With the SABC's Afrikaans news now back on SABC 2 after a stint on SABC 3, I thought it would be interesting to compare the viewership the bulletin experiences on SABC 2 with what it experienced during its stay on SABC 3.
What was initally a channel shift that was to last for 4 weeks during the Soccer World Cup ended up being a planned permanent move that saw the overall schedules and alignment of SABC 2 and 3 shifting.
But the move was met by a massive viewer outcry and after a 20 week and 2 day run on SABC3 at 7:30pm, the Afrikaans news was back at 7pm on SABC2. The move back to SABC2 also 'effectively' means that the duration of the news bulletin returned to 1 hour as the Afrikaans team continues their broadcast on The SABC's news channel on DStv 404 at 7:30pm whereas it was merely just a thirty minute simulcast when the bulletin was on SABC 3.
And now, the numbers
For the last full week that the SABC's Afrikaans news was on SABC2 (the week of 2 - 8 June 2014), the bulletin averaged 1 416 000 viewers.
During the following week, the bulletin made the switch to SABC 3 and therefore the Afrikaans news was shown on both channels during one week. For that week, the days it was shown on SABC 2 averaged 1 702 000 viewers. With the shift to SABC 3 during that same week, viewership plummeted 44% to 949 000.
Over the following 20 weeks, the Afrikaans news on SABC3 averaged 967 095 viewers, peaking during the week of the 21st to the 27th of July 1 066 000 viewers, not coming close to the 1.4 million viewers seen just a few weeks prior. In fact, that weeks was only one of three weeks out of the twenty to have more than 1 million viewers, the other being the week of the 7th of July with 1 021 000 viewers and the week of the 8th of September with 1 024 000 viewers.
The bulletin experienced its smallest viewership during the week of the 29th of September with 851 000.
All things Relative
With many things in life, these numbers are related to something else, here being the channel that the news bulletin is on. While on SABC 2, the news bulletin would often feature on that channel's top ten overall most watched programmes, though closer to the bottom of the top ten, while on SABC 3, though the viewership dropped on average quite a bit, it was still a top ten show for SABC 3, though now closer to the top.
This is ABC reaches fewer homes than SABC 2 (and in fact SABC 1 and eTV as well) does and therefore the average SABC 3 programme is less-watched than the average show on any other free to air channel (excluding community broadcasters, of course).
A real life example of the small reach of the channel is that of the Northern Cape where only people in Alexander Bay have access to the channel without having to have a satellite service like DStv or Openview HD.
(As soon as viewership is available for the bulletin's first week back on SABC 2 is available, this article will be updated)
No comments:
Post a Comment