The TAMS are not only dead dear readers, but they're officially buried.
Buried so far underground it's officially impossible for us to know the truth of what's happening with TV viewership in South Africa.
You may have noticed that we haven't been publishing the monthly Top Shows on TV documents with commentary about the TV ratings since the beginning of the year.
Here's why.
The
Broadcast Research Council (BRC), who've published these lists on their website since 2016, tell us that they're no longer making them publically available.
The final nail has been plunged into the coffin of transparency.
To fill you in in case you haven't followed the history of the TAMS: TV viewership figures in South Africa used to be under the custodianship of an organisation called the South African Advertising Research Foundation (SAARF).
They were a third party organisation who weren't affilated with the broadcasters and they used to provide the public and media with weekly audience reports of viewership across channels for every day of the week.
In 2015 SAARF was replaced by the Broadcast Research Council, a non-profit entity that was set up by the broadcasters to research audience statistics in TV and radio.
They continued providing the weekly audience reports for a year, but a year later they pulled them and replaced them with the limited Top Shows on TV lists, which provided a fraction of the information that the weekly reports used to cover.
If you wanted the weekly reports you could still get them - but for an impossible fee of R50,000 a year!
This change in custodianship also meant that there was no third party, objective entity who could verify the stats without a vested interest.
You'll find our article from the time here:
The day the TAMS died
Flash forward nine years and now the stripped down Top Shows on TV documents are gone too, amidst a haze of discrepancy between what the BRC was reporting and what channels are reporting.
The Top Shows documents haven't been on the BRC's website this year and when we enquired about them they told us that they aren't uploading them anymore.
This removal didn't just suddenly happen out of the blue, things happened in the build-up. These events occurred:
1. The
November 2024 Top Shows document was released in December as per usual, but without the Top 30 shows on DStv.
As you may know, the Top Shows on TV documents always covered the Top 20 shows for the SABC channels, e.tv and the Top 30 shows on DStv.
2. We emailed and called the BRC before the festive season to ask for the DStv list to be added but heard nothing.
3. Just prior to this, on 10 December, M-Net issued a press release about Mzansi Magic's shows and quoted viewership numbers in it - which were
completely different from the viewership numbers by the BRC.
The last BRC document with DStv viewership in it was in October 2024, released in November 2024, and there's no way viewership could have changed so much in a month.
These are the viewership figures quoted in the Mzansi Magic release:
| Show |
Viewers |
Audience Share |
| Umkhokha: The Curse |
1,790,000 |
42% |
| My Brother’s Keeper |
1,289,000 |
27% |
| Gqeberha: The Empire |
1,130,000 |
30% |
| Champions |
800,000 |
19% |
And these are the viewership figures by the BRC in
October 2024:
| Show |
Viewers |
Audience Share |
| Umkhokha: The Curse |
856,625 |
7,7% |
| My Brother’s Keeper |
574,371 |
5,1% |
| Gqeberha: The Empire |
557,593 |
6,3% |
| Champions |
This didn't make the list |
- |
A difference of almost a million for Umkhokha!
The convention for reporting TV viewership has certain parameters, specifically: Adults 15 years and older. Any stats you see reported internationally will use this as a parameter.
The BRC documents also have an extra parameter for DStv - you'd always see a second column in the documents on the right hand side. This reflected the DStv universe and provided the viewership for All individuals four years and older.
Could this be the stat quoted by M-Net? No, because these are the BRC figures for DStv universe viewers from the age of four:
| Show |
Viewers |
Audience Share |
| Umkhokha: The Curse |
1,007,069 |
12,7% |
| My Brother’s Keeper |
681,079 |
8,6% |
| Gqeberha: The Empire |
638,885 |
10.7% |
| Champions |
- |
- |
Radically different too.
And these weren't the only events in the build-up. There was one more.
4. Last year an insider from one of the local free-to-air soapies got in touch with us to ask where we got the viewership figures that we published. We explained that it was from the BRC and they replied saying that they were getting numbers their side that didn't make sense to them.
Another discrepancy which further reveals that the reporting of South Africa's TV viewership is a shambles. The TAMS are now the SHAMS.
The reality is they've been headed this way for a long time. The Top lists were becoming more and more irrelevant by the month.
For starters they were only supposed to cover primetime TV shows from 17h30 to 22h00 - they had this parameter defined at the top of each document but these were never adhered to. Daytime shows were constantly included.
Also, the viewership figures in them were only for viewers watching via TV sets, with no provision for those watching the shows live via streaming. This was becoming an increasingly problematic oversight considering the fact that people are streaming. We just don't know how many.
All of the stats were for those watching TV live, which is how linear viewership is reported around the world.
However, as the ecosystem changes this is becoming less and less representative because of people watching at different times via Catch Up, SABC+ and Viu, which could dramatically alter the impression of a show's performance if these stats were included too.
As you can see, these factors make it impossible for us to know what's truly happening with TV viewership in South Africa.
Also, the fact that there's no transparent, objective organisation providing stats to the public and media means that shows and channels can now say anything they like about their viewership and there's no way of verifying whether it's legit or not.
Ultimately the reporting of TV viewership in South Africa is meaningless and over - but this isn't new news. It had happened already.
RIP TAMS.