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“As an industry we need to work harder”

Nine's Michael Healy adds his voice to the push to expand upon just Overnight ratings.

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In the US networks have recently begun ditching Overnight numbers in favour of both Live + 3days and Live + 7day results, to better reflect the changing nature of viewership.

In Australia that nut will be much harder to crack, but Nine’s Director of Television Michael Healy says change is needed.

“Overnight viewing figures only tell part of the story,” he said. “Viewers are now enjoying our content in a myriad of ways. This year we introduced an internal metric to measure this data and we look forward to an industry-wide format being available in the near future.”

The table below illustrates various increases in audience numbers on several platforms, including metro and regional numbers. Of course the industry standard remains metro via OzTAM and separates first-run playouts to repeats or video views. But it nevertheless gives us a snapshot of viewing trends even if adding for “Total” Viewers is a bit liberal.

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“So while Love Child might do 1.2 million in overnight figures, once you factor in time-shifted viewing, encore screenings and catch-up viewing you end up with an average audience well in excess of 1.7 million – a huge increase of 44 per cent on the overnight figures. As an industry we need to work harder to communicate this message,” he said.

True enough. In the face of Streaming competition, fragmentation and a soft ad market, networks do indeed need to do everything they can to accurately reflect who is watching and how. Bring on the Catch-Up numbers, bring on the metro + regional and Live streaming numbers. Of course when measuring data it’s crucial that all things are equal for all networks in all markets -otherwise it’s no level playing field. Free to Air also does itself no favours with merging simulcast numbers, constantly trumpeting “peaks” not averages and split-coding programmes just to prop up the reportage.

Some hope is in sight.

OzTAM, which is collectively owned by Seven, Nine and TEN, will begin reporting video plays before the end of the year.

2 Responses

  1. It is important to capture the impacts of new technology.
    You can’t tell the story of new technological players (eg. Netflix) eating away at traditional television if you’re not reporting the ways that audiences are now watching that television.

  2. They are trying to pretend the the overnights don’t exist for press release purposes. Networks programme on profit using ratings as a data input to models, media buyers look at ad views in target demographics, advertisers looks at how many ad views in target demographics are needed to increase sales by x% or brand favourability by y%.

    If you want to see what people sitting in front of the TV last night watched the overnights are fine. For News they make up 99.5% of viewers. For dramas the total number of views will increase 30-50% with encores or timeshifting, which you can see in the +7s, but the Overnights still provide a relative measure. And as most of the revenue comes from ad views in overnights, and the other additions tend to be similar, they provide a good measure of whether a show will hold a slot, or get bump, dumped or cancelled.

    Nine is interested in counting…

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