Masterchef up by 40 per cent after Ten axes Reef Doctors
Ten’s Masterchef made a significant recovery last night, with ratings improving by nearly 40 per cent on the previous Sunday, which saw the audience driven away by the dismal performance of Reef Doctors.
Last night Masterchef delivered an overnight metro audience of 890,000, well ahead of last Sunday’s 648,000.
Last week, the first episode of Reef Doctors, at 6.30pm, averaged an audience of just 357,000, according to OzTAM.
Ten swiftly axed the show from the schedule, replacing it with a double episode of Modern Family, which rated 566,000 and 635,000, giving Masterchef a better inherited audience at 7.30pm.
Ironically in the week of the gender wars, they seem to have eased off on the Boys vs Girls banter, making it eminently more watchable!
MATHS FOR dUmMIES
IT DOESN’T ADD UP
Why is the headline implying that the media’s latest mindless whipping of Reef Doctors is responsible for Channel 10’s Master Chef’s ratings on the night that Reef Doctors aired? Do the maths.
According to ratings figures of the top 20 for June 16th, the amount of people viewing was increased by 1,944,000 compared to the previous Sunday.
In the top 15 that translates to an increased viewing audience of a massive 2,261,000. Of the Top 15, 75% of the shows have an increased audience, with well over half increasing by the hundreds of thousands.
Why blame Reef Doctors lead-in for a dip in Master Chef ratings when it’s clearly not just Master Chef who had an audience increase the following week. Plus the audience as a whole had a substantial increase.
The apparent failure of Reef Doctors to find an immediate audience is worthy of some analytical thinking, it points to a raft of issues which currently affect the local television industry, the future of free to air TV and new media in general.
Is it Channel 10 feeding the chooks, trying to cover its own programming arse? Or is it journalists failing to think?
Go figure.
Hi Annie,
I don’t recognise the number you refer to (Total people viewing free to air? Commercial TV? Metro? national?)
What is clear is that Ten significantly increased its share compared to a week before, while ABC1 was down. In part it may have been that Paper Giants wasn’t on on ABC1, and in part it will have been that people didn’t turn off Reef Doctors because it wasn’t there.
You say more people were watching TV this Sunday. Could it be that the previous week some of them ditched reef Doctors and turned off altogether?
Short of interviewing the audience, it’s hard to explain what is in viewers’ minds. But what is incontrovertible is that at 7.30, when Masterchef started, more people were already watching than a week before,a nd more of them stayed around.
Cheers,
Tim – Mumbrella
Hello Tim,
I see where you’re coming from, as in my viewing audience total I’m meaning the total across the board, for the evenings in question, of the top 20 (5 metro).
So the maths for those overall stats I gave really doesn’t add up in any sensible way.
But I also compared each show the first Sunday with the second Sunday, side by side, from the list of the top 15. So for example you can see that first Sunday Border Security was (metro, free to air) 970,000 and second Sunday it was 1,121,000 or A Place To Call Home was 1,094,00 first Sunday and 1,283,000 the second Sunday. And so on.
And using this method I still maintain that of the Top 15, 75% of the shows have an increased audience, with well over half increasing by the hundreds of thousands.
And that the increase for MasterChef is by no means an isolated example. Far from it, during the 6.30 and 7.30 time slots figures were up all the commercial stations.
Another way of looking at it is by taking one hour’s figures. If you take the 7.30 time slot and look at the figures (metro free to air) across the 2 Sundays, you can see that there were actually 600,000 more viewers on the second night (watching at 7.30 at any rate). And that all shows on ABC, 7, 9 and 10 increased their audiences by healthy margins. These shows were Grand Designs, Border Security, 60 Minutes, and MasterChef.
If you take the 6.30 time slot across the 2 Sundays, for 7, 9 and 10 (as I haven’t seen figures for ABC’s Compass), you will see that the three commercial stations (metro free to air) all substantially increased their audience numbers and that their combined figures show 800,000 more folk were tuned in the second night.
You say “What is incontrovertible is that at 7.30, when MasterChef started, more people were already watching than a week before, and more of them stayed around.” Yes, that’s right, there were more people watching the second night as I hope I’ve demonstrated. But I fail to see how you can conclude “more of them stayed around” when the broad figures seem to be showing none of them necessarily left in the first instance. I’d be interested if you had any factual numbers that people “turned off’ Reef Doctors “. You need across the hour figures to know that.
Again, I ask, why single out Reef Doctors as cause and effect for MasterChef’s ratings, when it is just as likely to be another factor such as it was a public holiday the first Sunday or viewer numbers were down across the board the first Sunday. Or something else.
Just saying.
Regards,
Annie
Please feel free to check and to correct my maths. I certainly don’t claim to be a statistician 😉