This weekend, Business Insider wrote a long, detailed piece covering all the ways cable is losing subscribers and television advertising dollars are poised to move to digital media.
A recent analyst note from Macquarie Capital should also be worrisome for those making money in the TV advertising ecosystem, but for a different reason. While the pay-TV industry is hurting from losing more subscribers than it ever has before, this chart shows Facebook and Google are reaching more people than ever. It measures monthly reach in millions of users:
What the chart shows is that while television still holds the title of most pervasive mass medium by reaching 294 million Americans, Facebook and Google aren’t too far behind at 200 and 235 million, respectively.
Combined, they’re actually bigger than TV — although of course there is plenty of overlap.
