WoS/World of Sport held their seventh episode this weekend on ITV. The ratings for the show appear to have now been released.
Here’s the reported number:
- 500k (5% share)
Compared to last week’s number:
- 400k (4.8% share)
We reported last week that WoS would be going on a UK tour in 2019. This skews the idea that WoS would be prematurely meeting its demise with such forward planning.
The Time Change
We need to revisit the sentiments from last week’s first show in the new 4:30pm time slot. It’s clear that the change from 5pm to 4:30pm played a huge role in the ratings drop from weeks 5 to 6. With the ITV Evening News changing by 30 minutes the rest of the schedule had to follow suit and this appears to have hurt WoS by a few hundred thousand viewers. Again the number isn’t pretty to look at but a time change affects most programmes across many genres. This isn’t uncommon for WWE either, when special time changes occur for RAW and Smackdown this affects their numbers.
The numbers for WoS WERE steadily increasing, week 5 saw a height of 900 thousand viewers and an overall rating of 700k. Again The live tour for 2019 is an excellent sign of ITV investment in the show, both monetarily and in figurative terms. It is a good sign that the show bounced back this week slightly with around a 100k increase in this new time slot.
No Premier League Competiton
If you’ve been following our Ratings reports for the past seven weeks then you know that Premier League football returning has a huge impact on UK viewing habits. This week interestingly didn’t have a 5:30pm match as it is an International break. With no game potentially taking away viewership from WoS it may have been hoped by ITV officials that their Saturday night wrestling show would perform slightly better. The England international game did not start till later in the evening on the pay-per-view Sky Sports channel.