Masterchef smashes TV ratings record
Adam Liaw - centre left - celebrates his Masterchef victory
Sunday night’s final of Masterchef has delivered Ten the biggest Australian TV audience for a single programme in at least five years, preliminary overnight ratings suggest.
According to metro ratings from OzTam, last night’s winner announcement which saw Adam Liaw defeat Callum Hann attracted an average of 3.962m viewers and a peak audience of 4.348m – factoring in regional viewing, the peak figure rose to more than 5.7m.
The final of the first series of Masterchef rated an average metro audience of 3.7m with a peak audience of 4.1m.
This year the challenge show, which preceded the announcement of the winner, averaged 3.542m metro viewers, compared to 3.3m last year. Last night its peak metro audience was 4.211m.
Update: Once regional markets are taken into account the winner announcement show averaged 5.2m viewers, peaking at 5.74m viewers. The challenge show’s audience including regional averaged 4.63m.
Although the makeup of the OzTam panel has changed slightly, the Masterchef audience makes it at least the third most watched show since the new ratings system was introduced in 2001. The most watched show was previously the men’s final of the Australian Open in 2005 between Lleyton Hewitt and Marat Safin which rated 4.045m viewers.
Last year’s Masterchef final had been the third most watched of the last 20 years but it now pushed down to fourth place.
However, the all time biggest Australian TV audience may never be surpassed, which was Seven’s coverage of the Opening ceremony of the 2000 Sydney Olympics. Although ratings were then calculated by Nielsen so not directly comparable, the estimated audience was 6.5m viewers.
The large audience for Masterchef also helped Ten’s new series Undercover Boss to an average metro audience of 1.78m.
Meanwhile, Seven won the bragging rights in the battle of the worms by the narrowest of margins – pulling in 1.245m metro viewers for its coverage of the Julia Gillard-TonyAbbott debate, just 16,000 ahead of Nine’s 1.229m. The ABC was well behind on 574,000.
Despite the competition of Masterchef, Seven’s Dancing With The Stars managed to stay the right side of 1m. However, Nine’s repeated CSI Special Event featuring a three hours crossover between the various franchises only averaged 495,000 metro viewers.
Ten’s metro share for Sunday evening was a spectacular 41.8% – meaning the channel had a greater share than commercial rivals Seven, Nine and SBS1 combined.
Sunday network share:
- Ten: 41.8%
- Seven: 19.0%
- Nine: 15.7%
- ABC1: 9.7%
- SBS1: 3.7%
- GO!: 3.6%
- 7TWO: 2.6%
- One: 2.5%
- ABC2: 0.7%
- ABC3: 0.4%
- SBS2: 0.4%
Sunday’s top 15 shows – avergae metro audience:
- Masterchef – Winner Announced Ten 3.962m
- Masterchef – Finale Night Ten 3.542m
- Undercover Boss Ten 2.082m
- Seven News Seven 1.728m
- Nine News Nine 1.602m
- Seven News: The Great Debate Seven 1.245m
- 60 Minutes: The Great Debate Nine 1.229m
- Modern Family Ten 1.118m
- Dancing with the Stars Seven 1.061m
- Rules of Engagement Ten 1.052m
- 60 Minutes Nine 0.765m
- Life ABC 0.624m
- Jonathan Creek ABC 0.596m
- Ten News Ten 0.574m
- Australia Votes: The Great Debate ABC 0.574m
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Crikey. A successful reality show without any hatred, anger, bitching or back-stabbing. Who would have thought it?
I watched it for the last four weeks and thoroughly enjoyed it all. Nice one Channel Ten.
Simon
http://www.TwoCentsGroup.com.au
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So do we have a regional comparison for last year?
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Old media- pfffft…
5.74m sets of eyeballs on the same content at the same time.? BIG DEAL!
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Outstanding!
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ANON333… Ha, ha! Even worse the magazine edition’s doing 250K. Bloody traditional media hanging about pulling huge audiences and huge ad spends. The internet’s the future, after all – what with those 3 people having a social media experience with that $1.50 ad spend.
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Bill Bailey apologised to the audience last night at the State Theatre for keeping them away from the MasterChef finale.
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5 Million people watching strangers cooking an omelete? Are you egging me on?
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Why the surprise? Every other TV station promoted the show heavily.
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