For 20 years, millions of non-subscribers were able to tune into M-Net for a taste of subscription television during the channel's 5pm – 7pm open time window. Longstanding SA soapie Egoli: Place of Gold held a prime slot in this window.
Using SAARF's Television Audience Measurement Survey (TAMS), comparisons of the last week of March and the second week of April show a significant decline in ratings for Egoli. Between 26 March and 30 March, ratings for the show stood at 4.8. In the first week of April, this had fallen to 1.7. In terms of thousands, the Egoli audience declined by 52.7%, from 758 000 to 358 000. With the loss of open time, the show's LSM profile has changed dramatically, with LSM 5 – 7 dropping from 30.1% to 6.0%, and its LSM 8 –10 audiences increasing from 67.5% in February and March 2007, to 90.5% for April.
Another open time show, hospital drama Binnelanders, suffered a similar fate with the blocking of non M-Net subscribers. Its audience fell by 22%, and its AR of 2.4 coming out of March was at 1.4 going into April. Its audience profile shows a similar movement to Egoli's, with LSM 5 – 7 down and gains in the upper LSMs.
These lost viewers have surfaced in other shows across the television dial, such as SABC 2's soapie, 7de Laan, which gained 205 000 viewers over the first week of April, growing its audience to 1.957 million, although its ARs have declined from 11.1 to 9.3. This is due to the inclusion of black rural households in the TAMS panel, growing the TAMS universe by over 7 million viewers, causing lower ratings but more viewers in terms of numbers on an All Adults level.
The change in the TAMS panel has seen significant audience profile changes coming through for the 5pm – 7pm soapies. M-Net soapies Egoli and Binnelanders have had no movement in the lower LSMs, with LSM 1 –4 audiences remaining stable at less than 2.0%, while the upper LSM audiences have grown, as mentioned earlier.
7de Laan's LSM 1-4 audience is up when comparing February and March, with April 2007 – the lower LSM audience is up from 2.0% to 11.5%, while the upper LSM audiences are down by around five percentage points.
American soap Days of Our Lives has seen the growth of its LSM 1 – 4 audience (from 3.2% to 17.1%), while its LSM 5 – 7 audience is down (from 67.0% to 56.1%). The picture is the same for Isidingo, with an LSM 1 – 4 viewership of 18.3% (up from 3.8% in the two months prior to the universe change), and an LSM 5 – 7 audience of 58.6% (from 66.6%). Its LSM 8 – 10 audience is down some five percentage points.
Backstage has shown the most significant change of all the soaps, with a completely reconfigured audience profile: LSM 1 – 4 is now 35.5% (compared to 3.1%), LSM 5 – 7 is 54.2% (from 83.4%), and LSM 8 – 10 is at 10.3% (down from 14.4%).
Egoli and Binnelanders are the only shows in this time slot which have grown their proportion of upper LSM viewers, due to the loss of its open time viewers, who were primarily in LSM 5 – 7.
