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Neighbours pips TEN Evening News

On Tuesday night TEN Evening News was pipped at the post by the programme it replaced.

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The first week of official ratings is a bit like playing musical chairs as everyone scrambles to see where the numbers are falling in the morning. For some there are sighs of relief, for others it’s a hell of a way to wake up to the day.

But in its third week TEN Evening News has now been pipped at the post by the programme it replaced.

On Tuesday night Neighbours pulled 311,000 on ELEVEN.

TEN Evening News was just 310,000. It’s only a 1,000 difference, but in television’s numbers game a win is a win. At least in this case the network can be upbeat about the way the soap is performing on a digital channel.

TEN Evening News was strongest with Mal Walden in Melbourne on 97,000 viewers. Sandra Sully had 66,000 watching in Sydney. 6pm With George Negus was 382,00.

The network continues to remind us that such significant change to their 6 – 7 hour will take time to bed in, and they are right. Hopefully for their sake the shareholders are listening.

Week 7

23 Responses

  2. At 6:30 people are looking for an alternative to the paid ad’s/current affairs tripe on the other channels… George Negus would have had a real fighting chance in that timeslot…

    I really like to believe that, given a quality alternative, the people who are watching this said tripe would switch over… but people don’t wanna switch over to Another news bulletin… they’ve been going on all the major stations since 4:30 in the afternoon…last thing we needed was another one…

    Although Negus’ show is not near perfect yet, a more indepth show like it aspires to be Is needed and i think wanted… just not at 6:00

  3. Simple things that we are all suggesting to ten about their news service but they just won’t listen to us!! So it will prob take even longer to get anywhere

  4. KFed, what was the age demographic for those people? just curious as to whether they are older people who don’t rescan because they’re not tech savvy or maybe their just not into tv much in general?

  8. What’s more annoying is the shift in content. All the promos said that the 6.30 edition was “where *insert your city/state* is the focus”, however in reality there are stories from overseas and other states that would have been covered in the main 5 o’clock bulletin… so much for truth in advertising…

  10. yep they should have put George on at 6:30pm to compete against the blatant plugging and advertising that 7 and 9 dish up and put the local news on at 6pm oh and for godsake get rid of that annoying beep in the news theme it is extrenly annoying

  11. Well nearly three weeks in – I can say – 6pm is too heavy for the 6pm slot and George looks awkward. There are plenty of people who do not get home at 5pm to watch the news…and why would you watch George before you get the news of the day. Move it to 7pm. And the Project to 6.30pm where it can safely compete against the crap of TT and ACA. The question is..what to do with the 6pm slot- maybe Neighbours!!!

  12. Firstly, sucked in Ten!

    Secondly, it doesn’t matter how many people have “access” to Eleven, I was at a function last week and the number of people who hadn’t Heard of Eleven, Gem or Mate far outweighed those who had. And most had digital. I’m not saying I have access to a core sample of Australians, but I am saying there are plenty of people with access to digital channels who are unaware of what is available or that additional channels have been added since they got access and that they need to rescan.

  17. Still – that is 621,000 watching something on the Ten network at the time (plus another 10,000 say from ONE), which is better than it was when Neighbours was on Ten and ELEVEN wasn’t there.

    Assummng that digital penetration is 75%, and that everybody who has digital TV that wants to watch Neighbours is, then Neighbours, if moved back to Ten, would only be getting around 415,000.

    That aside, I would agree with swapping the two shows around – Evening News at 6pm, George at 6.30pm.

  19. Persisting with it will not increase numbers. It had fail written all over it before the first night.
    I don’t know what they can replace it with now though.

  20. I’ve defended OzTam’s sample sizes here before, but I’m not sure they’re accurate enough to discern a ~0.3% (311,000 vs 310,000) difference in actual viewers for a single event. By my calculations, spot ratings like that are only accurate to within ~2% at best (and that’s ignoring issues created by e.g. differing main vs secondary channel penetration rates – likely it’s worse than that). Arguably, weekly averages and trends should be somewhat more accurate, but you won’t see networks crowing about those unless they’re desperate to put a positive spin on bad results 😉

    That said, those figures have got to be embarrassing…

  21. Yes, was good to see this. I have nothing against the news programs, but it was good to see that Neighbours was able to beat the program that replaced it.

    Still I have to wonder what the ratings for Neighbours would have been if it was still on the main channel? I am not really watching Neighbours out of habit as I had been for so long, but it is the storylines of this year that have really kept me interested.

  23. This is great because it’s the only time anybody can actually say “these ratings are so bad, if Neighbours was still on it would be doing better than it!” and be right.

    Maybe the networks have just found out the bad side of digital TV – they can now prove themselves wrong.

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