TV Viewers More in Rural Areas than Urban

Pakistan tv-viewerThe rural television audience in Pakistan has overtaken the urban audience, a fact that advertisers and communicators must not overlook in order to run effective media campaigns and advertisements, according to the National Establishment Survey conducted by Gallup Pakistan.

It said that the urban audience measurement can be highly misleading as less than one in four television viewers live in the top ten cities in the country.

Chairman, Gallup Pakistan, Dr Ijaz Shafi Gilani said it at a seminar titled ‘Ruralization of television in Pakistan: challenges for audience measurement and communicators,’ organised by the Sustainable Development Policy Institute (SDPI) here on Monday.

Dr Gilani said that the TV audience in Pakistan has been dramatically ruralised in the last decade and the rural audience now significantly outnumbers the urban audience in the country.

‘Out of an estimated 86 million TV viewers of age 10 years and above, more than 52 million live in the villages of Pakistan and only 34 million are spread out in the 470 cities and towns across the country,’ Dr Gilani added.

He said that the rural Pakistan was waking up as it was getting connected to the mainstream through roads, electricity, telecom, television and most of all more purchasing power.

‘All modern facilities are getting ruralised because majority of Pakistanis live in approximately 45000 villages throughout the country,’ Dr Gilani told the seminar adding that the advertisers or communicators must not overlook this reality.

Dr Gilani also said that these findings present a challenge for television audience measurement as well as all communicators in the country.

TV audience profile and viewing habits which are restricted to measuring them in the top cities can mislead media managers and if media managers make decisions based on flawed data they are likely to misallocate and waste scarce media budgets.

‘In these re-cessionary times, that would be bad news for an industry, which is the worst hit by global financial crisis,’ the seminar was informed.


  • How can one get access to the survey by Gallup?? Which TV ratings and survey’s are the most accurate and trusted.
    Kindly Comment Mehwish??
    Would love to see a report on rating and market research organisations in Pakistan.

  • Thanks Aamir for your reference. I have already checked the link. As a media planner we have to rely on market research and surveys alot but Unfortunately Pakistan has yet to get a credible organization for such activities, we do conduct our own web/sms/BTL activities to understand the Media audiences and clients, but a centralized organization providing authentic data in this regard is not available or at times not credible.
    Pro Pakistani has always been a credible source of information among a lot of other web blogs and services.

    A detailed analysis of the need for an independant and credible ratings and research organization is something i would look forward too.

  • Dear Mehwish,
    Thanks for your effort,i believe this other way.as we all know that there are three solutions availabale to the broadcastres in Pakistan,i.e Terristerial,Cable and MMDS and now the fourth one IPTV.actually terristerial audiance range is bigger than cable and others as it covers almost all rural and urban areas.Cable is still not able to penetrate well because of operational hurdels,for example hilly areas are the most difficult areas for cable penetration.so we can say that majority of Pakistani audience is on Terristrial.i think its not a matter of rularising of audiance.as they dont have the option other than PTV or ATV as they are the only terristrial channles.


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