AFL Grand Final breaks records as Seven wins the week
Saturday’s AFL Grand Final on Seven has broken records becoming the biggest TV audience of the year.
The footy game saw 3.006 million metro viewers tune in to watch the Melbourne Demons defeat the Western Bulldogs by 74 points, ending a 57-year wait for a premiership.
The result gives the AFL grand final its highest ratings since 2016, surpassing last year’s showdown between the Richmond Tigers and Geelong Cats which brought in 2.979 million metro viewers.
The viewing audience in Melbourne was the biggest with 1.636 million metro viewers, while Perth, where the game was played, had 483,000 metro viewers, followed by 395,000 viewers in Sydney.
Adelaide saw 278,000 metro viewers tune in, while Brisbane brought in 214,000 metro viewers. The episode of the AFL Grand Final also won all three key advertising demos.
Seven West Media’s director of sales Natalie Harvey told Mumbrella: “We had nine brands that had AFL-themed creative that ran throughout the game. Toyota, McDonalds, Telstra, Bunnings, Uber Eats, Coles, NAB, Google and Chemist Warehouse.
“Last year, there was more tourism activity which we don’t have as much of this year, clearly because of border closures, and people not being able to make plans and travel. So, that would be a noticeable, absent category. Usually we’d see a lot of the tourism bodies using the AFL as a launch platform.
“From a revenue perspective, it is very strong, and continues to be for us, one of the most important days of the year when it comes to revenue. With fragmentation of audiences, news and sport becomes even more important. We have been pretty heavy with AFL this year, because it has delivered really good ratings across the whole Home And Away season and throughout the finals,” Harvey commented.
Nine’s The Block won entertainment on Sunday night while Nine also won the night with the highest overall network share.
The Block brought in 1.074 million metro viewers while also taking the top spot in all three key advertising demos.
The Seven News: Disappearance of William Tyrell episode was next in entertainment pulling in a metro audience of 689,000, followed by Ten’s The Masked Singer episode which aired to 581,000 metro viewers, with 762,000 metro viewers tuning in to watch the big reveal in the last five minutes of the episode.
Ten’s Young Talent Time Unmasked saw 494,000 metro viewers, followed by an episode of Restoration Australia on ABC which aired to 453,000 metro viewers.
The #1 program on Sunday was Seven News, which had an average of 1.110 million metro viewers, ahead of Nine News Sunday with 1.046 million.
As mentioned, Nine won the night, taking an overall network share of 32% over Seven’s 28.3%, while Ten had 18.8% and ABC 14.2%.
Nine won primary channel share while the top-rating multi-channel on Sunday was 9GO with a share of 2.6%.
But Seven took the week ending 25 September with a considerable network share win over Nine thanks to sport. Seven had 35.8%, ahead of Nine’s 27.1%, while Ten had 15.9% and ABC took 14.2%.
Seven also managed to win the primary channel share for the week, with a 28.7% share ahead of Nine’s 19.8%.
In the latest Daily Consolidated Total TV Report for 19 September, Seven News was the #1 program nationally across linear and BVOD television, with 1.708 million viewers including 34,000 on BVOD and an uplift of 2%.
The program with the biggest uplift however was an episode of ABC’s The Newsreader which had a 63% uplift on overnight figures and had a total of 1.062 million viewers overall.
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