the unemployed who suffer -- it's advertisers, who prefer soaps to the game and talk shows that are replacing them. Though the alternatives are cheaper and easier for networks to produce, media buyers tell TheWrap that soaps are still one of the most cost-effective buys on broadcast television. Broadcast network executives tell TheWrap that changing viewer tastes and escalating costs are conspiring against the genre.

"We're not prepared to say soaps are becoming extinct yet," one executive said, "but we are definitely less soap-centric."

And media buyers aren't enthralled with game shows as replacements.
"If they are replacing a soap opera, a talk show like THE VIEW or some other type of genre would be better than a game show," one media buyer told TheWrap.
Losing viewers or not, from the advertisers' point of view, the six soaps combined still reach 14.6 million viewers per day, and that's a sizable number that they can still buy at reasonable rates. And YOUNG AND THE RESTLESS reaches 1.1 million women 18-49 each day, the largest number of women in that demo of any of the soaps.

ABC's GENERAL HOSPITAL has the youngest median age viewer at 52.3, while CBS' THE BOLD AND THE BEAUTIFUL has the oldest at 59.5.