Gavin and Stacey character Nessa’s catchphrase could easily be the title of this series of articles. What’s occurring in the world of TV viewing? Everything is changing, but it’s also not. And the speed at which that change is happening is uneven. Our friends from Wales, Essex and even Korea, can help us understand why we should look beyond audiences achieved overnight and over seven days.
Smithy and Nessa deliver a significant Christmas audience
Most headline viewing figures have been well covered from the Christmas period. Gavin and Stacey and Wallace & Gromit were phenomenal successes for the BBC. Squid Game returned to our screens on Boxing Day with a second series. Episode 1 of the Korean thriller achieved an audience of 4.6m (dubbed plus original language) over seven days.
The last part of that sentence is one of the more crucial for those analysing Barb data: over 7-days. As the ways in which people can choose to watch their favourite shows has evolved, so has the way Barb reports programme ratings. Live event programming — principally sport — is almost all watched on the day of the event, with audiences reported overnight. Other programming builds an audience over the days and weeks after launch, while some eagerly anticipated shows merit consideration in multiple ways.
Like Christmas lunch programme ratings can keep giving after a first pass
Gavin and Stacey is a perfect example of exciting overnight audiences followed by significant gains over time. Overnight the series finale attracted an audience of 12.4m on the TV set. Alone this would make it one of the most watched programmes of 2024. But this figure is a little over half the story. The audience for Gavin and Stacey had grown past 20m by 5 January. While the audience away from the TV set approached 750k by New Year’s Day.
Chart 1: 7.6m watched Gavin and Stacey between Boxing Day and 7 January
For those analysing viewing data there’s an irony in that the ability of the viewer to watch what they want, almost instantly, at a time of their choosing, means that we need to be more patient in waiting for audiences to build to their fullest. It’s for this reason that broadcasters and pure-play VOD services are increasingly interested in 28-day audience figures. Or even longer, in some cases.
International content adds complexity
Series 2 of Squid Game also demonstrates this. The overnight audience to episode one was 1.4m. After reaching 4.6m at seven days, the audience had reached 6.1m by 14 January on TV sets.
The international nature of programming adds another level of complexity here. Viewers were able to choose the language they watched in. The list of options is extensive, but Barb must choose which languages to reference (if any) alongside English. In this case, Korean is the obvious choice.
To get a complete read on the show’s audience we need to combine audiences that chose to watch in Korean with those that chose to watch the dub into English. Doing this, we arrive at the figures above.
The more things change the more they stay the same, or even roll back
Progress does not go in a straight line. While the trend is often your friend, it can stall or even reverse to a degree before moving on. Before Christmas we published an article that drew attention to fragmentation in the form of a falling number of programmes achieving an audience of over 1m on Christmas Day itself.
With two giant audiences on 25 December, we might have expected this trend to accelerate. However, Christmas day 2024 showed a distinct roll back, with 37 programmes passing the 1m mark — five more than in 2023. This does not mean fragmentation is reversing — that figure is still far behind the 2014 and 2015 figures, but is a useful reminder that change is not as neat as we might like to think.
Chart 2: The journey to full fragmentation may not be as unrelenting as some suppose
Are audience figures more pass the parcel than the instant hit of a Christmas present?
Who doesn’t like a Christmas present? The Champneys sleep mask was exactly what I wanted this year (thanks, Mum). Good or bad, the wrapping is removed and you know what you’ve got. Pass the parcel, on the other hand, builds. You have an idea of the scale of the gift, but (in the modern way) each layer removed reveals a small present — or extra viewing.
It’s not until all the layers are removed that we see the final present — or audience. Of course, the wonderful variety of programming on our screens means that both kinds of analysis have their place, but its increasingly beyond overnights, and even seven days, that we should be analysing.
Note on viewing figures:
All viewing figures in this article relating to 2024 programmes have been run in TechEdge As Viewed. Gavin and Stacey data include viewing from non-TV broadband only homes. This is why the seven-day figure is 19.2m, rather than the 19.1m on the Top 50 programmes report on the Barb website. The website figures are based on TV-only homes.
Squid Game has been measured in English (dubbed) and Korean (original language). Data users should add the audiences to these two versions together to get a total audience for each episode.
Barb produces ratings for non-English language programmes where there is good reason to believe a sizeable audience will view a programme in a language other than English. These decisions are taken in concert with Barb subscribing companies. Netflix do not currently report non-TV audiences, so all data are TV-set only.
Featured image: Gavin and Stacey / BBC