Anzac Day audiences turn off the television
Australians turned away from their televisions during the evening of Anzac Day, with not a single entertainment show reaching a capital city audience above one million.
Only Seven News (1.377m), Nine News (1.293m) and Today Tonight (1.149m) made it above the 1m mark according to preliminary overnight metro ratings from OzTAM.
Seven had a strong performance during the day in Melbourne with the Essendon Collingwood game reaching an average audience of 581,000 in the city, making it the most watched program of the day in the city.
Nine’s best performer in the evening was Top Gear, which rated 690,000.
It would be disrespectful to the fallen to be at home watching the ‘idiot box’ on ANZAC Day. Instead, you must be at the pub getting blind drunk.
Only Anzac Day audiences that have an Oztam box turned off the television. the other 5.99 million households without Oztam boxes were still watching.
And you know that for a fact how Wil?
Plus do you have any idea how many households there are in Australia if the “other households” amounts to 5.99 million? Nah, didn’t think so.
ABS website lists total households. Harold Mitchell’s data is for total households with TV in metro and regional markets. Nielsen Homescan data ads households with subscription TV. Oztam member data breaks down markets by region and number of Oztam units per market and total number of households with breakdowns for age, sex and income bands (not total number of people or total number of ‘dwellings’) gives you 5,999,783 households. That’s how they come up with 5.99 million that don’t participate in ratings surveys.
CRA figures are worse. 21,985,000 do not get access to radio ratings diaries. So when they say that Kyle & Jackie 0 have 750,0000, they really only have around 73 people that fill outratings diaries in the Sydney market in favour of 2DAY-FM at any one time.
(On the PDF document there’s a note 4 on the 2nd page of the Data Guidelines and explanatory notes: Does not include people living in temporary shelter, hotels, correctional facilities, hospitals or within defence establishments Log in and have a look.
I’ll send it to Dr Karl (http://www.drkarl.com) he’s better with the numbers and reads mumbrella and James Manning’s mediaweek as well.
Best Wishes,
Wil
Gruen Valley, Victoria
Oh dear Wil.
Do you seriously think that you have to enumerate EVERYONE to get an accurate audience estimate? The 2011 Census cost $440 million for a (close to) complete enumeration. We’re talking TV and radio ratings here.
There are MUCH more efficient but still effective ways to provide audience estimates that don’t cost the earth. Given that we have an extremely accurate enumeration of the population you can sample sections of that population to derive the proportion that you are interested in.
Let’s say you asked 10,000 people did they watch The Voice last night. And let’s say 1,200 of them did. Is 12% a fair estimate? The answer is … probably. It may have been 11%m it may have been 13% but it is unlikely to be (say) 1% or 25%. So 12% of 23 million is 2.76 million people – a fair estimate.
Well, everyday TV samples over 13,000 people, which is a pretty big sample size. It’s around 5 million person-viewing days a year. The political polls – which virtually all called the last election as “too close to call” – generally are based on sample sizes or around 1,000. And as you know we got a hung parliament and a minority government. In essence a sample of around 1,000 people pretty accurately predicted the 12.4 million formal votes cast.
But to simplify things for you Wil, I’ll give you an easy example to remember. You are cooking dinner tonight and decide you wants peas with your meal. You boil the water and put 200 peas into the water to cook. How many peas do you check to make sure they are cooked. You check one and if it’s done you know they are ready. You don’t need to eat all the peas just to make sure.
John Grono
GAP Research
Sydney
Using the number of programs with an average audience over 1m is a poor indicator of whether people were watching television. If you look at the OzTAM Metro average audience (overnight) for Thursday 25 April 2013 between 1800 – 2229, you will see all TV had an average audience of 4.890m, up from 4.655m the previous Thursday. Driving the increase in All TV viewing was Subscription Television with average audiences up 214,000 compared to the previous Thursday. Live ANZAC day clashes in the AFL and NRL on Fox Footy and Fox Sports delivered strong audiences.