Nielsen Releases Annual TV Market Rankings
By Kevin Wing
Editor, Off Camera
The San Francisco-Oakland-San Jose television market, once the fifth largest in the nation, has dropped farther in Nielsen’s annual ranking of TV markets.
For the last several years, Nielsen has ranked the Bay Area market – consisting of San Francisco, Alameda, Contra Costa, Solano, Napa, Sonoma, Marin, San Mateo and Santa Clara counties – as the sixth largest TV market in the country. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, it had been the fifth largest.
But, for the 2017-18 season, San Francisco-Oakland-San Jose drops from sixth to eighth, a loss of -1.5 percent of TV homes versus the 2016-17 season. The Bay Area market has 2.45 million TV homes, according to Nielsen, or nearly 2.2 percent of all TV homes in the United States.
The trend was the same for the top five markets: New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia and Dallas all lost TV homes as well.
Sacramento-Stockton-Modesto maintained its ranking as the 20th largest market in the United States, from last season to now.
Fresno is the 54th largest in the nation; Honolulu is No. 66, Reno is No. 105, Monterey-Salinas is No. 125, Chico-Redding is No. 132, and Eureka is No. 195.