Business as usual... for now

According to this AMPS release internet access has grown across all the LSM groups. Social networking has increased significantly, with Facebook dominating ahead of Twitter" explains Mpho Mathebula, Senior Research Support Executive at SAARF.

"One third of the population will also engage in a medium because of a comment made on social media. For example a tweet on Twitter about a television programme will lead to watching that programme," she adds.

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While 10.5% of the survey population read newspapers/magazines online or on a mobile as opposed to nine percent in the last survey, year on year both the percentage for reading print online and on a mobile also increased significantly from 7.5%. Despite this the readership of magazine and newspapers in a paper format is still 62.3%.

While print is comparable to the last survey with magazines stable but continuing on their downward trend, the significant loss has been in daily newspapers in the Western Cape and Limpopo. "In Limpopo this has been mainly the Sowetan and the Daily Sun. In the Western Cape a number of dailies have declined."

Television has remained comparable. However SABC1 has lost significantly while SABC2 is trending downwards. eTV has also lost significantly in the Limpopo and Western Cape. Media has been affected in these two provinces. The only station that went up in the Western Cape was DStv.

Radio is stable with an upward trend for community radio stations. Of all adults 25% listen to community stations. However it must be noted that in the previous survey less community stations were measured than in this survey. In this survey of the 279 stations measured 239 are community stations. The percentage of people accessing this media platform via their mobile phone increased very slightly from 40% to 40.6%.

Cinema is still in a downward trend, especially in LSM9-10. This could be because they are accessing movies on DStv via boxoffice, however this cannot be stated for sure as there could be many reasons for this trend. This survey 503,000 people in LSM 9-10 (compared to 425,000 in the previous survey) watched a movie via boxoffice.

This, the second last release of the survey, includes a population update. AMPS June 15 sees its universe increase from 38,259 million after adding nearly 600,000 adults aged 15+. This is an increase of 1.6% in the adult population in the survey.

The increase includes more adults from urban than rural groups of which more than half live in Gauteng (specifically Johannesburg, the Reef and Pretoria). There are also slightly more men than women. These are also predominantly black. There was also a three percent increase in households.

However the growth in numbers had very little impact on the survey results, says Mathebula. "For all the mediums there has not been much movement and everything is comparable to the last survey."