In prime time Viale Mazzini remains first, but within 24 hours it overtakes its Lombard competitor. In third position is the giant Warner Bros with the Nine, which confirms an interesting growth. Agcom data
Rai returns to the center of the spotlight, again. This time because, as Agcom notes, Mediaset has overtaken public television in 24-hour ratings.
The data from the Communications Observatory relating to the whole of 2023, published yesterday, record a clear drop in viewers compared to its competitor. More in detail, the Cologno Monzese company boasts – over the entire day – 3.09 million viewers compared to Rai’s 3.04. A gap of 50 thousand listeners which is sensational, because marks a historic overtaking that had never occurred until now.
Furthermore, compared to the pre-pandemic period, the public publisher lost a total of 510 thousand viewers (-14.4 percent) over the entire day, compared to Mediaset’s 50 thousand (-1.6 percent). The press release explains how it is the “minor” television channels that determine Rai’s debacle, although it confirms itself as the leader of the segment “prime time” with a share of 7.17 million (37.8 percent) compared to Mediaset’s 7.12 (37.5 percent), above all thanks to the three main and generalist channels: Rai 1, Rai 2 and Rai 3, which hold throughout the year.
Agcom’s takeover is not a surprise for the company, which has recently attracted the spotlight. The farewell of the Janissary Fabio Fazio – now a year ago, after forty years of faithful service – had at the time caused discontent and popular uprisings, expertly ridden by the opposition. The Scurati affair, halfway between censorship and a careless communication move by the leaders of Viale Mazzini, then reignited the controversy. To plead the cause of the state gag, then, the U-turn of Amadeus, who publicly complained about the invasion of the field in the artistic direction, with Povia and Pino Insegno becoming scapegoats of a brawl which led the famous presenter to accept the proposal from the giant Warner Bros. Next destination: Discovery. And looking at the data, the new faces of the American platform, among the best known on Italian television, are definitely bearing fruit.
Fazio’s arrival on the Nove seems to have attracted a significant portion of the public and it is not far-fetched to assume that the same will happen with Amadeus. Again based on data published by Agcom, in fact, in the last quarter of 2023 Nove increased its daily audience by 2.2 percent, even recording an overall growth of 46.4 percent in the evening programming slot. Evidence of this exploit is counterbalanced by the significant declines in the same period of the main public networks, Rai 2 (-9.5 percent) and Rai 3 (-20 percent). More generally, Warner Bros’ Italian channel is the third most watched in Italy over a 24-hour period in 2023.
