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Melbourne audiences drive the TV ratings

Ratings: It's the great divide. Of the top 50 shows on TV last night, 43 were highest in Melbourne, and only 7 in Sydney.

2013-05-30_1012According to Wikipedia Sydney has a population of 4.6m people and Melbourne has 4.25m people yet night after night our TV shows have more viewers south of the Murray border.

Last night there were whopping differences between cities in Melbourne’s favour for Nine News, The Block, ABC News, Offspring and Adam Hills Tonight (all of which were filmed locally). Of the top 50 shows, only 7 were higher in Sydney: Deal or No Deal, The Bold and The Beautiful, Nine’s Afternoon News, a repeat of The Hollowmen, Little Charley Bear, Seven News at 4:30 and a Big Bang replay on GO!

The reasons why Melbourne repeatedly tops Sydney aren’t necessarily apparent, but industry theories put it down to weather and a bigger uptake of Foxtel in Sydney.

On Wednesday, Nine network won the night with a 30.4% share, then Seven 29.0%, ABC 19.0%, TEN 17.2% and SBS 4.3%.

Nine News topped the night with 1.35m then The Block (1.18m), A Current Affair (1.13m), Arrow (968,000), The Big Bang Theory (885,000), Hot Seat (735,000) and The Following (443,000 / 352,000).

Seven News (1.25m) was best for Seven then Today Tonight (1.06m), Home and Away (952,000), House Rules (951,000), Criminal Minds (733,000 / 564,000) and Deal or No Deal (609,000). Hannibal was 177,000.

ABC News (911,000) topped ABC1 followed by Qi (812,000), 7:30 (785,000), Adam Hills Tonight (634,000), Would I Lie to You? (426,000) and Time Team (314,000).

Offspring (798,000) led TEN but was down on last week. TEN News was 696,000, The Project improved with 570,000, Modern Family was 569,000 / 504,000, The Simpsons was 414,000 but Beauty and the Beast struggled with 255,000 losing a pile of its lead-in.

World News Australia (214,000) was best on SBS ONE then Jimmy’s Forest (170,000), Extreme Frontiers: Canada (134,000) and Borgen (124,000).

Bananas in Pyjamas topped multichannels with an impressive 387,000. The final Head First was 158,000.

Sunrise: 333,000
Today: 317,000
ABC News Breakfast: 59,000 / 36,000

OzTAM Overnights: Tuesday 29 May 2013

22 Responses

  1. I don’t know who is doing your programming statistics , but most of the people who have made a
    comment to me about the content of the local free to air programs are totally disgusted with it.
    For example ” The Office ” on channel 11 , only 1 person of all the people I have spoken with actually likes this program . Big Brother is , and always has been a spectacular dud , and as far as I can remember , was pulled because of poor ratings the first time around . To the people who do watch this garbage , ” Get a Life ” . The only answer for the rating of programs I can see , is the programmers have set a gerrymandered ratings locale , to suit their own agenda . Whether it’s financial or internal company politics , this is the only answer that makes any sense .
    Come on programmers , at least give the majority of the people something halfway decent to watch in prime time slots !?…

  2. Having moved into a Ten receiving area a few years into The Panel’s run, I could never see what others saw in it. I knew it was so popular it was simulcast on Triple M, but I just didn’t get it.

    Also, the Sydney ratings include people on the Central Coast, despite it being NNSW territory (the same is true of the Gold Coast and Brisbane). It appears OzTAM only measures the metro network viewers, while Regional TAM only measures the regional network viewers in these areas (which given that these use diaries, may in practice contain metro viewing as well). So the ratings for both only tell half the story of what people are watching.

    (www.oztam.com.au/documents/Other/FINAL%20Metropolitan%20Coverage%20Maps%202013.pdf)

  3. @DK and DanR

    I sometimes think the Panel is better remembered than revived, it was good but towards the end it did get a little self indulgent, especially Rob Sitch

    Rob could have a major news maker or entertainer beside him and instead of asking questions about them, he would get their thoughts on something that happened in his day, eg a broken CD stacker in his car!

  4. Ten should have an Australian chat based show following their local dramas on Wednesday nights. Can of Worms would have been a good pair but they’ve burned that off in spectacular fashion.

    Or bring back The Panel!

  5. I am enjoying watching beauty and the beast but with those ratings I don’t expect it to last in the slot. Hopefully they will put it on a multichannel and not remove it altogether.

  6. @NicH- I have relatives at Sutherland, just south of Sydney airport, who receive their TV from Wollongong, due to a better signal (which they discovered decades ago when they put up a Wollongong antennae so they could see the cricket in Sydney when blacked-out by Nine).
    Ditto for Penrith, in the “western Sydney” region. Their Sydney signal suffers from severe ghosting caused by the mountain range. The Wollongong signal is at 90 degrees, and is not so affected. These are leftovers from the analogue days but they report the W’gong digital signals are 100% and no need to change.

  7. I know from my high school geography days that often Sydney incorporates the Central Coast in its population figures, thats a good chunk of people. But the Central Coast receives regional TV, not metro Sydney broadcasts.

  8. Good to see Arrow holding up well despite not having a new episode of BBT as a lead-in.

    Really surprising how something that was ridiculously obvious to readers of this site (the unsuitability of the Offspring-BATB pairing), wasn’t obvious to the Ten programming department.

  9. k thx emurray,Andrew..and for the regional TAM website.So Oztam doesn’t even collect data from the areas I was wondering about..it’s Regional TAM.I never knew that..matter of fact I’d never even heard of them before this..thx again.

  10. Beauty and the Beast has to move to ELEVEN immediately. I’m quite suprised that Arrow is holding a good audience, I fully expected this to be shafted to GO! I’m not saying I assumed the show would be bad, but Nine has not had much luck with drama shows aimed at that target demographic… Smallville, Gossip Girl, Chuck to name a few.

    It looks like kid power often rules at whatever time Banana’s in Pyjamas is on.

  11. @nicks: Regional TAM collects ratings data for regional markets (including WA, TAS). They post some summary reports on their website regionaltam.com.au

    From memory I think Free TV Australia do the occasional report to aggregate the OzTAM and Regional TAM numbers into one report.

  12. @Nicks … I think a lot of people in the regions would have a loyalty to their original pre aggregation station – for instance Wollongong people still have an affinity to Win (and also perhaps because it is only one to do a local news)

  13. Its also important to note that Melbourne’s populations is out-growing Sydney year on year. The gap between the two big cities is closing in population.

  14. Great to see an increase in ratings for The Project with it being much deserved. I knew from the outset that launching BATB on TEN was a poor decision given now it will be a matter of moving it to ELEVEN hoping that what audience it does have will follow, instead of launching it on ELEVEN from the start and developing a niche audience that will maintain over the long run.

  15. Is there a pattern to rural ratings?Do rural folk tend to watch certain networks differently than ,or the same as ,the capitals in their states?And while I’m on this tangent…Hobart and Tasmania..are they like Wa and Perth with specific preferences? Finally ,does Oztam ever aggregate all these numbers..5 city metro,rural, Darwin,Canberra,Tasmania to come up with a complete viewing figure for Australia?To David…lol…I don’t want you to answer..you’ve got enough to do,but maybe some of our crack posters might know.

  16. only a matter of time until BATB is given the boot with those numbers. Emily Owens MD was shafted after around 4 or 5 episodes with similar ratings, in the same timeslot

  17. It’s hard to think of the horribly mindless stuff that people watch, and yet a quality show like “Hannibal” is so sadly overlooked.
    It is fast becoming the highlight of my week. Just keeps getting better and spookier. An awesome show. A standard like it’s is rare on TV. Fingers crossed it gets picked up.

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