CHANNEL 10’s audience is not growing and that’s not helping the Virgin Australia Supercars Championship’s bid for big free-to-air numbers in 2020.. however, the supports did really well!

WORDS: Richard Craill IMAGE: Mark Horsburgh / Supercars

Channel 10 attracted a paltry 5.8% of the free-to-air market on Sautrday, rising to 7.4% on Sunday. By comparison, 21% of those watching TV on Sunday were tuned in to Channel 9’s big slate of reality TV.

As such, 10’s struggles for weekend market share led to relatively soft numbers for their two days of Supercars programming from Townsville.

A total audience of 316,000 watched Race 19 on Saturday, comprised of 210,000 on Channel 10 (Metro + Regional) and 106,000 on Fox Sports 506.

262,000 saw the early race on Sunday (160,000 on 10, 102,000 on Fox) which swelled to a much better 376,000 (242,000 on 10, 134,000 on Fox) later in the day for Race 21.

We weren’t provided with a breakdown between the regular 5 city / metro numbers and the regional numbers, but on average the regional audience generally makes up approximately 40-45% of the total number provided, so it’s easy to do the maths.

The numbers are down slightly from Darwin’s first event three weeks ago.

As an interesting aside, 109,000 watched the support races prior to Race 21 of the Championship on Fox Sunday afternoon, which is a large number. (A further 160,000 watched on Channel 10, too, which is healthy for the undercard!)

Later that evening, in prime time, 84,000 watched the A-League Grand Final between Sydney and Melbourne City, also on Fox.

Thus we can deduce that the Townsville Tin Tops are more popular than Australia’s third or fourth (it’s a battle with Rugby Union at the moment) biggest football code.

A good result for motorsport.

As always, Kayo numbers are not promoted, however recent AFL and NRL numbers published by Foxtel indicate the average Kayo audience for those games adds approximately 45% to the ‘traditional’ audience watching.

What does that mean? For Supercars (and, indeed F1) numbers, add somewhere between 50-60,000 to the published Fox Sports numbers to get a rough idea of the audience watching digitally.

FORMULA 1

A strong 111,000 tuned in, and probably fell asleep during, the Belgian Grand Prix Sunday night on Fox Sports.

It’s the fourth of seven races contested so far this year to draw more than 110,000 viewers and is also up slightly on the Belgian GP audience from last year – one of the few like-for-like comparisons we’ve been able to manage so far in 2020.

73,000 watched Qualifying, the lowest Saturday audience of the year to date on a busy Saturday of sports on the pay-TV broadcaster.

As always, Kayo numbers are not released.

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SOURCES: TV Tonight, Mediaweek, TV Black Box.

(NOTE: Numbers are overnight metro (5 capital city) and Foxtel ratings supplied by ratings agency OzTam to media outlets. They do not include any additional reporting, including time shifted content, regional ratings or broader reach, unless released and freely available. They also do not include streaming numbers on Kayo or SuperView, etc).