Hello everyone. I could see this becoming one of my favourite threads over the coming weeks and months.
I said I wasn't going to enter the predictions business this early on, but your posts have inspired me to get my thinking cap on.
Firstly I'd like to join rzt in saying that I think today's scheduling news has been very good. They've successfully foiled an attempt by Channel 4 to spoil things - they were plotting to pit the premiere of Twilight, a hugely popular franchise with young people, against the launch. But Channel 5's late switch to Thursday (possibly planned all along) means Twilight won't be a worry at all on the Wednesday and the Channel 4 competition will be considerably easier.
And they've also got a far better night in Thursday, where the three major channels in opposition are all denting eachother at the moment by airing competing dramas, none of which has taken off in a big way. There's certainly nothing there that will seriously threaten CBB's audience, although Torchwood does skew quite young it is not holding onto the viewers it has got very well at the moment and young viewers are precisely the fickle kind who will timeshift and watch later if needs be, allowing the live launch to take precendent. Frankly it was too good an opportunity to miss launching on that night. And Cowboy Builders, which has been performing very well recently, will act as a great lead-in for the show, not that it needs it particularly of course!
Now we move onto the tricky business of numbers. If we take the overnight averages for each Celebrity Big Brother launch on Channel 4, that gives us a value of 6.3m. C5's reach is about 75% of C4's reach. 75% of 6.3m is about 4.7m. Add a margin for error of about 0.6m each way and that gives us a range of about 4.1-5.3m. Who's with me so far?
I know what you're probably thinking. That's a little on the high side. After all, only 4 programmes have cleared 5m on Channel 5 in its 14 year history, and the most recent of those was way back in 2001 when its audience share was somewhat higher than it is now. More recently, the highest ratings the channel has achieved in the past couple of years have been around the 4.5m mark for premieres of various US imports. So that narrows our range down quite considerably to 4.1-4.5m.
But we also need to take into account that summer is less optimal for high viewing figures than winter where the show traditionally airs. The average viewing share for the launch going by the figures we do have is 23%. On Channel 5 this would be more like 17%. Last Thursday there were about 22 million people watching TV in the 9pm slot, so 17% of that is about 3.7m. That leaves us with a range of 3.7m-4.5m, although it is likely the launch will mean more people watching TV.
Therefore my provisional prediction for the CBB launch is midway between those two values at
4.1m. I also believe it will win its timeslot, narrowly beating its nearest rival BBC One. This is assuming that the marketing campaign continues to gather pace, and that the quality of the launch is high. I may revise this prediction nearer to the time depending on how things evolve from here.
Phew! Thank you for making it through my entire post. It was a bit of a marathon but we got there in the end.
