Huge Australian TV audience for Royal wedding
The Royal wedding proved to be a huge ratings draw, delivering Seven and Nine some of the biggest Saturday night ratings of the year.
The ceremony – perfectly timed for Australian primetime – saw an average of 1.95m metro viewers tune in for Seven’s coverage, making it the most watched program of the week. This number rose to an average of 2.6m, taking into account regional viewers too. Peak national viewing approached 2.9m for Seven.
The wedding between Prince Harry and Meghan Markle attracted a further 1.475m metro viewers for Nine, making it the top rating show of the week for the network.
The first kiss! #9News pic.twitter.com/RJaDSxqJXb
— Nine News Australia (@9NewsAUS) May 19, 2018
The big ratings justify both networks’ investment in sending large teams to cover the Windsor ceremony despite it occurring on what is traditionally Australian TV’s toughest night of the week. Both networks went commercial-free for the duration of the ceremony.
Seven’s coded seperate parts of the ceremony for the OzTam ratings, with the arrivals averaging 1.7m metro viewers and the procession 1.5m.
As a result, Seven and Nine’s Royal Wedding coverage dominated the top 20 shows of the week, with Ten only scraping into the top 20 in 18th, 19th and 20th for two episodes of Masterchef and Have You Being Paying Attention.
Seven narrowly won the ratings week in all-people and the key advertiser demographics of 16-39 and 18-54, just ahead of Nine. Ten was a distant third.
The tables below were prepared by Nine based on OzTam data. The shares are commercial only and do not include ABC and SBS:
Linkedin
Channel 7 spent hundreds of thousands for a broadcast they aired in standard definition. What an absolute joke. The same picture quality as Diana’s wedding in 1981.
User ID not verified.
And millions of people watched it. And Seven no doubt achieved the advertising/publicity/whatever goals they had.
It goes to show that people will watch things at low resolution if that’s what something they want to watch is available in. They could have watched essentially the same coverage on 9HD, ABC HD or SBS HD, but they chose not to.
User ID not verified.