Lisa Wilkinson’s Sunday Project debut attracts the show’s biggest audience to date
The co-host of The Sunday Project Lisa Wilkinson, boosted Ten’s alternative news program by more than 200,000, making it the show’s largest audience since its launch last year.
Wilkinson, who left the Today Show last year after contract negotiations with Nine failed, debuted on Ten last night with a metro audience of 481,000 at 6:30pm.
At 7pm, The Sunday Project, which also features Hamish MacDonald, Tommy Little and Rachel Corbett, climbed to 583,000. The result was up 88% in total people than 2017’s series average.
Despite achieving its strongest numbers to date, The Sunday Project was defeated by Seven’s coverage of The Australian Open Men’s Tennis Final between Marin Čilić and Roger Federer.
Federer won his 20th grand slam title in a five set match. It was watched by 1.730m across the five metro cities. According to OzTAM’s overnight preliminary figures, more than 650,000 of the Australian Open audience was in Melbourne.
Nationally, the final averaged 2.3m. The presentation achieved 1.293m across the five metro cities.
But the result had almost 1m viewers less than last year’s Australian Open Men’s Final, between Federer and Rafael Nadal. The match was watched by 2.627m.
On Saturday night, the Women’s Final between Simona Halep and Caroline Wozniacki was watched by 1.023m.
According to OzTAM’s VPM numbers sent by Seven, 10.6m minutes were live streamed by 5.3m Australians yesterday, up 5% year on year.
Running against the tennis was the final One Day International between Australia and England on Nine, which saw Australia just miss out on a win. The first session attracted 969,000 metro viewers while the second session had 943,000 tune in.
Last night also saw the premiere of Ten’s first entertainment show of the year, I’m A Celebrity, Get Me Out Of Here! which sees celebrities including tennis player Bernard Tomic and Shannon Noll enter the jungle.
The show was up on last year’s metro audience figures, with ‘Welcome to the Jungle’ collecting an average audience of 1.108m and ‘Opening Night’ pulling 1.274m metro viewers.
Last year, the audience figures were 1.103m and 963,000 respectively. Nationally, I’m A Celebrity was watched by 1.68m.
I’m A Celebrity Get Me Out of Here! out-rated the cricket.
Looking to the multi channels, Play School was the most watched program with 155,000 tuning in on ABC2.
In news, Nine won the night with an audience of 1.289m over Seven’s 888,000.
Federer and Čilić’s clash boosted Seven to a 36.7% share last night, winning the night. Nine finished with a 19.1% share while I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here and The Sunday Project brought Ten’s share to 16.8%.
ABC’s share was 6.4% and SBS’ share was 3.7%.
Looks like Bernie was pretty sure he wasn’t going to be getting in the Aus Open final more than a fortnight ago!
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“According to OzTAM’s VPM numbers sent by Seven, 10.6m minutes were live streamed by 5.3m Australians yesterday, up 5% year on year.”.
So that means that each ‘viewer’ watched on average 2 minutes? That wouldn’t even be one game – probably closer to two or three points. Good luck getting your ad noticed.
But well done Seven – that’s about 6 seconds more than last year. Crack open the champagne!
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500,000 viewers used to get your show cancelled.
“How far they done fall…”
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