Why More Than A Million Aussies Are Tuning In To Watch YouTube On TV

Last week, the nation was shocked — SHOCKED — to learn that Channel Seven's Cats Make You Laugh Out Loud, a last-minute replacement for its failed Restaurant Revolution, accrued the sixth-largest viewing audience for the night of Tuesday, 11 August, netting 917,000 viewers across the five-city metro catchment.

But last night, the network proved that it wasn't a fluke, with follow-up YouTube montage Dogs Make You Laugh Out Loud improving on its predecessor's performance, storming past the magic million mark to end up the third-most watched program of the evening, with 1,039,000 viewers. This means that literally the only thing on TV that Australians saw as being more worthwhile than assorted footage of canines doing canine things was Nine News, which took the top and second spots with separate broadcasts to claim 1.2 million and 1.1 million viewers each.

Social media, of course, is full of opinions about the damning statement this makes about Australia's general audience (if another person makes a pun about how we've "gone to the dogs", I will find you and end you), but that's not really fair or accurate; rather, if the fact that more than a million Aussies are making the conscious decision to sit down and essentially watch YouTube on TV — above basically all other available free-to-air programming — is indicative of anything, it's less that we're a nation of morons than the fact that our country's networks continue to display a stunning lack of respect for their viewers.

We live in an age of abundant entertainment — via piracy, emergent streaming networks, catch-up services, YouTube channels, and so on — and yet commercial television still believes it is doing enough to deserve our attention by offering up the same thing they've been pissing out for the better part of the past decade: news, reality TV, some shit local drama and the international ring-ins. Seriously, look at these ratings. Take them in. Really understand what they represent in terms of what is being offered for Australian audiences.

As you can see, of the top 10-rated shows on free-to-air television last night, less than a third were non-news-related. A Current Affair, Seven News, and Seven News/Today Tonight separate the dogs and its next-highest entertainment-based competitor, Nine's god-awful The Hotplate, which is limping along around the 880,000-viewer mark only a few weeks into its run. And then — no surprises — ABC News, which only just fell short of matching The Hotplate, and was roughly equally as far ahead of season 90 of Home & Away. The ABC's 7.30 took the 10th-highest place with 717,000 viewers.

And then… it's an absolute graveyard of sub-par programming, with Hot Seat (Nine), Kevin McCloud's Escape To The Wild (ABC), Winners & Losers (Seven), another fucking episode of Winners & Losers (still Seven), The Project (Ten) and The Great Australian Spelling Bee (Ten) managing to claim consecutive spots on the ladder before ABC's Foreign Correspondent ruins the party with yet another news program, as The Truth About Fat (Nine), Ten Eyewitness News First At Five (Ten) and Family Feud (Ten) round out the bottom three-most watched (or top three-least watched, if you're an optimist) programs for the evening.

Looking at that list, considering last week's similar results when we all had a good laugh about how Seven's silly cat-videos replacement/act of surrender actually managed to decimate The Hotplate in the ratings, can we honestly say that the problem here lies with the viewers? The top five programs the night that Cats Make You LOL made its impressive debut were all news programs too, indicating either a fundamental lack of programming diversity and quality, or a hitherto undocumented TV news lust among the Australian public. Somehow, I'm betting the former.

If there was any doubt at all that the local small-screen industry is a pale imitation of other countries, results like this should comprehensively erase it. While the UK and US routinely pump out television gold (admittedly along their own fair shares of lamentable content), and restrict shows like Idol or This Place Has Got Talent to, like, two nights a week, we're lighting up text lines pretty much every working night, and often weekends, too. We've had a solid four different renovation reality shows come and go in the same period of time it's taken Netflix to generate some of the world's most lauded contemporary programming.

Sure, Neighbours and Home & Away are evidently still doing strong business locally — and Winners & Losers is somehow in its fifth season, having apparently overcome the handicap of having its scripts written by illiterate orphans — but, by and large, Aussie-made TV happily falls back on whatever is cheap and easy to produce, doesn't require too much thought to watch, maybe utilises some kids to make adults feel better or worse about themselves (depending on the light in which they're being presented), and doesn't necessitate them having to actually pay a writer — whether that's what you want or not.

From here, the ball is well and truly in the networks' court. It just remains to be seen whether they do anything with it other than play catch with the dogs of YouTube.