The four-decade noon-time show continues to reflect the ever-declining noontime TV viewership in the country, as it plunged to a historic low TV rating.
It seems that Eat Bulaga, Tape Inc.’s noontime show airing on GMA Network, will continue to lose its audience this year.
The program has consistently declined in viewership in the last two years, even though it already lost a competition with nationwide free TV coverage. Eat Bulaga used to go head-to-head with ABS-CBN’s It’s Showtime until May 2020, when the network was shut down by the government.
Eat Bulaga did not only fail to win It’s Showtime’s former viewers, but it also, and more strikingly, lost nearly half of its audiences. While the ABS-CBN noontime show has already returned to free TV via A2Z Channel 11, GMA Network’s massive national coverage should have ensured Eat Bulaga a higher TV rating and viewership; but records do not show.
According to AGB Nielsen’s National Urban TV Measurement (NUTAM) data, on March 28, 2022, Eat Bulaga rated only 4.0%. That is now the show’s lowest TV rating, at least since it lost It’s Showtime as the main rival. Before the ABS-CBN shutdown, the Kapuso show’s TV rating used to be at around 6-8%, which shows how much its viewership deteriorated even after It’s Showtime’s absence on free TV.
It’s also worth noting that It’s Showtime has been doing well in the TV rating game. Last Saturday, March 26, 2022, the show was already no. 24 on AGB Nielsen’s Top 30 chart, making it the second most-watched noon-time show, in the land.
Eat Bulaga’s steep rating decline seems to mirror the overall trend in local television. As streaming services continue to capture key viewing demographics, local television loses a fraction of its viewership every minute.
But it can also be a reflection of the Filipinos’ slipping interest in noon-time shows. Is it time to finally do alternative programming on noontime? Maybe the next big television player can initiate that step.
