amazing how a week later they come out with the extra numbers, when the NRL beat them hands down.

they must of payed off someone just so it can go in there favour.the AFL are a absolute sooky...can't handle the fact that we beat there sorry


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I dont blame the game & I agree it is a compliment to league to be even compared but the Aussies posting on here wont understand that their small little world down there is only a small part of the whole picture & they have no comprehension that France & the British Isles is 100 million people most of who dont even know league exists. they say Union/super 14 is dying, well probably more people watch it in Europe than Australia & NZ put together. those people dont ever see league & are quiet happy to watch a game thay they will have played as school kids. That is a lot of viewers to advertise to. I just find it a bit silly the Aussies squabling about viewing numbers when even if every man jack of them watched League they would still be a drop in the sea compared to Unions numbers world wide. Like you say it is a testamony to the devotion of League followers that we are still going.

its good you have so much faith in rU

ive got the same faith in RL

SL has only touched the tip of the iecberg in terms of its potential

once it gets to the standard of the NRL it will leave union well behind it

as i said before, newcastle and sale have seen massive crowd falls despite lots of media behind them. union is a dead horse

if RL had the same media how big would it be?

Me and Dally have had this argument a number of times. the sample group used for TV ratings is statistically insignificant (less than 0.05%) and the results as such are unrelaible and invalid. But hey ho it is the only area we beat AFL in so lets keep spouting the same old rubbish!

millions of dollars in advertising are based on it

maybe you should tell the uni professors that teach sampling methodology they are wrong

Bums on seats, TV revenues, corporate income, season ticket income there is only one winner in Australia and that is the AFL - why do you think Dally/Manley/GLF cling to the viewing figures - because it is the only area that RL "allegedly" beats the AFL.

It is a sad indictment of Sydney RL fans that the best supported sporting side in Sydney is the Swans!!!

They talk about Origin and how big it is - what they omit to mention is the AFL have 20+ club games that draw higher attendances than Origin that is the strength of the AFL the paying customer.

I would suggest then that AFL is an insular game for insular people.

It is played nowhere else in the world at a serious level.

Grid iron is the same.

I just had a quick look, and it seems that Nielsen (for example) only study around 4k households, so it's along the lines of 16k people out of over 20 million - it's maybe a little more than your 0.05%, but not by much.

That's only going to be accurate where you actually have a properly representative sample - and picking an appropriate 4k households out of the entirety of Australia seems fraught with danger in that respect.

They're not invalid, but a hell of a lot hinges on their ability to make those 4k representative and what postprocessing they apply to the figures.

Grid iron is a massive, massive game in the USA - which has a population of close to 310 million.

That easily dwarfs the population of all the countries where RL is played at a serious level.

Viewing the USA as some homogeneous entity is also wrong; there's just as much variety in the USA as there is between the UK and Australia.

Describing gridiron as insular compared to RL is silly.

What gets me about tv ratings is why not just take the signal from the box.
It cant be hard for virgin or whoever to know how many people are watching sky sports at any given time

Privacy issues, I'd guess.

TV receivers receive signals they don't broadcast them. Virgin could (and possibly do) get viewing data back down their cables. In theory your Sky box should be connected to a phone line and so it could phone home with viewing data. However there's no way of telling that a standard TV signal is being received.

Don't tell the people in the TV Licensing company's 'detector' vans that though.

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!