A dedicated topic for discussion of the football ratings for the major codes. This thread if often a better place to compare, debate and theorise rather than the daily ratings topics. Continuation of AFL/NRL Ratings.
I was having a look back over the AFL & NRL ratings for last year’s finals, just to refresh myself prior to the upcoming series’.
I didn’t realise that a few NRL finals rated quite poor in Sydney particularly (as low as 300k).
Is that odd? A reason for it?
Or just a different culture to the AFL in Melbourne perhaps (who went as high as 700k for one of them, including 1m for a post-match)?
I’d probably say that there’s a different culture with the AFL.
Both that and NRL supporters are probably more used to the concept of subscribing to Pay TV for live coverage - especially when until about a decade ago, the free to air TV coverage of all regular season NRL games was delayed!
Yes, Sydney has a culture of watching sport on telly more than Melbourne, compared to actually going to the game.
I believe FOXTEL has a higher subscriber rate in Sydney than Melbourne, and Sydney fans do not like traveling to the larger venues like ANZ Stadium at Homebush or Allianz Stadium at Moore Park, they want to watch their teams at their local grounds eg. Penrith Park, Brookvale Oval or Leichhardt Oval, despite those venues having antiquated facilities and ground capacities of under 20,000.
And it’s only been in the in the last 5 years or so that Nine have regularly shown more than 2 games a week.
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I see that Nine included the ratings figures for NRL on 9Gem last night with the figures for Nine in Sydney and Brisbane. The audience in Adelaide was abominable, with Perth and Melbourne only slightly better but probably only due to larger populations.
Foxtel will be very encouraged with the ratings of the 2019 season opener on Thursday. The Storm-Broncos match had a national audience of 338,000, up 27% from last year’s game between the Dragons and the Broncos. It was the highest rating Thursday match on Fox League and the highest ever rating regular season simulcast match. The audience could have been higher if for the big storm in Sydney during the night which affected Foxtel signals in the city.
According to OzTAM, pay TV ratings for Round 1 of AFL season was up 17% compared to the same round in 2018.
The Age’s Caroline Wilson claimed on Sportsday on 3AW tonight that ratings for Fox Footy’s simulcast of AFL finals (Channel Seven coverage without ads) were down 30% on last year. She reckoned it was due to Kayo, or there hadn’t been many finals with close results.
Ratings for yesterday’s AFL Grand Final have been posted on Twitter. It was the lowest rating GF (5 city metro) since Essendon beat Carlton in 1993.
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That doesn’t surprise.
A blowout and one team with a small following.
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This is a rarity.
Tonight we have AFL and NRL regular season club games on the main channels in both Sydney and Melbourne and with the same games (Swans V Essendon on 7, and Melbourne V Penrith on 9).
I think we all know which one will come out on top in which city, but curious to see how close they might be… i suspect it will be a pretty comfortable win for 9 in Sydney and 7 in Melbourne.
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This really makes you wonder for how long we’ve been fed subscription numbers that are not reflective of the real viewer numbers.
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From the NRL 2023 annual report released today
- NRL broadcast figures outstripping AFL, with 93.2m viewers tuning into Telstra Premiership matches on Nine and Fox Sports compared to 91m for AFL’s free-to-air and pay-tv coverage. Overall, rugby league viewership was 171.8m, making the code Australia’s most watched sport;
- Huge growth of interest in the expanded NRLW, with 7.2m viewers watching NRLW compared to 6.1m AFLW viewers - despite the rival code playing more than twice as many matches (99 to 48). More than 1m viewers tuned into the NRLW grand final, which was watched by a crowd of 40649 fans at Accor Stadium, while NRLW content views were up 31% on NRL.com and video views by 48%.
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I am a bit suspicious of the NRL spin on the first dot point, but the NRLW numbers seem somewhat a bit more believable, as the NRLW season overlaps with the NRL season more and thus probably gets a bit more traction that way and they play their Grand Finals on the same day.
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If you look at the report, they have excluded streaming numbers in the comparison so wildly inaccurate only including broadcast on Nine/Seven and Fox sport excluding Kayo etc.
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