TV ratings

[Tau Ceti]

Again, this guy never gives up. He used to do the same thing in the Star, "US ratings not included" but he never mentions or factors in the RDS numbers not only for the Als but now involving most of the other games.

I do agree he managed to provide excuses for the other sports lagging rather than giving credit to the CFL viewership being strong, but his basic point is a fair one: in sum there were almost certainly more people watching the World Series in Canada last Thursday than any other sporting event. I would be curious to know by how much; presumably Fox and other American networks track this.

As for RDS, I've only worked out the numbers for the Grey Cup and they're disappointing when Montreal's not involved. 5.5 million English Canadians watched last year's final and only 300k Quebecers did.

[Mulder]

I do agree he managed to provide excuses for the other sports lagging rather than giving credit to the CFL viewership being strong, but his basic point is a fair one: in sum there were almost certainly more people watching the World Series in Canada last Thursday than any other sporting event. I would be curious to know by how much; presumably Fox and other American networks track this.

I'd assume Canadian advertisers don't care how many Canadian's watch TV Shows/Sports shows on American networks, if they were tracked in any way we would have heard about it. They want real Canadian numbers.

He's also bundled in the NFL Sunday games into Category, just remember that that's usually showing 3-4 different games across the country, as opposed to just 1 CFL game.

[jerrym]

What does it say? Probably nothing more than the fact that not even NFL die-hards will watch a game as bad as that one.

Still this was a pretty mealy-mouthed way of excusing the fact that the Argos (a first place team) playing against a last place team (Winnipeg) in a game one could hardly say was a classic still attracted 5 times the audience of the NFL and beat baseball's World Championship.

[Neely2005]

http://ca.sports.yahoo.com/blogs/eh-...221855538.html

As far as raw numbers go, the CFL game won (517,000), baseball came second (465,000) and the NFL lagged far behind (105,000.) In reality, baseball took the night since most likely another army of Canadians watched on Fox, whose Canadian viewers aren't tracked. The NFL game, possibly the worst matchup of the season, was aired on Sportsnet360, a channel that viewers may have had to conduct forensic searches to find.


They've been doing well in the USA too. This was from the end of September:

The overnights are in, with the Sask vs Als drawing an excellent 818,000 (English audience only), while N.E. vs Atl did 509,000 (TSN/NBC).

The Saturday night Argos vs Esks did a surprising 821,000, going up against HNIC at 928,000 (Combined games). Great numbers again, even beating out the Blue Jays! (who are lucky to break 300,000 these days...much to the surprise of some Toronto sports writers)

Speaking of ESPN, the ratings are in for the Esks vs Bombers on ESPN2, which averaged 201,000 viewers (over 194 minutes). That's pretty darn good, especially going head-to-head against a live NCAA football game on ESPN.

Ratings for other U.S. cable sports programing being televised in that Friday night time slot:

MLB Tonight (live): 240,000 (MLB Network)
CFL Esks vs Bombers: 201,000 (ESPN2)
NFL Total Access: 167,000 (NFLN)
MLS (live): 131,000 (NBCSN)
WNBA playoffs (live): 89,000 (NBA TV)
UFC Tonight: 80,000 (FOXSNThe overnights are in, with the Sask vs Als drawing an excellent 818,000 (English audience only), while N.E. vs Atl did 509,000 (TSN/NBC).