The ABC has moved to defend its Thursday night panel discussion program Q+A after recent criticism due to historic low broadcast ratings.
This week’s episode, hosted by Virginia Trioli and featuring outspoken social commentator Roxane Gay on the panel secured a 5-city metro audience of just 168k.
The result was a new record low for the program after the previous week’s episode hosted by Stan Grant recorded a metro audience of 175k.
After moving to a Thursday timeslot last year in a move the ABC indicated was designed to discover new audiences, the program now finds itself competing against live broadcasts of the AFL and NRL.
A spokesperson for the ABC has today defended the result by indicating commentators should be discussing online audiences when reporting Q+A results.
In 2022 to date Q+A has achieved a total average audience of 518,000 viewers across metro and regional broadcast markets and ABC iview .
Broadcast share for the program in 2022 to date is 8% in metro markets and 7.5% in regional markets. This is similar to the Thursday 8.30pm timeslot in 2020 and 2021.
Q+A ‘s ABC iview audience grew by 70% in 2021. The Q+A YouTube channel has more than 100,000 subscribers and 2022 episodes to date have achieved more than 100,000 views.
Including archived content, the Q+A YouTube channel has recorded more than 4 million views in 2022 to date. Digital articles on Q+A content averaged 165,000 views per article in 2021.
The spokesperson went on to indicate that the ABC continues to believe;
Foreign Correspondent and Q+A work well together as an offering for current affairs audiences on Thursday nights.
