Serena Williams fails to boost Ten as Project interview disappoints
Ten’s highly promoted exclusive interview with tennis star Serena Williams failed to boost Ten’s overall share last night despite a slight increase in audience for the show.
Last night the channel finished with a 5.8% share, down almost two percentage points from last week’s 7.5%, according to OzTAM’s overnight figures. The result put Ten just ahead of SBS from a main channel perspective. Nine led the night with a 26.5% share, followed by Seven’s 19.6%. ABC had a 12.8% a share and SBS’ was 4.5%.
Ten’s share also edged closer to Seven’s multi-channels 7TWO and 7mate, both of which were 4.3%.
That was despite a major marketing effort from Ten, which featured clips from Williams’ interview with The Sunday Project co-host, Lisa Wilkinson. Williams came under scrutiny several weeks ago, following three code violations at the US Open.
But Ten’s The Sunday Project did see growth compared to last week. At 6:30pm, the show had a metro audience of 289,000 – slightly up from last week’s 248,000, while from 7pm, The Sunday Project averaged 404,000, a rise from last week’s 312,000. The interview between Wilkinson and Williams was in the second half hour, from 7pm.
According to Ten, The Sunday Project was up 23% week on week, according to metro figures. But despite that, it was still out-done by a number of other shows running at the same time. ABC News Sunday, which also commenced at 7pm, finished with an audience of 705,000.
But Nine’s The Block dominated, with an average metro audience of 1.263m. The Block led all the key advertising demographics, the 16-39s, 18-49s and 25-54s, and beat Seven’s Sunday Night, which achieved 696,000 metro viewers.
Seven News had the strongest bulletin across the country last night, with a metro audience of 1.019m at 6pm, beating Nine News Sunday’s 937,000.
The later time slot was led by Nine’s 60 Minutes, which pulled in a metro audience of 715,000.
Serena Williams on Nine or Seven would have attracted three times more viewers.
Ten has an image problem and as soon as CBS realise this, then and only then, can they fix the problem. Ten is not the go to Network for big interviews as their news and current affairs departments are under-resourced and barely competing.
The CEO is out of his depth and surrounded by people who sit back and applaud his every word.
The Network needs fresh blood to restore the grunt.
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I have no respect for that woman, she thinks the world owes her everything and her mother is just as bad. The sister not so much. I don’t care if somebody is black, white or piebald as long as they show respect for others and accept criticism if due. I wouldn’t watch any program about her or anyone like her no matter what channel it was on.
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Agree Leo. That story was last Sunday week’s news – and may have rated better when the topic was still hot. Almost 2 week’s later we’ve all moved on and Matt getting voted off the island was a hotter topic.
Wilkinson whilst experienced is too old for The Project (Sunday or otherwise) and it’s core demo. She can grin all she likes (who wouldn’t earning what she does) and crack her unfunny jokes, but Ten have over capitalised there, expecting to bring her loyalists across, but they aren’t The Project viewers. That interview was over flogged and under performed as expected. Would have faired better on 60 Minutes when the topic was current.
And contrary to network beliefs, if you also flog it to death in the hope of gaining an audience with bated breath before it runs, that doesn’t work either.
Lisa – probably a nice woman but old news, wrong programme, wrong network.
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Agree it was over promoted but what does Wilkinson’s age have to do with it? They’ve got Steve Price on there often enough and I notice no comment about his age.
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Ratings are rigged, you survey a few thousand people in the major cities to determine what you believe 25 million people are watching. The people you survey don’t even realise that Australia is actually a country that extends further then the city limits.
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