Eurovision Final draws viewers despite no Australian finalist

Maybe Australia is part of Europe after all. The Eurovision Song Contest Final rated well on Sunday night — and early Sunday morning — with the evening repeat ranking among the top shows in the day’s free-to-air programming.

Based on Total TV reach, 927,000 viewers checked out at least part of the repeated final last night, enough to see the show rank #12 for the day.

However, viewers didn’t tend to stick around for long – with the national average audience sitting at just 226,000 – which sees it rank at #25, at best, based on this metric.

More pleasingly, over half a million viewers tuned in early for the 5am live broadcast, with the average audience for the early morning sitting at 209,000.

This suggests that anyone serious about their Eurovision woke early – while the evening audiences were tending to channel surf.

Without an Australian to cheer on — after we were dumped in the semi final — getting 508,000 Aussies to tune in at 5am on a Sunday morning is an even more impressive audience haul than it would otherwise be.

For comparison’s sake, the first semi-final had a Total TV national Reach of 1 million, with the second semi-final reaching 931,000.

SBS director of television, Kathryn Fink, said, “SBS has been bringing Eurovision to Australians for more than 40 years as a celebration of diversity and culture through music, and this year we saw audiences come together in the early hours to watch our live coverage, and more tuning in to watch our special prime time evening shows across the weekend.

“From the beautiful and history-making performance of Electric Fields representing Australia in semi-final 1, to all the colour, chaos and key changes across performances that featured everything from dazzling light shows, spinning stages, and even doilies – it was fantastic to see so many Australian fans coming to SBS across TV and SBS On Demand for their Eurovision fix in 2024.”

For the record, a guy named Nemo from a country named Switzerland won the contest, with the below performance.

Check out the rest of Sunday’s ratings, below.