Late-night hosts only have themselves to blame for cancellations, ratings flops and high-profile departures, it would appear.
The Daily, as a daily newscast on Channel 9, is arguably the most popular late-night newscast in Queensland and has even been described as a “national treasure.”
But while the popularity of the newsreader is clear, his performance and the success of his show has been questioned since he left the station.
And now it appears he will have to re-launch himself on another station after Channel 10 announced on Friday (July 13) that they had been forced to pull the plug on the program.
A statement from Channel 10’s new CEO, James Warburton, said the decision not to re-launch the show was the result of “a review and a number of issues surrounding the program.”
So what went wrong? We go back to the start and look at two seasons worth of ratings and then at what the ratings for one or two of his shows have been for the past few years.
The Daily Show with Trevor McDonald
After the station’s initial announcement, the Daily with Trevor McDonald started slowly on Saturday nights.
In the first year that it was on the air it had a 0.1% share of evening programing.
In the year after that, the rating for the first night of the show in March 2014 dropped by nearly 60,000 viewers.
On a very average night, it was down 20,000 viewers.
Then last night’s broadcast was down 10,000 viewers on both a night where it was up more than 5,000 viewers and also a very average night in which it was down just over 5,000 viewers.
Last night’s ratings for March 2014 in red.
The Daily Show with Craig McLachlan
By the end of 2014, the Daily Show’s ratings had fallen by around 15,000 viewers.
But this first season actually got worse after that and did not improve for another couple of years.
In November 2015, the first episode showed a fall in ratings of around 5,000 viewers from the previous night, with the ratings for the first night of the show in December 2014 down almost half again.
That first-night fall in ratings then continued throughout early 2016, which was another drop of around 5,000 viewers across the season