Shaun Micallef’s Mad as Hell benefits from non-ratings period as Nine’s Forever slides
In a quiet night of TV in which no program hit 1m viewers, Shaun Micallef’s Mad as Hell was the most watched non-news show pulling in 782,000 metro viewers in the 8.30pm timeslot.
The comedy news program benefited from the non-ratings period, with its audience up on last week’s 641,000 viewers while Nine’s Forever, which also aired at 8.30pm, saw its audience drop to 250,000 metro viewers, less than half last week’s 525,000, due to only airing in Sydney and Brisbane.
A second episode of the US crime drama, at 9.30pm, was watched by only 193,000.
Who saw him whack the ad guy across the head with the fry pan? Something felt so very right about that.
Hey guys – think you’ll find Forever was only screened in 2 or 3 markets, not the full 5…?
Forever’s audience dropped because it was only shown in Sydney and Brisbane last night. The AFL Footy Show was shown in Melbourne, Adelaide and Perth with the start of the 2015 season tonight.
Thanks Johnson and Mark, I’ve amended the story.
Cheers,
Miranda – Mumbrella
Wow, so many shows under the “magic million” mark.
This will become more frequent as fragmentation decreases audiences, who are now spoilt for choice with thousands of shows to choose from.
You are right Geoff. But the corollary is that ‘the million’ viewers lost are spread across ‘the thousands’ of other shows.
This implies that these ‘thousands of other shows’ will only get audiences in the realm of low thousands, which is virtually an unsustainable ad-revenue model for 90%-99% of them. Few will survive.
The irony is that as video audiences fragment, advertiser demand for audiences will outstrip supply (assuming demand is not changed substantially). We all know the result when that happens – the audience scarcity is likely to drive up the price for programmes that can amass audiences.
I think it was David Poltrack from CBS when asked about 20 years ago whether he was worried about CBS’ audiences declining to ‘niche’ levels, replied along the lines of … not really, we may end up being niche but we’ll be the biggest niche in town.