Monday night saw post-election news coverage vying with popular entertainment shows for audience share in a close battle for television viewers.
Post-election interest saw ABC’s line-up of news and current affairs draw its best Monday audience in three months following on from Saturday’s election coverage that gave the network its highest audience share since the Asian Cup final in January 2015.
However, there was still a big audience looking for entertainment programs, especially in the younger demographics with Ten’s MasterChef and Have You Been Paying Attention? dominating the list of non-news programs.
In the end, four networks finished above the twenty per cent mark with Seven on top with 26.9% ahead of Nine (24.6%), ABC (21.4%) and Ten (20.9%), leaving 6.2% for SBS. Ten was the number one network in 16-39 and 18-49 with Nine winning 25-54. Seven won all markets except Sydney that fell to Nine.
Seven News, despite lifting from recent results was beaten into second place last night with 1,224,000 and 1,107,000. Home and Away, that followed, slipped to 754,000 while Highway Patrol managed 758,000 and 736,000. Later, Guardians of the Galaxy averaged 432,000 while the afternoon saw The Chase on 488,000 and 756,000.
Nine News had a rare week night win with 1,230,000 and 1,186,000 with A Current Affair lifting to 999,000. 20 to One improved on last week’s result for The Briefcase but still finished fourth in its timeslot with 659,000. This helped Love Child to a small increase, averaging 726,000 while The Briefcase rated 303,000 at 9.30pm. A split schedule saw Footy Classified on 136,000 in the three AFL markets. In the afternoon Hot Seat had 644,000 fans.
ABC News (908,000) did well at 7pm while 7.30 had its best result of the year with 890,000. This helped Australian Story to make the top ten with 762,000. Next best for the network were Four Corners (705,000) and Media Watch (702,000) with Q&A just making the top twenty with 676,000.
MasterChef with 1.14 million was the top non-news program of the night winning its timeslot in every demographic group while Have You Been Paying Attention? was next best for Ten with 794,000. Earlier, The Project had 731,000 and 528,000 after Ten Eyewitness News averaged 580,000 and Family Feud had 585,000. Later, NCIS New Orleans rated 298,000.
Over on SBS, Michael Mosley: Wonderful World of Blood (274,000) and The Island with Bear Grylls (172,000) were the top entries while later Tour de France had 122,000.
In the breakfast battle, it was another win for Today (318,000) over Sunrise (302,000) and ABC News Breakfast (105,000 and 55,000). Following, The Morning Show had 190,000 ahead of Today Extra (178,000) and Studio 10 with 94,000. On the Gold Coast market, the launch of the new Seven Gold Coast News attracted an audience of 49,000 while the established bulletin from Nine managed 34,000.
See [Monday 4 July 2016] (http://forums.mediaspy.org/t/monday-4-july-2016/1496) for a more detailed look at the ratings numbers in the Media Spy forums.
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