The launch episode of Ten's new series The Bachelorette failed to take X Factor's lead as the top non-news program of the night, despite having a bigger launch audience than this year's Bachelor and a strong presence on social media.
The first episode of the show, which sees season two Bachelor and jilted winner, Sam Frost, looking for love, picked up 875,000 metro viewers according to the overnight OzTam ratings, making it the eighth most watched show of the night. The figure is more than the launch numbers for 2015 The Bachelor which reached a 846,000 strong metro audience, in what Ten called at the time its biggest launch episode ever.
However it fell short of Seven's X Factor audience, which was the fifth most watched show of the night on 953,000 viewers.
ABC's return of everyone's favourite advertising show, Gruen, also continued its strong ratings run with 900,000 viewers, making it the sixth most watched show of the night.
Nine's The Block rolled in with 753,000 viewers as the 12th most watched show, while Pets Make You Laugh Out Loud 2 on Seven reached 644,000 viewers.
Network Seven won the night on 29.1% of audience share followed by Nine on 25.0%. Ten picked up 20.4% audience share, ABC 19.4% and SBS on 6.1%.
The Bachelorette proved to be as much of a social media hit as its Bachelor counterpart, with a 70% share of Twitter TV impressions – amounting to 3.3 million impressions – and a 60% share of Twitter TV audiences.
In addition the #BacheloretteAU hashtag trended at number one nationally last night, and number one in every Australian capital city. Other trending hashtags included Bachelorette contestants Sasha, Davey, David and Richie.
The show was also number one in the 16-39 demographic, 18-49 demographic and 25-54 age demographic.
See AdNews' top Bachelorette tweets here.
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