Ratings Review: BARB Week Ending 09 September 2007
19 September 2007 tbs.pm/72
This week’s publically available ratings throw up some interesting titbits.
ABC1, which recently announced it would be closing, had a great week, scoring 0.4 share / 5.2 weekly reach. Almost 2.5 million viewers tuned into the channel at some point during the week. To put that in perspective, more people watch ABC1 at some point during the week, than watch Channel 5’s top rated show that week, which was CSI: Miami. And only half a million more watch the top rating shows on both BBC2 and Channel 4, which were Tribe and Supernanny respectively.
The developments in the Madeline McCann story that took place that week, including the questioning of both of Madeline’s parents, and their subsequent naming as “arquido” or suspects by the Portuguese police brought more viewers to the news channels this week than normal. BBC News 24 led the way with a 1.0 share / 17.3 weekly reach, followed by Sky News with a 0.8 / 11.1. Both channels had seen significant improvement on the previous week’s figures. Even Fox News had gone up, although only from 209,000 to 293,000 viewers weekly reach. The channel that lost out as a result was Sky Sports News, which went down 0.9 / 13.0 to 0.5 / 10.2.
In a way, it’s a shame that we do not have figures available this way for the other news and information channels that are available on both Sky and Virgin Media, such as EuroNews, CNN, CNBC, Al-Jazeera, and France 24 amongst others. These channels may think that this kind of ratings information might not be of much use to them, but the home audience is still the primary audience of DTH satellite and cable services in the UK, and as such, it is still the best guide as to the performance of many digital channels.
Channel 4’s selection of digital channels pulled in another week of great performances. Channel 4 +1 continues to be one of the best eprforming timeshift channels with a 0.5 / 14.3. E4 proves that it doesn’t need Big Brother to get big ratings by posting a 1.1 / 19.9, whilst its +1 puts in a 0.5 / 12.6, putting it just behind Channel 4 +1 in the timeshift stakes. Film 4 continues to perform well with a 0.8 / 14.4 for the main channel and 0.2 / 4.0 for the timeshift, and last, but not least, More 4 does 0.8 /16.6 for the main channel and 0.1 / 3.1 for the timeshift. This continues to highlight the fact that Channel 4 took the right decision by changing E4 and Film 4 from being subscription to being Freeview channels. Methinks perhaps there is a lesson here for those over at Sky 1, who continue to languish with a 0.9 / 13.6, way down on its best performances.