How Many Canadians Actually Consume CBC's Digital Content?
What if it wasn't just broadcast services that were being ignored?
Everyone in these parts knows that CBC plows through upwards of two billion dollars of public funding each year. And it’s certainly no secret that their “linear” (i.e., TV and radio) audience is collapsing even faster than their budget is growing.
No matter how brilliant their programming might (or might not) be, if no one’s watching, what’s the point? Just what do Canadians get for all that spending?
CBC insiders and supporters tell us that it’s the digital world where the real action’s happening. That’s where all the eyeballs are and that’s where those eyeballs are enjoying all the magic that only public broadcasting can deliver.
So how’s that playing out in practice? Way back in 2024, I noted how only four CBC products ranked among the top 200 Spotify podcasts in Canada. To be fair, since then there were months where a few more made the list and probably some with less. But when you account for CBC’s competitive economic advantage, the corporation is clearly under-performing.
Measuring CBC’s Digital Distribution Reach
Now how about YouTube? As you can see for yourself, Global News just squeaked onto the Canadian top 100 list at number 100, but not one of CBC’s highly-curated YouTube channels was anywhere to be seen.
By contrast, there are five separate BBC YouTube channels ranked in the UK top 100, all significantly ahead of their commercial news competitor, Sky:
CBC News also can’t claim to be outperforming their broadcast peers when measured in either YouTube subscriber numbers or content volume. This, despite the fact that CBC enjoys much larger budgets and has no existential need to return a profit on its online investments.
In terms of followers on the four main social media platforms, it’s obvious that CBC News is leading its peers:
On X at least, CBC News also boasts more followers than the Globe and Mail (1.8M), Toronto Star (1.1M), or National Post (1.0M).
The CBC website does attract more monthly visits than its primary competitors:
Although you should bear in mind that, since that CBC number covers the full website rather than just the news pages, this isn’t quite an apples-to-apples comparison.
But in the context of CBC spending, it’s hardly a fair fight. Remember - since they also enjoy revenue from advertising, subscriptions, and asset leasing - even the massive public funding numbers only represent 70 percent of total CBC income.
For (estimated) context, CTV spends just $600M annually on their news operations, Global News checks in at around $840M, Globe and Mail costs hit $300M, and the Toronto Star burns through $250M.
The bottom line is that taxpayers are heavily funding CBC to compete head-to-head with (nominally) private companies and the CBC is still just barely keeping up.
How many Canadians consume CBC content?
Let’s assume that those 4.55M YouTube subscribers and 3.5M X subscribers are all actual human beings, all Canadian, and that they’re not being counted twice - all of which are unlikely to be true. That would still represent only a small fraction of Canada’s population.
And let’s assume that those 64M monthly cbc.ca visits were the product of, on average, three visits per person, per day.1 That would mean that there were only around 650,000 unique visitors each month, which is just over one percent of Canadians. That would represent a tiny fraction of the population.
If so few Canadians are being informed, enlightened, and entertained, by what measure is CBC successfully fulfilling their parliamentary mandate to “provide a wide range of programming that informs, enlightens and entertains”?
By what logic should we bleed all that funding away from more pressing national interests (like reducing our crippling deficit) when, by all the metrics we’ve seen, the private competition is getting the media creation job done on their own?
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I have no clue whether this estimate is accurate, but it’s certainly not impossible.
The CBC, for its fans, should evolve into a subscriber / user funded model and be completely defunded by tax dollars thus leaving those who actually support it to pay for it and freeing the rest of us from the burden. It’s a money consuming beast and not spending those dollars supporting it could be the start of a general cost reduction program that would ultimately leave more money in tax payers pockets and return government to some minimal form of fiscal sanity.
Thank you for this excellent piece of research. The results are scarcely surprising; but it is good to have data.