SABC continues to dominate football viewership
While SuperSport is now the primary holder of football rights, SABC Sport continues to dominate audience delivery for the sport, indicates a new research report produced by international sports and sponsorship research agency Sports Marketing Surveys.
SABC Sport delivered an all-adult audience of 3 324 636 against the total Supersport audience of 102 960 for the recent derby game between Kaizer Chiefs and Orlando Pirates broadcast on 24 November 2007 (source: TAMS).
“SABC Sport certainly dominates the lower LSM groups, which is the majority of the football viewing audience, with the exception of LSM 9 which is taken by SuperSport. SABC, however, dominated by a factor of four in LSM 10, an interesting anomaly,” says Eddie Roux, sponsorship insights manager at Sports Marketing Surveys.
The derby game in particular attracted a larger youth audience. “Thirty percent of the audience on both SABC1 and Supersport were aged 16 – 24, which is encouraging for football,” says Roux.
Roux says that football audiences are also smaller in comparison to figures achieved on SuperSport for other sports. “In recent cricket one day internationals between South Africa and New Zealand, all-adult audiences on SuperSport 2 were nearly double those achieved for SuperSport 3 for the derby game.”
Although football audiences may broaden as 2010 approaches, it seems that that much work is still to be done on increasing DStv decoder penetration in the football viewing market in SA.
