TV year: How Seven won, Ten survived and Nine slipped back – and digital finally made its presence felt

Tim Burrowes

November 30, 2009 12:45

While the next few weeks will see several of the free to air TV players appear to be competing in the new reality show Extreme Hibernation Challenge, it’s fair to say they were all hard at work over the weekend.

On Sunday – and indeed into today – it felt like every few minutes my inbox was pinging with a new analysis of the year’s TV ratings. Virtually every one was accompanied by a note explaining why their interpretation of OzTam data was the fairest way of looking at things.

First the five city prime time share numbers for 2009 (excluding non-ratings weeks and ignoring the new digital channels), which is Seven’s preferred metric:

Seven 28.8%
Nine 26.8%
Ten 22.2%
ABC1 16.4%
SBS 5.8%

Or the 6pm to midnight numbers, as preferred by Nine:

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Tim Burrowes

I write about the world's media and marketing industry from an Australian perspective Australian lens. I've worked in the UK, Middle East, Asia & Australia. I founded Mumbrella, which we sold in 2017.

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1 COMMENTS

Stilgherrian 30 Nov 09

“The ABC officially doesn’t care about ratings” is one of their biggest lies. When I worked for ABC Radio in Adelaide in the era of David Hill as MD, he’d be on TV saying, “The ABC will never be about chasing ratings.” And yet at the very same time our programs on what is now called ABC Local Radio were given specific ratings targets,

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