Initial reports that attracted more than 1,000,000 viewers on New Year’s Day have been shot down.
Earlier this month, broadcast of ’s New Year’s Eve fireworks were released by broadcast data body Barb, which said GB News had managed to bring in the record-breaking numbers.
The viewership data that was released meant it was the first time the channel had reached over a million viewers in 2021, with the achievement occurring during their coverage of the fireworks just after midnight.
However, , and the numbers were revealed to be .
Instead, GB News had only averaged about 33,000, clearly a massive drop from the original report.
A few days after the numbers were released, a Barb spokesperson announced the mistake and said some numbers that should have been attributed to BBC One and other channels may have instead gone to GB News.
‘The New Year’s Eve Fireworks were broadcast across several channels with very similar audio feeds,’ they told .
‘Barb’s ability to report which channel is being viewed relies partly on matching the audio output from TV sets to a channel.
‘In this instance, our audio-matching process has incorrectly attributed some viewing of the New Year’s Eve Fireworks to GB News that should have been attributed to BBC One and other channels.’
The spokesperson added they were investigating the issue and would release amended viewing data ‘as soon as possible’.
GB News rang in the New Year with a New Year’s Eve Live programme hosted by comedian Andrew Doyle, which featured a countdown and the London fireworks from moments before 12am to about 12.13am.
Doyle is normally a presenter on its nightly Headliners paper review show.
Meanwhile, on BBC, the London fireworks show was watched by 11million people, according to Broadcast magazine.
Across on Sky News, it had a peak average audience minute of 625,000 at midnight and a total reach of 1.2 million between 10pm and 1am.
Overall, in November, the latest month for which public BARB data is available, GB News had a total reach of 3.5 million people.
This is in comparison to a monthly reach in the UK of 10.9 million for the BBC News Channel and 8.2 million for Sky News.
Metro.co.uk has contacted GB News and Barb for comment.
