Election weekend a winner for ABC
"Suck on that, Kerry O'Brien." Saturday night coverage and Insiders draw huge crowds for ABC's election coverage.
- Published by David Knox
- on
- Filed under Election
ABC drew bumper figures for its election night coverage, winning Saturday night with a 33.8% network share.
ABC’s primary channel pulled a 21.9% share as the results stretched well past midnight.
Australia Votes: Election Night drew 856,000 / 847,000 on the primary channel, but a simulcast on News 24 saw those numbers lift to 1.22m / 1.23m in 5 city metro, peaking at 9:50pm.
For News 24 it was the highest ever share for the channel.
By contrast Nine averaged 606,000 viewers, while Seven (which was split across Seven and 7TWO) drew 318,000.
Adding in regional viewers ABC lifted to 1.7 million viewers.
iview plays were also at a record high, (excluding children’s programming) whilst online traffic to ABC News Digital was among the highest ever recorded, with news and current affairs achieving 2.8 million visitors, 4.3 million visits and 20.5 million page views — doubling the traffic recorded for the 2013 election.
The good news continued into Sunday morning with an extended Insiders pulling an impressive 466,000 viewers (likely to be another record).
Director of News Gaven Morris said: “The ABC delivered the most comprehensive election coverage across television, radio, digital and social, and it’s good to see audiences responded to that.
“Across the campaign and on poll day more Australians came to ABC News for live coverage, essential context and analysis and policy discussion and debate than any other source.
“Australians turn to us during these important events and we are always exploring better ways to serve them.”
The marathon broadcast, in which presenters admitted they were getting delirious after midnight, ended with Leigh Sales quipping, “We’ve broken out own record. Suck on that Kerry O’Brien.”
Share
- Tagged with Federal Election, Insiders
5 Responses
7 needs to look at ABCs design and take some cues. Mainly watched ABC, gave up and watched some PVR’d stuff to break the monotony. Pretty bad numbers for 7, I gotta say I think they need to decide what they want from their news brand; some it just ultra trashy tabloid crap, but some is really good journalism – the problem is that the trash is bringing the reputation down, rather than the quality stuff raising it.
Wow, I’m quite surprised. Judging from the Twitter response of people who watched it, they said it was appalling, the worst coverage they’d ever seen on ABC. Biased presenters & a shouty bullying Morrison.
As compared to Karl whatshisname, Alan Jones, Mark Latham et al on 7? Really?? Actually shouty Morrison was as bad as expected, and Penny Wong’s not much chop on television anyway, let alone for a whole night. But the ABC’s own people made up for it. What on earth would they do without Antony Green !
We flipped between ABC & 7, mostly when we got fed up with Antony apologising for the ABC’s predictions being wrong (tip: maybe set a threshold so it doesn’t even try and predict when only 0.01% of a division has been counted?) or they had Michael Rowland in increasingly strange contortions while presenting the graphics (pretty sure he ended up presenting them through the window of a room across the atrium at one stage!).
7’s effort was lackluster (guessing they expected more fireworks from the panel) & their graphics just embarassing (though nowhere near as sad as 9’s), but it was worth watching just for the sight of Alan Jones freezing in shock every time Tanya Plibersek touched him 😉
Clean graphics, no silly gimmicks, great presenters, plus Antony Green. Comment was made “those poor girls (Leigh Sales and co.) – they’ve been there since 6pm – they don’t get a commercial break like the others. Do they have buckets under the desk?”.