At the end of round 9, the halfway point of the regular season, 301,978 Australians have attended Super Rugby matches, an improvement of 25,000 on last season. But it’s a different story where the post-World Cup year of 2012 is concerned, when the cumulative crowd figure for all Australian games at this point of the season was 397,921.
It’s a similar story for live audience viewers, with 2,960,129 tuning into pay-TV provider Fox Sports to watch Super Rugby this year, a substantial increase on the 2015 figure of 2,352,000.
But at the corresponding point of 2012, the viewership number stood at 3,513,000.
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The Australian experience is being replicated in New Zealand where the television audience has gone from 5,078,900 four years ago to an alarming low of 3,409,400 last year but this year has surged to 4,451,900. Attendance figures have almost regained 2012 levels at 292,356 after bottoming out at 226,715 in 2014.
Alarmingly, South African attendance figures are on the slide, down to 419,336 this year, their lowest figure in five years. After peaking at 20.7 million viewers in 2012, Super Rugby is now holding 16.9 million in the republic, a modest increase on last season.
While no television ratings are available for Argentina, the Sunwolves have attracted 602,900 viewers for their eight games to date. Even with the addition of Japanese numbers, the total viewership for Super Rugby across the five competing nations is 24.9 million, down from 29.3 million in 2012.
