The average viewer of The CW is eligible for their AARP card these days.

According to the network’s new owner, Nexstar, the average age of a CW viewer is just under 58 years old. As demographics go, that’s on the old side.

Founded 16 years ago, the fledgling netlet was engineered to appeal to an under-served demographic – adults 18-34. While other networks geared their programming to adults 25-54, The CW populated its lineup with shows meant to appeal to a younger, mostly female crowd, like Gossip Girl and their 90210 reboot.

As it happens, that demographic didn’t watch a lot of network television (though they could be counted on to stream the better shows on the schedule), so gradually the CW revamped its schedule to appeal to a broader slice of the audience, adding shows like Arrow, and eventually a plethora of shows set in the same DC Comics-based universe.

This has been confirmed by Variety, which did its own study using measurements from the Nielsen ratings service. Their findings? The Nexstar exec was correct: the median age for the CW’s primetime viewer throughout the 2021 calendar year was 57.4, according to Live+7 Day data. That counts initial linear viewership and a week’s worth of delayed (mostly DVR) viewing where available.

Looking at total day numbers, which includes not just broadcast primetime content, but everything viewed on a network outside of the primetime window as well, the CW’s average viewer age creeps up to 58.4. That makes the CW audience not just older than they expected, it also means that Fox now has the youngest audience.  In 2021, Fox had a broadcast primetime median age of 56.6 and a total day median age of 56.2 based on Live+7 data.

If it sounds like bad news, remember that the CW has the youngest average viewer in the pack when it comes to streaming. The network’s menu of teen and young adult dramas and superhero content is consumed by a streaming audience largely in their late 20s and early 30s.

CBS has the oldest viewership in Live+7 ratings, with an average age of 64.3, far ahead of the other members of the Big Three networks, ABC (60.5) and NBC (60.0). The bad news for NBC, though, is that while CBS and ABC’s audience was getting younger, theirs got older.