Sky Sports F1 – Top 10 ratings (week ending 20th May, 2012)

From BARB:

1 – 53k – The F1 Show (Friday, 20:00)
2 – 24k – Spanish Grand Prix Highlights (Monday, 16:31)
3 – 23k – 2008 Monaco Grand Prix (Sunday, 12:35)
4 – 22k – 2006 Season Review: Part 1 (Friday, 21:00)
5 – 20k – 2010 Monaco Grand Prix (Sunday, 17:30)
6 – 19k – 2007 Monaco Grand Prix (Sunday, 10:20)
7 – 15k – 1983 Monaco Grand Prix (Sunday, 09:40)
8 – 15k – 2006 Season Review: Part 3 (Saturday, 22:15)
9 – 15k – Spanish Grand Prix: GP2 Sprint Race Replay (Wednesday, 22:55)
10 – 13k – The F1 Show (Friday, 22:31)

The first point to note is that all of the top ten is above or equal to thirteen thousand viewers, the first time that has happened in a non race week since the week ending April 1st, 2012. In terms of the Sunday ratings, the classic races did fairly well when you think that the previous non-F1 Sunday the channel failed to get above 11k at all. Assuming the other classic races had 12k for the sake of argument, between 09:00 and 20:00 on Sunday 20th May, Sky Sports F1 averaged 18 thousand viewers. This compared with an average of eight thousand viewers for Sunday 6th May, 12 thousand viewers for Sunday 30th April and seven thousand viewers for Sunday 8th April.

Is 18 thousand viewers enough to justify showing classic F1 races? I don’t know. Don’t forget here, though, that each of the above races were repeated over the week, so maybe the totals will look a bit higher once they are accounted for (although I doubt any will appear in next week’s Top 10). The weekly reach was also high, a reach of 812 thousand was the highest for a non-F1 race week since the week ending March 11th, which was the channel launch week.

One thing also of note is that 2008 was the highest rating, which is no coincidence considering it was the most exciting race (and the fact that 2009 is no where to be seen, 2011 I imagine is not there as it fell into the more competitive primetime). Had they have been imaginative, and say repeated the 1996 Monaco Grand Prix, ratings across the day could have been slightly higher, although we’re talking a few thousands more here rather than anything over the top.

The F1 Show’s rating for it’s main Friday airing at 20:00, however, was the lowest since its airing on March 30th, which surprises me considering they had Pastor Maldonaldo as a guest. I do think it needs to be promoted a lot more as it rarely gets promotion outside of the channel.

Monaco Grand Prix ratings suffer under British heat [UPDATED]

The Monaco Grand Prix plunged from its 2010 and 2011 highs yesterday unsurprisingly as the UK experienced its first heat-wave of the year. The race attracted a peak of 4.16 million viewers on BBC One, lower than the average for last year’s programme.

Yesterday’s programme averaged 3.13 million, which I believe is the lowest rating for a live BBC F1 race programme in daytime since Formula 1’s return to the corporation in 2009. Sky Sports F1 added a further 565 thousand viewers, bringing the total viewership to 3.69 million, the lowest since 2009. This split is 84.9% to 15.1% in BBC’s favour, the biggest split ratio yet between the two. Given the weather, a drop was expected, and it’s not a concerning drop, this was round about expected. All ratings in the past few days have been hit hard by the warm weather, and the F1 was another victim of that.

Looking at the figures compared to last year, only one of the five races so far (Bahrain does not count) has been up year-on-year, that being China. All the rest of the races have recorded declines of some sort.

Qualifying held up fairly well, with 2.07 million watching on BBC One. Sky Sports F1 added 388 thousand, with the overall total in line with 2009 and 2010. 2011 was abnormally high due to the session overrunning as a result of Sergio Perez’s crash.

Note: The ratings information comes from Digital Spy and Attentional.

Sky Sports F1 – Top 10 ratings (week ending 13th May, 2012)

This is a rather short blog, because there is no Top 10. Normally this happens due to incomplete logs, and is normally updated in the six-week amendment cycle. So, the Top 10 for this week should be uploaded by 2nd July.

We can, however, still see the weekly reach. The channel reached 2.444 million people, which is slightly up on the 2.381 million people it reached for the Chinese Grand Prix.

What I shall do is update this blog post when the six weeks come around and replace the post with a Top 10. Hopefully!

UPDATE: I wrote the above on May 21st, and now six weeks later BARB has updated with the ratings for this week. Which are as follows:

1 – 523k – Live Spanish Grand Prix (Sunday, 11:30)
2 – 353k – Live Spanish Grand Prix: Qualifying (Saturday, 12:00)
3 – 115k – Live Spanish Grand Prix: Practice 3 (Saturday, 09:45)
4 – 84k – Live Spanish Grand Prix: Practice 1 (Friday, 08:45)
5 – 68k – Live Spanish Grand Prix: Practice 2 (Friday, 12:45)
6 – 64k – Live Spanish GP2 Feature Race (Saturday, 14:35)
7 – 55k – Spanish Grand Prix Highlights (Sunday, 19:03)
8 – 52k – Spanish Grand Prix Qualifying Replay (Saturday, 17:16)
9 – 48k – Fast Track (Sunday, 10:58)
10 – 45k – Live Spanish GP3 Race 1 (Saturday, 16:15)

There is not much use in me commenting on these ratings too much given that it was nearly two months ago, apart from saying that the GP2 and GP3 races performed well on the Saturday.

Sky Sports F1 – Top 10 ratings (week ending 6th May, 2012)

From BARB:

1 – 83k – The F1 Show (Friday, 20:00)
2 – 19k – 2003 Season Review: Part 1 (Friday, 21:00)
3 – 19k – 2004 Season Review: Part 2 (Saturday, 22:30)
4 – 11k – Chinese Grand Prix Replay (Sunday, 11:00)
5 – 9k – 2004 Season Review: Part 1 (Saturday, 21:03)
6 – 9k – Malaysian Grand Prix Highlights (Tuesday, 21:02)
7 – 8k – Australian Grand Prix Replay (Saturday, 11:00)
8 – 8k – Bahrain Grand Prix: GP2 Race 1 Replay (Thursday, 17:01)
9 – 8k – Fast Track (Tuesday, 18:59)
10 – 7k – 2003 Season Review: Part 2 (Friday, 22:18)

On the bright note, The F1 Show recorded it’s highest individual figure since launch. That’s about the only bright note. Only four shows above ten thousand viewers which is the lowest number for the channel so far. This is not really surprising though – in the three week gap between Malaysia and China, the second ‘off week’ performed worser than the first, and that is exactly the same here, with this week performing worser than last week.

The weekly reach for the channel is the lowest yet, albeit very marginally. The channel reached 607 thousand viewers for the week ending 6th May, compared with 608 thousand viewers for the week ending 8th April. Overall, though it’s not particularly surprising, although it shows why Sky needs to put more of an effort into its mid-week programming as I showed in Part 4 of my ‘The Verdict so Far’ series.

Spanish Grand Prix peaks with 5.6 million viewers

The Spanish Grand Prix peaked at 5.6 million viewers on BBC One and Sky Sports F1, overnight figures have shown. BBC One had 4.6 million of these viewers, with Sky Sports recording a peak of 1.05 million – a split of 82% to 18% in BBC’s favour.

In terms of programme averages (which is what I tend to use for comparison purposes), BBC One had an average of 3.49 million viewers from 12:10 to 15:15, while Sky Sports F1 had an average of 512,000 (3.6%) from 11:30 to 16:45, their programme extended by 15 minutes due to the events in Barcelona. This totals up at exactly 4 million viewers, with a split of 87% to 13% in BBC’s favour. The split is larger for the averages due to Sky’s longer pre and post race show. Doing some calculations shows that Sky had in the region of 770,000 viewers between 12:10 and 15:15.

But how does the split compare with China (the last race where both BBC and Sky were live), and how do the averages compare with previous years? For the Chinese Grand Prix, BBC recorded a 5-minute peak of 4.21 million, whereas Sky Sports F1 had a peak of 887,000 viewers. This was a split of 82.6% vs 17.4% in BBC’s favour. You could argue the split was 0.6 percent higher in Sky’s favour for Spain, but in reality the numbers are in the usual margin of error that you would expect. Overall, since China it seems Sky has not clawed anything from BBC, and vice versa.

The comparisons to previous year’s make for interesting reading, though. Last year’s race – which had the highest rating since 1996 – peaked with 6.2 million viewers and had an average of 4.68 million viewers. So this year marks a 600 thousand viewer drop on that figure. For the Spanish Grand Prix, that figure was abnormally high, the remainder of the Spanish Grand Prix races in the 21st century have either had bang on 4 million viewers, or below 4 million viewers. The 2012 figure of 4 million is in-line with the 2010 race day average which had 3.99 million, and above the preceding years. I guess, from a viewers’ perspective, a battle between Sebastian Vettel and Lewis Hamilton is more intriguing than that of a relative unknown to viewers (Pastor Maldonaldo) and Fernando Alonso. It’s worth considering outside factors as well, it was the last day of the Premier League season yesterday which, although it did not clash with the F1, would have probably depleted the Formula 1 figures slightly.

Either way, although it’s down year-on-year, I think it was to be expected given last year’s surprisingly high figure. Moving onto Qualifying, Saturday on BBC One only had 2.10 million. I don’t yet know Sky Sports F1’s Qualifying figure, we probably won’t know until next Monday, but assuming it is above 200 thousand viewers, it will be higher than last year’s Qualifying figure of 2.30 million, albeit lower than 2009 and 2010.

In conclusion, I think the figures are solid, and as expected. Nothing too high, but nothing of much concern. Next, we move onto Monaco, which due to the glitz and glamour of the place and it being one of the main races of the year tends to bring higher viewing figures.

Note: The ratings information comes from Digital Spy, Media Guardian, the Controller of BBC News Kevin Bakhurst and BARB.

UPDATE: Seconds after posting this, James Allen claims that BBC’s show peaked with 6.2 million. I’m not sure how true this is, none of the averages or peaks that I have seen support his assertion.