BBC: How to double your audience in 7 days

“You would think the television industry would be shouting such good news from the rooftops… The ‘missing’ viewers aren’t missing at all. They have just wandered off to use all the flexible methods of viewing that technology has offered, as you would expect.”

Ariel, the in-house weekly newspaper of the BBC, is not nearly as bad as its Pravda nickname implies. The letters page in particular often carries sharp exchanges between staff and management.

But you certainly don’t expect to find groundbreaking information about the state of the television business in its pages.

There it was though, the first published results of the Corporation’s take on Live + 7 – research bringing together the available data on all viewings of an individual programme across all platforms including the initial live outing.

Such an obvious idea, such a simple and necessary idea and yet the results, if confirmed over time, are pretty dramatic.

The first set of Live + 7 numbers cover the first two months of the year and show A Question of Sport getting a respectable 2.14 million when it was first shown on 10 January. Add in all the subsequent viewings over the next seven days and the number of viewers soars to a total of 6.65 million.

There are also a distressing number of petrol heads and Jeremy Clarkson fans out there if the Live + 7 numbers are to be believed. On 30 January Top Gear attracted a large audience of 5.4 million but over seven days the total virtually doubled to an astonishing 10.63 million.

The Live + 7 takes the official BARB ratings then adds in from a variety of sources the best available numbers for everything from recorded and played back to repeated and watched on demand.

The numbers could be even larger if you were prepared to wander beyond seven days. Unsurprisingly the same processes are at work, proportionately, with minority programmes on minority digital channels. The small discreet audience for Romancing The Stone: The Golden Age of British Sculpture on BBC Four on 9 February was up 198% to 502,000 when given the Live + 7 treatment. Viewing figures for The Brain – A Secret History on BBC Four on 9 February rose by 127% to 983,000.

The BBC is not alone in finally getting its mind around the problem presented by apparently declining numbers for many – though certainly not all – live transmissions. Work of a similar nature is going on all over the place – at Channel 4 and Sky – but it seems odd that so far at least, there does not seem to be a co-ordinated approach with an agreed methodology.

There is more than a whiff of everyone doing their own thing. Such numbers may be already available if you look hard enough but you would think the television industry would be shouting such good news from the rooftops.

The ‘missing’ viewers aren’t missing at all. They have just wandered off to use all the flexible methods of viewing that technology has offered, as you would expect.

The new numbers emerging on individual programmes certainly underpin the BARB findings that in 2010 average viewing to linear TV passed the four hours a day mark for the first time. Yet why has so little been heard about Live + 7 concept so far?

Broadcasters have different interests in publicising such numbers.

For the BBC, big numbers particularly for programmes that ostentatiously come out of the public service broadcasting drawer, are vitally important to emphasise the case for the licence fee.

Apart from the big live shows like The X Factor, ITV can sometimes be more ambivalent about the numbers.

Historically, UTV in Northern Ireland suffered not from low audiences but from the reverse. ITV audiences were so high in Ulster that advertisers could reach their chosen segment of the population quickly and therefore more cheaply.

You would think though that Live + 7 was absolutely made for Channel 4 and it is surprising that the broadcaster is not making more public fuss about the concept.

In an ideal world it would surely be in everyone’s interest for a totally integrated, methodologically agreed single system of producing viewing figures for a programme whenever or wherever that viewing takes place. But at least we are clearly heading in the right direction.

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