“Broadcast news in the UK is very expensive to do,” says Gill Hind, head of TV at media analysts Enders Analysis. “Even if you have economies of scale and pool resources abroad as some outlets do, it’s really expensive to get content up and running.”
“Not surprisingly, if you’re an advertiser, a lot of the time you don’t want your company or product to appear in the news environment,” says Enders’ Hind. “And you can understand why you might night want your brand to appear immediately before or after something that happens in Ukraine, for example.
“This means that the income you get for the news programme if you’re ITV, or news channel if you’re Sky, is a lot less per viewer delivered than it would be for lighter, entertainment programmes.”