Media Council of Kenya releases the State of Media Survey 2021

The Media Council of Kenya on Monday, January 31, 2022, published the State of Media Survey 2021 which showed trends in media consumption among Kenyans.

The survey was released during an event at the Sarova Stanley Hotel, Nairobi by MCK CEO David Omwoyo.

According to the report, a little over 40% of Kenyans said they do not watch TV, an increase from last year’s figure of 26%.

The survey found that about 58% of those interviewed consume TV content on a typical day. This translates to about 16.7 million Kenyans aged above 15 years.

This represented a drop from 74% of the respondents in the 2020 survey.

MCK explained that the survey was conducted in a heated political enviroment whereby some repondents expressed strong biases.

Citizen TV (78%), KTN Home (31%) and NTV (27%) were found to be the most watched TV channels.

The survey also established that Kenyans spent an average of 2 hours watching TV, which is lower than the global average time of 3 hours and 24 minutes.

MCK State of the Media Survey 2021 Pulse Live Kenya

70% of the content watched on TV was local compared to 30% foreign content.

Radio statistics

Across the country, radio is the most consumed media at 74% which translates to 21.4 million Kenyans.

Consumers spent an average of 2 hours listening to the radio which is higher than the global average of 1 hour.

The report ranked the most popular radio stations as Radio Citizen (27%), Radio Jambo (22%), Kameme FM (15%), Radio Maisha (13%) and KBC Radio at (11%).

Radio studio Pulse Live Uganda

Newspapers statistics

Newspaper readership has remained unchanged over the last two years where only about 25% of respondents said they read newspapers.

Less than half of the newspapers consumed are physically bought at vendors while 27% access them via online subscriptions.

Internet usage

From the survey, about 35% of the respondents cited TV as their main source of news, 31% cited radio, 24% cited social media, 4% cited friends and family, 3% cited online news websites while 1% cited social media personalities and newspapers.

Entertainment contributed to 64% of the content accessed on social media while 59% and 53% of the respondents said they use social media for news and networking respectively.

The average time spent on social media by many Kenyans is 3 hours per day, higher than the global average of 2 hours 24 minutes.