Sky Atlantic outbid the BBC for the rights to show Mad Men, and it launched to an unsurprisingly weak 98,000 last season. Now the ratings are in for its sixth season premiere, and that audience has fallen to 58,000. (That's a loss of 40,000 viewers, if maths isn't your strong suit.) I know ratings ultimately don't matter in Sky's case, because they're into the idea of building a brand and a collective reason for people to subscribe to them, but that's a really bad number. Their recent Game of Thrones premiere attracted 700,000 viewers.What's going on? Only 58,000 people? Admittedly you can't just start watching Mad Men in its sixth season, and its premise and setting only appeals to a certain type of viewer, but it was getting around 355,000 on the BBC between season 1-4. Where have those viewers gone? Do only around 100,000 of them have Sky and almost half have stopped watching? Are people buying the DVD box-sets later on? Has it become a show people download instead? It didn't break into TorrentFreak's Top 10 of 2012, so perhaps not...
I don't know. I have no explanation. Maybe it wasn't promoted as much and 40,000 people just didn't realise it was back? I tend to skip ad breaks these days, so does that seem like a valid theory? (Update: I'm aware there was a streaming issue with SkyGo on Wednesday, but I'm not sure if those online figures would have been added to BARB's overnight ratings.)
