So where is all the chest-beating now that it turns out that the original figures were wrong? From today's Sydney Morning Herald:

"The NRL's belief strong grand-final ratings last weekend would help their next TV deal was punctured slightly with the revelation yesterday the AFL's decider had in fact beaten its rugby league counterpart in national ratings, not the reverse as had been claimed originally. Recalibrated figures lifted the AFL's ratings by almost 400,000 nationally."

Personally I don't understand why anyone would watch Aussie Rules but there it is. Clearly the NRL is not doing a good enough job selling its superior product.

There isn't 20 million households (4k of 20mill is 0.02%!) hence why it is closer to 0.05%. Even if they could somehow manage to get an entire cross representation of 20million in 4K (whioch you can't) it still doesn't take into account A) How many people are actually sat in front of the TV (again they simply avg which on such a small sample is unreliable) B) How many people are watching the game in the pub or club and C) How many people are recording it and watching it later.

As a methodology and sample group size it is extremely poor and would be laughed at if such a piece of research was put forward in a peer reviewed journal.

But hey ho we beat AFL!

If there's an average of 4 people per household (ie. 16k people covered by the 4k recorders, bearing in mind multiple TVs etc), then it can come out as a little over 0.05%, but not by much.



The methodology isn't disastrous, but it's not great. The problem is, like you say, the small sample size - but even then, if they could actually get a representative sample (difficult) then the figures are not necessarily useless, they're just an approximation. Probably with rather large error bars!

Quote: JB Down Under " But hey ho we beat AFL!'" Or did you? www.heraldsun.com.au/news/breaki ... 5782913052 only playing.

Quote: JB Down Under " But hey ho we beat AFL!'" Or did you? www.heraldsun.com.au/news/breaki ... 5782913052 only playing.

A lot bigger than it is now but dont assume that because it is given coverage it would thrive, both codes of rugby are alien to most British people a lot who wont watch either & what seems strange to us could not tell the two games apart if they did. League will grow but it will be very slow & may even have setbacks along the way. I am sad to say that at my age I will not live long enough to see it (but I will try)

they seem to have this ridiculus notion that the are getting bigger in south africa. they put a lot of emphasis in the development section on their website to their.

Otherwise, RL has great potential but it will only fulfill it if the bodies that run the game get changed fast, then RL can look to a very bright future.