ARIAs off-key with 624,000 viewers

Last night’s sprawling presentation of the ARIA Awards pulled just 624,000 viewers for TEN.

It lost half the audience of the Junior MasterChef lead-in, which won its timeslot with an excellent 1.44m viewers. Admittedly there is a shift from family to youth viewers between the two shows in a later timeslot, but even Bones beat the ARIAs in the 18-49 demo.

It kind of makes you wonder, if we’re looking at the future of the network as chasing a broad audience or a youth audience, which plan makes more sense? Or was it just an indication of a poorly-packaged show?

It trailed the 2009 presentation by Nine. Staged last year on a Thursday night the ARIAs were 708,000.

Meanwhile Bones was an excellent 1.44m viewers for Seven. The X Factor did well with 1.24m viewers. Is there some irony that the show for the music industry takes roughly half the numbers of a talent show? X Factor is slowly working its way towards a decent finale, keeping up the showy production values, especially notable during Andrew Lawson’s performance of Black and Gold. Ironically, both shows were produced by FremantleMedia Australia.

Nine’s cricket broadcast ended early so preliminary figures are misleading. Enter Two and a Half Men as filler. Nine took a 23.8% share in network figures with 17.5% share for the primary channel, which was third. GO! was strong on 5.8%.

Best for ABC1 was Poirot: Evil Under The Sun on 1.05m and A History Of Scotland was 341,000 on SBS ONE.

Week 46
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