Move this thread to the fight club.
According to this...
http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/med_tel-media-televisions
there were just under 1.5 billion televisions on earth in 2003. Just a quick scan of the top of the list and you can instantly subtract a third of this, 500 million, as they belong to countries I'm certain aren't the least bit interested in rugby union. I'm certain you could remove more, including a large slice of America's 219,000,000 boxes. That leaves us with a generous one billion telelvisions worldwide and we need to fabricate a claim that 3 billion (though I have read 4) people are watching the union world cup. It leaves people open to claiming that 2 thirds of the world population watched the world cup. Just the language used by the union spin doctors, that there a 3-4 billion viewers, téléspectateurs, whatever, is a load of crap. Obviously you need the same people watching several games from this to be anywhere remotely true, but we shall continue.
Claims such as these rely heavily on estimating the ratio of viewers to each television, which is extremely difficult to do. Applying an accurate factor to your estimations is close to impossible and can easily skew your figures by huge amounts and any estimate to a viewing audience should explicitly state whatever method you used. I haven't seen union clarify this.
Let's take a look at the previous world cup to see if we can gauge the accuracy of union's claims for the present episode.
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Australia was estimated to have a touch over 10 million televisions in 2003. Let's assume that the average audience for one television is 3. If 30 million people in Australia tuned into the last world cup of union (as quoted above in this thread), this means every television in Australia was tuned into one game throughout the tournament. More realistically, we can say that an average of 1/10th of the nation's televisions were tuned into 10 games throughout the tournament - ie 1 million televisions and 3 million viewers Australia wide for each game.
Considering the final, which was by far the most attractive game of the tournament, peaked with a national audience of 4.34 million (
http://www.rwc2003.irb.com/EN/Tournament/News/md2411presser.htm) already this seems over generous. Even Bledisloe Cup games normally draw a national audience of around 500k (
http://forums.leagueunlimited.com/showthread.php?p=2361348&highlight=bledisloe+cup#post2361348)
If we estimate the average national audience over the duration of the tournament to be a hefty 1 million, this requires an average of 333k televisions tuned into on average 30 games of the tournament to bring up the 30 million audience figure. I don't know about you but I didn't watch 30 games of the 2003 XV WC and I don't know anyone who would or could, so not only do the audience estimates seem generous (a look at 2003 television ratings could determine the actual audience average. Was it around 1 million?), but the average games per television ratio seems outlandish.
Thus, the only way to make these figures more sensible is to increase the average ratio of viewers per television for each game. Union must consider an average of 3 viewers per television for union broadcasts in Australia an underestimate. But wait, how can this be possible if there are 10 million televisions in a country of 20 million people, ie with a nominal ratio of 2 to 1? Only if the games were heavily watched in pubs, clubs etc. live sites or at BBQs as union representatives often claim. The problem is the distribution of televisions around the country is presumedly pretty homogenious, and every person that goes out to watch a game at one of these places is likely to be abandoning at least one television at their home. Thus while the ratio of viewers to each television at the public location climbs, either
(a) the ratio
must fall back home and overall the average ratio remains intact. Of course this point only applies if the televisions back at home were left switched onto the rugby. This argument thus applies if dad goes to the pub to watch the game with his mates whilst the family stays home to watch. All in all the ratio reamains the same.
or (b) the number of televisions tuned into the game falls as you switch the television off at home or those remaining watch something else.
In summary, in order to increase the ratio of viewers to each television, the number of televisions tuned into the broadcast must fall and the number of rugby congregations must rise.
As far as I am aware, because of obvious accuracy issues in regards to audience demographics, the TAM ratings system takes all its samples from televisions in homes, not in pubs, clubs etc. Thus the TV audience figures mentioned above don't take into account pubs, clubs and livesites. They only account for family homes and so the only possibility left to increase the number of rugby congregations and hence the viewer ratio is through family BBQs (or whatever).
Thinking back a bit, we showed that the viewer per TV estimate of 3 to 1 for each game seems a little too low to produce realistic average ratings and realistic number of games watched. And can you realistically say that on average all 333k televisions showing each of the on average 30 rugby games had on average at least one out-of-household guest? That gives us 9,990,000 rugby BBQs held Australia wide during the world cup assuming each BBQ covered only one game. That's a lot of sausage. Did almost every second Australian attend a rugby BBQ during the world cup? I didn't go to any rugby union BBQs during the 2003 XV WC.
As you can see the Australian figures don't really add up.
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The total population of the countries represented at the rugby world cup in 2003 equates to around 1 billion people.
This is probably about right. Please don't claim that they are all interested in it or even know that it is occuring though. If we
do take these Australian 2003 figures as reasonable, one must consider that
- ALL games were obviously broadcast at acceptable viewing times for Australians.
- Compared to other countries, Australia would have a high(er) percentage of it's population, due to fact that Australians are generally rugby aware and particularly during the world cup bonanza, interested in and willing to watch games.
- Australians like to watch sport
These three facts combined would lead one to expect that Australia would have had the highest TV viewing per capita in the tournament in the world. Taking the dubious figure of 30 million out of 20 million inhabitants, injecting this apparent Australian rugby fervour into every other rugby represented country in the cup gives a total viewing audience of
1.5 billion.
3 billion is the common accepted figure through all media outlets, including business partners of the Cup which base their telivision rights and advertising deals on such figures.
I'll trust them over your calculations thanks.
This is what really bugs me. It just doesn't make sense. It reminds me of several reports released a while back claiming that a dictator, admittedly a nefarious character, possessed stockpiles of nasty weapons and was very close to unleashing them upon the world. The reports were sanctioned by some very big names on the world stage, so big that many people barely hesitated when deciding they were true, and never really questioned their validity. Many years later and these claims have all but been shown to be completely false and many now suspect they were fabricated in order to benefit some of the original players in the grand illusion.
This is exactly what union is doing. Don't swallow it. If all the business partners of the cup want to throw their money away that is their problem. But I don't like to be bullsh*tted to.
