Downton Abbey’s final season premiere attracts solid audience for Seven, but MKR rules
After struggling with mixed ratings last year, Downton Abbey returned to Seven last night for its final season, attracting 842,000 viewers despite the fact the series finished in the UK last year.
Last year the show battled to perform as live ratings slipped, but the series performed well with catch-up audiences where it managed to build on its initial showings, and its return to screens this year at 9:00pm saw it improve on its debut last year when it drew 772,000, well down from the previous year’s debut of 1.125m.
My Kitchen Rules dominated the night for Seven at 7:30pm, drawing 1.687m viewers as the chefs headed to Bali to try their hands cooking with spice.
Over on Nine, Australia’s Got Talent at 7:35pm lost more than 100,000 viewers, slipping from 851,000 last week to 736,000, while I’m A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here! on Ten at 7:30pm also lost viewers, down from 735,000 to 682,000, despite the continuing rants of cricketer Shane Warne.
Nine’s The Farmer Wants a Wife at 8:53pm also struggled, dropping t0 557,000 from 668,000 the previous week, outperformed by shows such as Media Watch on the ABC at 9:15pm (655,000) and The Project on Ten at 7:00pm (652,000).
Both Seven and Nine’s news programming, including Today Tonight, drew audiences in excess of 1 million.
Overall, Seven won the night with 28.4% ahead of Nine at 16.9%, The ABC at 14.5%, Ten at 13.3% and SBS at 3%.
I am concerned,
This data is so fraudulent and misleading! You are kidding yourselves if you think that your sample size of 3500 homes across Australia is representative of 24million people and every demographic and their viewing habits!
I would love to know how you combine ‘gathered data’, behavioral data with abs data?
No two people or homes are identical and for such a small sample size you are shooting into the air with these quoted numbers of over nearly 4 million people tuning into MKR, Australia’s got talent and I’m a celebrity concurrently on a Monday night (15-02) people have lives. I can only assume that your boxes are not represented by a fair and considered demographic reflective of the population as a whole. I generalise but I can speculate that most ‘data gathering boxes’ are in the homes of lower income earning families who are looking for some extra cash to support themselves (not a problem) however not representative of all demographics. The real issue here is that you actually have little idea of exact numbers of people watching yet you sell this lie that you have scientific, highly accurate data. A better way to approach this is obviously a greater sample size and numbers presented as percentages of people with your boxes watching each show. Your age demographics tables are so generalised that they actually mean nothing! what does an 18yr old have in common with a 49 year old? yet you bracket them together as a “target audience” – it could just read “everyone watching tv”.
Please some more clarification and justification on how you willing sell these statistics to media buying companies would be very much appreciated. Obviously I get it – you need to fudge the numbers to show that more people are watching then actually are so the data is more attractive to advertising companies.
These statistics exemplify so much of what is wrong with your industry at the moment! One quick look at the audience tables highlights to me there is NO hard evidence or data to back up your claims of audience numbers.
I would be happy to hear your justification.
Much appreciated.
Paddy.
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Paddy – at the coffee machine at my work I reckon about 80% of the caffeine addicts watched MKR the night before. On this statistic I am assuming that 20 million people are watching Pete and Manu each night.
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I would watch either Manu or Pete. Once has a constant smile on his face with glassy eyes and the other speaks another language. it certainly isnt English.Not sure what the apeal of the show is
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Paddy, two words.
You.
Idiot.
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Paddy, not @paddy…you do realise that you could double the sample size and the accuracy would improve by about 1-2%. you obviously have no idea about statistics and are making a fool of yourself. THe Australian tv ratings system is one of the most robust in the world
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You do all realise that Oztam is owned by Seven, Nine and Ten? How convenient.
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Wow Anonymous. Scoop of the century.
Of course every man and his dog in the industry knows that, and that OzTAM was set up close to 20 years ago and has been operating since 2001.
And you do realise that while OzTAM is owned by Seven, Nine and Ten, that Foxtel, ABC, SBS, MFA, AANA attend OzTAM Board meetings? How transparent.
And you do realise that if OzTAM did anything untoward that that ACCC would come down on them like a ton of bricks on anything that even had a whiff of an odour of collusion or anti-competitiveness.
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