Newspaper article on Neighbours

I found this article about Neighbours which talks about how the change from BBC1 to Channel 5 has secured more viewers and has been more successful than people originally thought it would be. This article was written in 2008 and was published in the Guardian.

Channel Five's £300m "big bet" on the "Neighbours effect" is showing signs of paying off with the Australian soap helping boost the network's adult audience share by 13% in the three weeks since it switched from BBC1.Five, which had a 5.2% audience share in the first six weeks of the year, has seen its share climb to an average of 5.9% since the show launched on February 11.Gerhard Zeiler, the chief executive of Channel Five's parent company RTL, admitted today that the acquisition of the show - pinched from the BBC last year in a 10-year £300m deal - was a gambit to help halt a decline in adult audience share from 5.9% in 2006."It was a big bet to secure Neighbours for Five. It seems the bet management took has really paid off," Zeiler said.Five, which has secured Weight Watchers as the first-ever sponsor of Neighbours, recorded an adult audience share boost of one percentage point to 6.2% in the first week the show aired.The launch of the show helped Five pull in its best weekly ratings in over a year.In the subsequent two weeks Five's share has slipped back slightly to 5.8% and 5.7% respectively.However, in the three weeks following the launch of Neighbours, Five has enjoyed a healthy boost to an average 5.9% share of audience, a 13% increase compared to the six weeks prior to the debut of the show.Five executives will be hoping the slight slip in audience share in the weeks since Neighbours launched is not an indication that the novelty factor may have worn off and that a significant audience boost will slip away.Zeiler said he expected Five's audience share would end up being "up significantly" this year and that there would be "further significant growth" in digital services Five Life and Five US.He added that despite the current economic climate there was "no reason to be pessimistic" about advertising sales, although the company "remained cautious".

• From this I have learnt that the channel in which a soap is aired upon is very important as this will determine how many viewers it will get.

Written By Natalie Michael