Atlanta recently went up three spots from the #10 television market in America to #7, surpassing Boston, Washington, DC, and Houston. BUT...are we on track to trading positions with San Francisco?
Here's why: Atlanta has 2,648,970 households compared to San Francisco's 2,653,270; if you do the math, that's a difference of only 4,300. Also...all throughout 2020, a combination of unrelenting wildfires, civil unrest, cost of high living, and of course the COVID-19 pandemic has had hundreds of thousands of Californians defecting to other states, especially Georgia, where the film/TV production industry has been booming with Atlanta as its hub (they don't call it the Hollywood of the South for nothing); Oracle, Palantir, and Hewlett-Packard Enterprise, which all started in the Bay Area, have left California as well and moving their headquarters elsewhere.
Another is that Atlanta-based Gray Television has acquired Meredith's stations (meaning WGCL will be their flagship) and has just bought Third Rail Studios in Doraville, which was formerly the General Motors assembly plant. That, in addition to Norfolk Southern relocating their headquarters from Virginia to Midtown and Microsoft recently opening up their offices in the Atlantic Station district, could help Atlanta become the new #6 market in the country, which also means the South will have back-to-back markets (Dallas-Fort Worth is #5)! What do you think?
