World's biggest TV ratings and lies

A thread with an estimated 1 billion viewers!


I'm not too bothered about whether Strictly beats Takeaway in the ratings. But the really big worldwide events, and how many people are watching them, can be very interesting. Even more fascinating, when most of the data you hear about them is wrong.

This all started around 2007, when Nick Harris questioned the claims FIFA made about the World Cup Final. The average audience for the match that we can verify is 250-350 million globally, while FIFA had claimed a "billion" or more watched it. The world ratings have also been exaggerated for Olympics, and for less popular occasions like the Super Bowl, and cricket and rugby tournaments – and outside of sport, royal weddings and Miss World.

- www.independent.co.uk/sport/general/tvs-great-viewing-mirage-768839.html



More reliable independent data is now available for international events, using figures from agencies like BARB and Nielsen in many countries. But things haven't changed much. Journalists and promoters still throw around that word "billion", forgetting that a billion is a hell of a lot. Not that many people want to watch a darts game.


So, this is a thread where we can:

- Find some crazy claims about world TV ratings

- Laugh at the big fibbers, like the ICC (cricket), IRB (rugby) and ASO (Tour de France)

- Chuckle at the smaller fibbers, like FIFA and the Olympic committees


And answer the questions

- Why are the media so bad at reporting these ratings? They're the media. Isn't it their area?

- Do false claims ever affect TV rights costs or sponsorship?

- What about online videos – if you see "1 billion views" on YouTube, how many people really watched the full video?


(pic: World Cup 2014 by Milton Jung, cc-by)

Donald Trump would love this thread, sad.

Oh dear

To stay on the right side of TVforum, here's some classic pres.

The Beijing Olympic opening ceremony – an event so big, you can see it from anywhere in the world. :-s

Partly due to being held in China and being so spectacular, it's been calculated as having a global average audience of 593 million, the largest ever recorded.

And this is the BBC pres which was seen by 593 MILLION VIEWERS








Redgrave: the Chinese "were always going to do fireworks well"... Do some research, man.

Despite that lead-in, Weakest Link only got 100 million IIRC.

The Beijing ceremony is known as genuinely having a billion viewers, but it isn't quite true. One billion people in the world saw some part of the broadcast, according to the 'reach' figures. But my 20 minutes' viewing wasn't really the same as someone watching the entire thing. For that reason, it's more consistent to use average audience figures across the event. Still, almost 600 million for a four-hour show is incredible.

The pitfalls of calculating all this, and the different kinds of audience figures (average/peak), are explained by a researcher, Daam van Reeth:

https://lirias.kuleuven.be/bitstream/123456789/549828/1/Methodological+pitfalls+in+analysing+TV+audiences+for+sport+(Van+Reeth,+2016).pdf

Sports are competitive, so everyone wants theirs to be popular on TV. But if a sport organization uses phrases like "cumulative audience" or "estimated reach" or "will smash the record", they're usually trying it on. The whole thing is a bull-s*** auction basically. It's fun. And then maybe someone else repeats the number and exaggerates it more!

So, what claims have you heard? Let's try to find the biggest phantom audiences of all time.

A late night Weatherview got something mad like 10 million viewers because it was shown directly after the London 2012 opening ceremony.

It was a very good episode to be fair.

Most of the networks in the US will use the Super Bowl's massive ratings to lead into a new series or show directly after

Good idea, it's the biggest event they have (100 million U.S. viewers or so). About a quarter of Canadians watch it too, afaik.

Where the NFL fell down was in assuming/pretending that the rest of the world was equally passionate about it:

- http://www.humankinetics.com/excerpts/excerpts/media-overstates-global-appeal-of-the-super-bowl

A billion for the Super Bowl is realistic compared to these two:
"an estimated worldwide television audience of 2.5 billion will witness the opening ceremony of the ICC Cricket World Cup at a freshly erected Greenfields Stadium, in Trelawny, Jamaica" ...and... "Now around 4 billion people in 205 territories will watch 20,000 hours of coverage" ...of the Rugby World Cup 2015 Hey, you can't disprove it! They sent Santa Claus to ask each viewer individually.

Most of the huge soap audiences of the 90s (Eastenders Xmas 1986, Corrie Xmas 1987 etc) are combinations of the first broadcast and later repeat showings that same week added together. While it means the figure isn't completely accurate, I suppose there's not much difference from today's combined iPlayer/timeshift ratings.

There's an urban legend that Go Nagai's Grendizer was so popular in France that 100% of audiences watched that show.

Reminds of when the BBC One O'Clock News once got 9 million viewers on a Tuesday in 2010, because of bad snow.

In terms of audience share, this years Eurovision was watched in Iceland be 153,000 viewers, a small number, but given Iceland’s population, that’s still an incredible 97.5% share of viewers.