Earlier this week we published an article quoting OzTAM figures from The Australian and compared them with Tuesday’s cume breakfast ratings figures on radio.
That set the cat amongst the pigeons and we were reminded that it is inaccurate to compare the TV OzTAM ratings with the GfK radio ratings, because the methodology is different.
What’s more, we compared averages with cumes. That’s not accurate.
You can read about the radio cume results in our analysis story here.
For TV, the closest equivalent to radio cume measurement is ‘reach,’ but even that is not an exact comparison.
TV reach is the sum of unique viewers who have seen at least one minute of an event or time band across its total duration. See more about OzTAM definitions here.
Radio reach (cume) is the total number of different people who listen to a station for at least eight minutes within one quarter hour, during any time period. Read more about cumes here.
So it is like comparing apples and oranges because the two ratings methodologies are not the same.
We apologise to the Seven Network and to set the record straight we asked Seven for the TV reach figures, which are still not an exact match to the radio figures, but do give a better representation of the national audience. These figures capture the reach across metro, regional and video on demand platform 7plus (BVOD) viewers for Sunrise Monday to Friday (not including Weekend Sunrise):
Metro | Regional | BVOD | Total |
2,252,000 | 1,259,000 | 243,930 | 3,754,930 |
*OzTAM Metro, OzTAM Regional (Comb. Agg Markets), OzTAM VPM 3.1 Live + VOD inc. Co-viewing. 01/04/22 – 30/04/22, Sunrise, Reach, Total People, Cons. 7.
The default measurement of reach in TV is often 1 minute, which ups the figures even further:
Metro | Regional | BVOD | Total |
2,815,000 | 1,550,000 | 243,930 | 4,608,930 |
*OzTAM Metro, OzTAM Regional (Comb. Agg Markets), OzTAM VPM 3.1 Live + VOD inc. Co-viewing. 01/04/22 – 30/04/22, Sunrise, Reach, Total People, Cons. 7.
Looking at the detailed figures supplied to us by Seven, it is also interesting to note that The Australian reported the average 5 metro city TV breakfast show figures for ten years ago and compared them with last year. But ten years ago, the majority of TV viewing was linear with limited BVOD streaming services available, so it was not accurate for The Oz to compare those figures without including streaming services.
If you include the full national figures across metro and regional TV, plus video on demand, the premise of the Australian’s article does not ring true. On 7plus alone, between 2020 and 2021, consumption increased 39 per cent.
The Australian’s article said “In 2012, Sunrise enjoyed an average weekday viewership of 364,445 across the five major capital cities.” If you include BVOD and regional viewers, the average total audience today is actually 429,005, not 260,650 as The Australian’s article reported.
Interesting story. No matter what the correct comparison is, I wonder how many people have time to actually watch the TV at breakfast time, despite the fact that it may be on in a couple of rooms. Perhaps people in older demographics may have more time to sit down and watch, but young people getting kids ready for school, getting ready for work etc. really don't have a lot of time to pay attention to the screen. Radio can be consumed far more easily at breakfast time. You don't have to watch it to consume it.
Further to this. There seems to be a fascination on this and other sites with cume figures, essentially so the claim can be made that FM stations are dominant in the two major markets. Simple fact is 2GB in Sydney and 3AW in Melbourne are the top rating stations. This is not rocket science. The fact is listeners listen a lot longer to the AM's while FM listeners tend to chase their favourite songs across multiple FM stations and other platforms like Spotify. An ad campaign is going to reach a lot more people on a top rating AM station than it is on a top rating FM Station. The FM breakfast shows are brilliant, however is Sydney for example Ben Fordham on 2GB is still number one despite his lower cume.