Nick ‘Honey Badger’ Cummins hands Ten best Bachelor premiere to date
Network Ten’s newest season of The Bachelor, which features former Australian Wallabies star Nick ‘Honey Badger’ Cummins, achieved 940,000 metro viewers, making it the highest launch episode since the franchise began in Australia.
According to OzTAM’s overnight preliminary figures, The Bachelor’s total audience was boosted to 1.244m when including regional numbers and topped key advertising demographics 16-39s, 18-49s and 25-54s. It also beat Nine’s The Block, which had an average audience of 823,000 and a national audience of 1.196m.
Nick Cummins is The Bachelor this season
The show’s premiere was almost 100,000 viewers larger than last season with Matty Johnson, which achieved 846,000. In 2016, The Bachelor achieved an audience of 882,000, while in 2015, it had an audience of 846,000. In 2013 and 2014, the premiere metro audiences were 669,000 and 692,000 respectively.
Last night’s numbers were on a par with sister franchise The Bachelorette. Last year Ten’s The Bachelorette, which starred Sophie Monk, launched with a metro audience of 951,000.
On Seven in the same time slot was Highway Patrol, with the two episodes managing metro audiences of 601,000 and 631,000 respectively. Nationally the audiences were 915,000 and 974,000.
Later in the evening, the premiere of Nine’s Bite Club achieved 509,000 metro viewers. It outdid Seven’s 911, which had 470,000 metro viewers. From 9pm, Ten ran Mean Girls, which managed 265,000 across five metro cities.
Overall, Seven had the most popular program of the evening with 1.066m metro viewers, beating Nine News’ 962,000 metro viewers. Earlier on in the day, Seven’s Sunrise beat Nine’s Today Show, with audiences of 296,000 and 235,000.
Nine won the evening despite the success of Ten’s Bachelor Australia, with a main channel share of 18.9%. It beat Seven’s 18.3% and Ten’s 16.3%. ABC and SBS had shares of 11.9% and 5.7%.
From a total network perspective, Seven took the win – at 27% – beating Nine Network’s 26.1% and Network Ten’s share of 22%. ABC Network and SBS Network had shares of 16.7% and 8.1%.
