Nine won last night — from Seven, the ABC and Ten — thanks to The Block, which was the most-watched program with 1.468 million nationally, including 1.040 million in the metros. Seven’s Farmer Wants A Wife is hanging in there with 806,000 but nothing else of note on the network. Earlier, Insiders on ABC and ABC News averaged 516,000. Ten’s The Amazing Race Australia with 383,000… well, Google Maps must be down.
In all the hot air expended about the supposed weak ratings for the 2022 AFL Grand Final, one very salient point has been forgotten — Saturday’s game was not only the first GF back at the MCG in three years but it was also the first played without the audience being impacted by the pandemic.
The 2.979 million national audience for Saturday’s game compares to 3.91 million for the 2021 game from Perth and the 3.812 million for the Brisbane-based game in 2020. Both were played at later times than Saturday’s GF, which was back to its traditional 2.30pm start. (And the Brisbane audience from memory was restricted, as was the audience size for the Perth GF last year.)
Seven CEO James Warburton used the apparently weak figure to again call for an evening GF, but he and all other critics forgot the restrictions imposed by the lockdowns in 2020 and 2021. Pubs, clubs and other outside locations couldn’t show the GF both years, so hundreds of thousands of fans were confined to homes and were more easily captured by the OzTAM rating meters.
One of the great difficulties of measuring live event TV audiences — especially for very popular programs like sporting finals (or cricket tests for that matter) — is the high number of people outside homes at pubs, clubs, outside areas (such as the SCG on Saturday afternoon for Swans fans), cinemas, etc. TV and ratings executives have always been frustrated by the difficulties of measuring total audiences for live events.
The adverse comparison between the size of the audience for Saturday’s AFL Grand Final and those for the 2021 and 2020 GFs suggests the size of the missed audience could be upwards of 1 million people. That sounds too high because there would have been thousands of viewers watching the games in 2020 and 2021 just for something to do in the boredom of lockdown and who, when freed this year, did everything to avoid a threepeat.
The best way to get an accurate idea is the old TV measure of HUTs (Homes Using TV), which decades ago was a preferred ratings measure. A comparison of that data over the past three years should give a better idea of whether the absence of a COVID lockdown this year saw the total audience for the game slip.
Network channel share:
- Nine (34.6%)
- Seven (27.5%)
- ABC (16/2%)
- Ten (13.5%)
- SBS (8.2%)
Network main channels:
- Nine (28.3%)
- Seven (18.7%)
- ABC (12.2%)
- Ten (8.5%)
- SBS ONE (4.5%)
Top 5 digital channels:
- 7mate (4.2%)
- 7TWO (2.5%)
- Gem (2.2%)
- ABCKids/Plus, 10 Bold (1.9%)
Top 10 national programs:
- The Block (Nine) — 1.468 million
- Seven News — 1.376 million
- Nine News — 1.132 million
- 60 Minutes (Nine) — 830,000
- 7pm ABC News — 811,000
- Farmer Wants A Wife (Seven) — 806,000
- Spicks and Specks (ABC) — 672,000
- Insiders (ABC, ABC News) — 516,000
- Savage River (ABC) — 471,000
- Nine News Late — 431,000
Top metro programs:
1. The Block (Nine) — 1.040 million
Regional Top 5: Seven News, 459,000; The Block, 428,000; Farmer Wants A Wife, 317,000; Nine News, 304,000; 7pm ABC News, 283,000.
Losers: it’s all downhill from now till the end of the year once the NRL GF is out of the way next Sunday night.
Metro news and current affairs:
- Seven News — 917,000
- Nine News — 829,000
- 60 Minutes (Nine) — 559,000
- 7pm ABC News — 528,000
- Nine News Late — 295,000
- The Sunday Project 7pm (Ten) — 278,000
- Ten News First — 242,000
- The Sunday Project 6.30 (Ten) — 210,000
- SBS World News — 164,000
Morning (national) TV:
- Insiders (ABC, ABC News) — 516,000
- Weekend Sunrise (Seven) — 332,000
- Landline (ABC) — 322,000
- Weekend Today (Nine) — 262,000
- Sports Sunday (Nine) — 189,000
Top five Pay TV programs:
- NRLW: Prime Minister’s XIII (Fox League) — 93,000
- NRLW: Prime Minister’s XIII Pre-Game (Fox League) — 74,000
- NRLW: Semi-Final 2 (Fox League) — 65,000
- NRLW: Prime Minister’s XIII (Fox League) — 62,000
- NRLW: Prime Minister’s XIII Pre-Game (Fox League) — 61,000
