The launch of the sixth series of Masterchef Australia won 874,000 viewers for Ten last night - down 20% on its 2013 debut.
The cooking contest made its way into the top 10 most-watched free-to-air programs across Australia's five metro areas last night. Ten insisted it was happy with the numbers, but in 2013, its boys versus girls series premiered to an audience of 1.10 million.
According to Ten, the program was the number six show of the night in the under 55s age group.
Chief programming officer Beverley McGarvey issued a statement today praising the launch episode.
"Masterchef Australia is off to a very promising start. We are very proud of the program, and the strength and quality of its content," she said. "We are looking forward to growth across the rest of the series."
Ten's former chief sales officer, who left the network last July and now runs media agency Department212, said Ten will be pleased with the numbers.
He told AdNews: "I would think that the network would be ok with those numbers, they will be comfortable with it. More importantly, the sponsors will be pretty comfortable with the figures. Look at someone like Coles - they keep coming back to Masterchef because it works for them.
"Masterchef grows as it goes, so this is a good base for it to work from. Everyone always wants more, but at the moment they will be pretty happy with where it's at."
But Nine's The Voice topped the metro TV ratings again on its second outing last night, but dropped 168,000 viewers on its Sunday night premiere.
The singing show won 1.987 million viewers for Nine and set the network up to take the biggest free-to-air audience share, with 34.2%.
Seven won 27.5% of the audience share, followed by the ABC with 17.6% and Ten with 16.2%, according to preliminary overnight ratings figures from OzTam.
House Rules' Reveal show ranked in the top 10 for Seven, in eighth spot with 1.085 million viewers.
And Nine's The Big Bang Theory performed well for the network, in third place with an audience of 1.311 million.
Other than Home and Away, in ninth place with 1.041 million people watching, the rest of the top 10 was made up of news programs.
Seven News was second, with an audience of 1.356 million, Nine News was fourth, with 1.303 million, Nine News at 6.30 was fifth, with 1.209 million, Seven's Today Tonight was sixth, with 1.206 million, and Nine's A Current Affair was seventh, with 1.186 million.
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