Autumn 2024: the 5 à 7 in front of JiC (at the photo finish)

Sports fans run on performance and adrenalin. For them, the desire to win is stronger than anything else. That’s why it’s a little harder to support the Canadiens these days…

The desire to win doesn’t just drive the team; it transports an entire fan base.

But this desire to perform can also be found in the media. With the ratings…

The TV and radio seasons are divided into four quarters: autumn, winter, spring and summer.

In summer, no one really cares about ratings. We have irregular programming… and above all, the figures gathered via the various surveys are of little use. Why is that? Because advertising reps almost never sell ads with summer numbers. It’s mainly the fall and spring figures that count. In winter, there’s the Christmas vacation, which maganates the figures by two to four weeks, or more or less 15% to 20% of the survey period.

Earlier this week, I released the fall quarter ratings for BPM Sports/91.9 Montréal. We’re talking about one of the best quarters in the history of the Montreal sports station.

Note that morning(@MaxLalonde_, @Anthodezo, Gilbert Delorme and @AlexLanctot10) and weekend(@datgregtho and @paiemento) figures are each up sharply on last year.

– Maxime Truman (@MaximeTruman) November 26, 2024

Over the weeks, I’ve also revealed the numbers for the Canadiens’ games on TVA Sports and RDS. Basically, we’ve gone from an average of 500,000 – 600,000 to an average of just over 400,000, mainly due to the rebuild and the poor show put on by the Habs.

Now, many of you have asked me who currently has the upper hand in the sports homecoming war on TV. The 5 à 7 or JiC?

Well, according to the information I’ve been able to gather, 5 à 7 attracts an average – since the start of the season – of 24,000 viewers per minute, while JiC gets 22,000. Yanick Bouchard and Frédéric Plante therefore beat Jean-Charles Lajoie and his numerous guests to the photo finish.

It should be remembered, however, that it’s weeknights when Canadiens games are broadcast on RDS that make the difference. The 5 to 7 ratings are much higher on those nights. Otherwise, it’s a case of whitewash, whitewash.

What’s more, RDS has about half a million more subscribers than TVA Sports…

That’s not much.
Those of you who have been following me for several years will remember that in 2019, 5 à 7 drew an average of 36,000 viewers per minute, while JiC drew 25,000. So we’ve gone from 61,000 people watching French-language sports TV (in Quebec) to 46,000 in the space of just a few years.

The pandemic really changed our behavior. The aging population and massive cable churn too…

So it’s easy to understand why there are so many cuts in the media industry, and why some people in the business are constantly anxious about their professional future.

It’s worth noting that late-night shows are also far less successful than they used to be.

There was a time when 110%, l’Attaque à 5 and l’Antichambre passed the scrape. That’s no longer the case, however, since sports opinions and hot takes have invaded social networks and the FM airwaves. Both RDS and TVA Sports no longer see the late-night slot as a cool spot.

Often, a live broadcast of a less popular sports team or sport works much better than a show that revolves around the Canadiens, which wasn’t the case before…

Extension

Many of you have asked me how ratings are calculated in 2024.

Numéris offers pagers to hundreds of people – based on several geographic and demographic criteria – across Quebec. These people have to wear the pager and plug it into a charger at the end of the day, which sends them the day’s data.

Each radio (in Montreal) and TV (in Quebec) program is encoded with a wave that is imperceptible to the human ear, but which the pager is able to pick up. When the pager picks up this wave, it records a listen.

Online recordings are often encoded on official station websites, but not when they come from social networks. People who record a program, then listen to it again later, are counted (albeit with a slight delay).

In the end, a rule of three is applied to match the listening of a thousand people, for example, with that of a population of several million French-speaking Québécois.

I can’t wait until we find a better way of accounting for all this, but in the meantime, this is still the way the industry works…