TVNZ’s boss raised some eyebrows with the assertion that one million people still watch the 6pm news every evening. Is she right? And how is Three News faring? The numbers are in.
“There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics” – a quote widely attributed to Mark Twain. He also purportedly said that reports of his death were greatly exaggerated.
Perhaps both declarations can be applied to the 6pm TV news – still an important headline act in the media landscape, even if people aren’t necessarily glued to it any more.
TVNZ chief executive Jodi O’Donnell raised eyebrows – and hackles – in some social media and political circles last week with her comment on the Media Insider podcast that one million people still tune into 1News at Six every day.
Act leader David Seymour was having none of it; today’s podcast guest Heather du Plessis-Allan is also sceptical.
And so we dug further to test the claims. And it comes down to the difference between average audience and reach.
Nielsen numbers for the first two weeks of June show 1News at Six had an average audience of 662,800 and an average daily reach of 923,600.
“Daily reach counts our total audience, including those watching a bulletin in part – e.g. those who just watched the leading stories,” said a TVNZ spokeswoman.
“Average audience counts the audience on average watching each bulletin in its entirety.”
Those are the traditional terrestrial broadcast audience numbers. Then you have to take into account those watching some or all of 1News at Six on TVNZ+, the state broadcaster’s streaming service.
Google Analytics numbers provided by TVNZ reveal there were 2,617,607 streams of the 6pm bulletin for the 14-day period between June 1 and 14 – or, taken to a very basic level, an average of 187,000 streams per day.
TVNZ will be reassured that – on the back of rocky world events, including instability in the Middle East – all of these numbers are up strongly on a year ago.
In the same two-week period in June 2024, its average audience for the 6pm bulletin was 590,800 and the average daily reach was 861,600, according to Nielsen.
So year-on-year, for this two-week period, average audience is up 12.2% and reach is up 7.2%.
Streams are up a massive 42%.
“As you can see, broadcast and streaming audiences for 1News at Six have grown year-on-year," said a spokeswoman.
“As per the statement I provided you on Thursday, our broadcast audience reach is just shy of one million every night. If combined with New Zealanders streaming the bulletin, it’s fair to say that number is over one million.”
The longer-term trend is not as healthy for terrestrial viewing.
According to Stuff, TVNZ’s 6pm bulletin regularly drew, in the mid-2000s, an average of more than one million viewers aged 5+ every night.
And ratings from July and August 2020 show the TVNZ bulletin was drawing an average audience of 751,421.
So, TVNZ is using a reach statistic – rather than an average audience number – to back up the one million number.
It’s justified in doing so, but here’s another historical quote.
“Reach is rarely quoted because it measures every viewer rather than regular viewers and in advertising a viewer who watches for a few minutes once a week is not considered as important as someone who watches every day for half an hour."
That was from TVNZ itself, back in 2011, in the middle of a heated breakfast ratings battle with TV3.
TVNZ is still well ahead of the Three News 6pm bulletin, produced by Stuff.
The average audience (age 5+) for the Three News bulletin for the first week of June was 148,000. For the second week of the month it was 154,000 and for the third week, it was 162,000.
“The June increase in viewership appears to correlate with escalating tensions in the Middle East, of which we feel the Stuff-led Three News team has provided excellent coverage,” says a Three spokeswoman.
“On Three Now, over this same three-week period, we have seen more than 250,000 streams of Three News. Throughout the course of 2025, both average daily live streams and ‘time spent viewing’ of Three News on Three Now have been increasing steadily, indicating not only more viewers, but more engaged viewers as well.”
While Three News has had a bump in recent weeks, it’s still nowhere near the levels it was a year ago, under the Newshub banner. Then, average audiences were regularly over 200,000.
Stuff took over the production of Three News in early July 2024 and over the past 12 months, TVNZ has held a big lead over its rival.
On last week’s Media Insider podcast, TVNZ’s Jodi O’Donnell talked about the future of the 6pm news and we asked her directly about newsreader Simon Dallow following revelations in January that he may decide to call it quits later this year.
Editor-at-Large Shayne Currie is one of New Zealand’s most experienced senior journalists and media leaders. He has held executive and senior editorial roles at NZME including Managing Editor, NZ Herald Editor and Herald on Sunday Editor and has a small shareholding in NZME.
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