Australia Post Stawell Gift fever continues to work its way into more and more Australian homes, with marketing company Jump Media reporting a significant increase in thr Gift's overall broadcast audience for 2008.
A 30 percent increase in the peak broadcast audience was recorded during Channel Ten's two-hour Easter Monday coverage, including a 12 percent rise on the average broadcast viewership compared to 2007.
The national coverage continued to grow this year with Melbourne experiencing a 27 percent increase, Sydney growing 95 percent, Brisbane 63 percent and Perth 12 percent. However, Adelaide recorded a surprising 42 percent decrease on its 2007 figures. This is believed to be due to the AFL coverage.
The Stawell Gift also had a higher peak audience than the AFL in both Sydney (113,000 to 82,000 viewers) and Brisbane (98,000 to 97,000).
In addition, SNTV, the world's leading sports news video agency, distributed a one and half minute news package from the Saturday and highlights of Monday's program to more than 200 broadcasters in countries all over the globe.
More print, radio and television coverage was recorded compared to the 2005-2007 figures, with total media audience, excluding the official broadcast, increasing by 65 percent from last year. National radio audience was up a staggering 179 percent following a massive increase in air time. Television news viewers were up 81 percent and print readers up 13 percent from 2007.
The Gift website was also subject to plenty of traffic, with hits rising from 34,022 to 51,719. This was an increase of 52 percent on the 2007 figure. The website included live audio coverage for the first time in 2008, while the `results' section of the site attracted the most attention with 12,071 hits.
Attendance figures were about five percent down on last year, with 9392 spectators coming through the gates across the three days of competition. Almost 4000 of those were recorded on Easter Monday, while 650 people attended Friday night's Calcutta at the Stawell Entertainment Centre.
Some of the figure increases have been attributed to the unfortunate circumstances involving 2007 Gift champion Nathan Allen, who was arrested by police at the conclusion of the official media launch just days before the carnival.
Jump Media's David Culbert said while it was not something organisers would never encourage, but the incident certainly helped increase figures across the weekend.
``As a consequence more people watched, there is no doubt about that,'' Culbert said.
``It was a pleasing result.''
Culbert said the risk of having the Gift final as the last event of the day certainly paid dividends despite clashing with Channel Seven's AFL coverage.
He said the club was offered a 12pm-2pm timeslot, but opted to be televised between 2pm and 4pm.
``The TV figures in particular were really pleasing,'' he said.
``We decided we wanted to try and finish with the Gift as the last event of the day.''
Culbert described the drop in Adelaide ratings as `unexplainable'.