Are cracks starting to appear in new look TV ratings?
If you didn't hit the remote between MAFS ending and Clarkson's Farm starting then Nine is probably very grateful.
- Published by David Knox
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- Filed under News
In the new-look Ratings from OzTAM there are more surprises being uncovered, including Free to Air replays of Prime Video’s Clarkson’s Farm reaching 1.48m viewers last night. Whoa….
Given Reach includes just 1 minute of viewing (or just 15 secs on BVOD) and the show followed Married at First Sight this suggests a lot of viewers had not yet “reached” for the Remote. Notably its audience average is actually just 348,000.
MAFS meanwhile reached 2.34m viewers, well in front of Australian Idol‘s 1.42m and Australian Survivor‘s 1.02m.
Seven News is faring well in the new results this week reaching 2.09m to Nine News‘ 1.77m.
Sunrise reached 928,000 ahead of Today‘s 789,000 and News Breakfast‘s 734,000 -but there’s a catch given no numbers are supplied for the separate ABC News channel. That could lead to ABC’s show potentially surpassing Nine’s in Reach.
Welcome to the new age of trying to accurately report ratings results.
Official survey begins on February 11.
Total TV: Wednesday 31 January 2024.
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- Tagged with Australian Idol, Australian Survivor, Clarkson's Farm, MAFS, Married at First Sight, News Breakfast, Nine News, Seven News, Sunrise, Today
32 Responses
That’s why the averages rather than reach needs to be reported.
Well I’m just ignoring Reach and looking at the National Audience Table to get a more accurate figure.
So if I flick over to a show for 2 minutes to see if I like and and decide its crap, it gets recorded in the Reach. How can this benefit an advertiser when I have not watched an ad. So a lot of the reach figures could mean people hated that show. But the networks will brag about the reach to advertisers. Crazy stuff.
Nine News made some changes in 2024, which have driven viewers to 7 News. Absolute failure
What changes?
Nothing more than a desperate attempt by FTA under siege by streaming and fragmentation to inflate their viewing numbers.
Surely advertisers won’t be fooled.
Sad
I am so pleased to see the ridiculousness of some of the changes have been highlighted in this story. The networks need to be held accountable. The reach metric has to go.
and neither will viewers.
I certainly don’t choose to watch a TV program based on rating numbers.
Have you noticed how many shows don’t show credits at the end and titles at the beginning of the next? It can take a few minutes before you realise that the show you were watching has ended and a new one has begun and its not just an ad break. I expect that this will happen now on almost all shows.
Couple of things:
A lot of TV apps now autoplay the primary channel live stream on the menu. Literally turning on the TV and not making a rapid choice may count as BVOD reach. I guess that is not accidental.
ABC News I always watch on YouTube so I can rewind to the beginning of the hour and speed it up. YouTube then recommends me ABC News In Depth and thus I may not jump out to iView and as per your News Breakfast I may not be counted.
Then on a technical level devices request streams in fragments/chunks. If the fragment was set to 15 seconds then it could be instantaneously registering (if the server is doing the counting – likely – rather than the app reporting its on screen time).
YouTube is not counted, but you also do need to be in the OzTAM panel to effect.
Oops! As long as they report absolute counts instead of a percentage like an opinion poll I’m going to keep forgetting there’s a panel. It was always obvious in the antenna days that something different had to happen, but now on the on-demand side each provider already has their own very detailed metrics of course.
Are cracks starting to appear in new look TV ratings? Yes is the answer. Glad everyone, bar oztam, can see how this is a farce.
At least make the reach 3 minutes long (the length of a ad break/, or the time you realise a show is finished, and you get off the phone, look for the remote and switch over).
Advertisers constantly ignore the older generation and yet a recent report a few days ago has stated that the older generation are spending a lot while the younger ones aren’t because they’re trapped in higher prices at the grocery store and rental and mortgage repayments so they don’t have any or very little spending money.
I don’t think the issue has ever been that older people don’t spend. It’s that they’re more set in their ways and have already made decisions around insurance, airlines, supermarkets and the like and are less likely to be persuaded to change by ads.
Maybe OzTAM needs some competition. Technically, I can see no problem with Foxtel or Fetch producing their own FTA ratings list. Their customers TV’s are connected to their mainframe via the Internet for billing and program delivery so it wouldn’t be difficult to record viewing activity. A summary list isn’t a breach of privacy. The viewing data is collected in real-time so the list could also be real-time with no more waiting for “overnights”. Oztam uses info from 10,000 people, Foxtel has 4.7million subscribers, Fetch has 670,000 subscribers so there’s a lot of room for statistical adjustments to reflect the Aussie population and other matters. Just a thought.
Foxtel announced plans late last year which I reported at the time.
And the movie on Seven as well (even if a first run), another one! Following Aus Idol (whether correctly coded or over-run), clearly caught plenty of viewers before changing channels. As its reach was high, but average low.
The MAFS to Clarkson’s Farm numbers reminds me years ago when The Age/SMH did an article about Kyle and Jackie O Night with the Stars ratings on Channel 7 in 2011 and there was a graph in the article of how many people were watching the show minute by minute and showed how dramatically the audience switched off was on the show immediately when it had a lead-in of 1.43 million viewers to around 255,000 people watching their show to the end.
How ridiculous. Reach would be better if it was say 7-10 minutes of continuous viewing. 1 minute is just stupid. Im only interested in the national figure.
So if I’m watching Aus Survivor and I flick to Married At First Sight during an ad break, then I get counted as a Married viewer as well?
Yes, as long as it is 1 minute or more (15 seconds for BVOD)
If you stay on Married for a minute and having a ratings box then yes you do.
Advertisers don’t pay for reach, they pay for the reach of their ads.
There’s nothing accurate about this new reporting as your example about not hitting the remote early enough proves. The final view figure should be some aggregate of viewers at the start, middle and end of the broadcast.
Can be sure the advertisers would ignore those figures and have a different set of numbers.
Not sure this counting 1 minute of watching is a good idea. Sounds a bit ridiculous to me.
And repeat NCIS are rating at all now?
I think that’s the point David, they don’t want anyone to accurately report the figures. The spin doctors have won.
David, thanks for helping us navigate these changes. I don’t work in the industry but am an avid tv watcher who used to enjoy seeing your ratings article each morning. It now seems so far fetched and ridiculous that I am losing interest and I assume a lot of people will also tune out.
What a farce. Don’t envy you having to report these numbers with a straight face. It’s propaganda North Korea would be proud of.
Very interesting observation. We might now see many high rating shows go for an extra minute so the following programme gets a rating hit.
Networks have been deliberately starting to shows early or late to beat the competition or keep eyeballs. The problem now is it makes the ratings more ridiculous! I was hoping it would give a fair picture of TV viewers-average audience it is for me to make note of.