Tuesday 13 September 2016

RATINGS: August free to air news highlights


  • The Xhosa news and Zulu news on SABC1 continues to lead the pack by far, averaging 4.53 million and 4.51 million viewers, respectively.
  • On SABC2, consumer affairs show, Speak Out had a strong month once again, with its premiere episodes capping at 2.3 million viewers whilst its reruns finished a strong 2.1 million viewers. Yes, a rerun beat most of the rest of SABC2's lineup and all of SABC3's programming.
  • The news bulletins on SABC2 seem to be recovering from their timeslot shifts with the Afrikaans news pulling a peak of 1.499 million viewers, with the multilingual bulletin (as always, there is absolutely no reason why three languages should be sharing one slot for news) not far behind with 1.47 million viewers.
  • SABC3's English news bulletin pulled slightly more than 860 000 viewers for the month.
  • The weekend editions of eNews Direct, well at least the one-minute bulletins that get the benefit of having a very strong WWE lead-in, averaged a very strong 2.5 million viewers for that single minute. The standard eNews Direct bulletin is yet to feature in the channel's top twenty programmes since its inception in January.
  • A major point of concern is that in August 2016, a Municipal election took place here in South Africa (in case you forgot). The 30th most watched programme on DStv pulled 189 000 viewers. No South African news channel, therefore, was able to pull at least that amount of viewership for any moment on an election day, a day when people are usually expected to flock to news broadcasts. Also, no election coverage charted on either SABC2 or etv, both of which aired election programming. Are South Africans getting their news from other places or just ignoring major news stories completely?

Ratings courtesy of brcsa.org.za. Programming included is for prime time only, which is defined in South Africa as the time from 5:30pm to 10:00pm. Ratings are for viewers fifteen and older only. 

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