I've tried to get a handle on this but can't.
That Roy Morgan survey talks about "TV" viewership, without defining exactly what that means (that I could find).
Since it's a survey, I would assume that if someone was asked about the sport they are watching, they would tick the box of whatever they are watching without the need to specify what platform they are using (or maybe they do specify the platform in the survey, but that level of granularity is not provided in the freely available summarised stats).
By the way, 50k is a pretty good number for a detailed survey, so you'd definitely be able to put a lot of reliance on the outcome, with perhaps a +- 4% margin of error, in other words, you can conclude with 99.9% degree of confidence that the decline in overall viewership of Australian Football is at least 290k (noting the wide variability of how a "viewer" is counted".
We now also have evidence that viewership of the Premier League has nudged ahead of the A-League (in other words, Optus viewership ahead of Fox/FTA combined of the two biggest football products in this country).

More interesting stuff from the summary:

Men more likely to watch the W-League than women, but female viewership is growing faster
It might surprise some but more men (547,000) than women (332,000) watch the W-League on TV – although female viewership (up 83% on a year ago) is growing faster than male viewership (up 26%).
The W-League will be keen for the hosting of the 2023 Women’s World Cup to drive an increase in TV viewership of the sport amongst younger Australians – the most likely TV viewers are currently those aged at least 50 years old.
The most likely age group to watch the W-League on TV are people aged 50-64 (257,000) closely followed by those aged 35-49 (245,000) and 65+ (219,000). Together these three age groups comprise over 80% of W-League viewers with the remaining 158,000 aged under 35.
This new data comes from Roy Morgan Single Source survey, Australia’s most comprehensive consumer survey, derived from in-depth interviews with around 50,000 Australians each year.

Roy Morgan Industry Communications Director Julian McCrann says: “The Matildas have become one of Australia’s favourite national sporting teams in recent years and their success on the pitch is translating into increasing interest in the local W-League in Australia where most of the Matildas play.
“The W-League’s increasing TV viewership goes against the trends evident for men’s soccer in Australia. There are now 879,000 Australians who watch the W-League on TV – up a stunning 43% from a year ago – and both women and men are driving this growth. The increasing popularity of the W-League will receive an enormous boost over the next three years as Australia gets set to host its first World Cup – the 2023 Women’s World Cup with joint hosts New Zealand."

Given it's held every 4 years, that bit didn't make a lot of sense to me.

if it was a survey then it could make sense, my WC viewing was also down last year :)!

https://www.theage.com.au/sport/soccer/a-league-clubs-filling-pre-game-void-after-poor-restart-ratings-on-fox-20200721-p55e3x.html

"About 15,000 people on average watched A-League matches on Kayo last season, O'Rourke said. Numbers for My Football Live have also increased six- or seven-fold, from about 2000 users who would usually access the app on days with no matches being played."

look forward to hearing the theories why the young and hip AL fans arent watching Kayo or Telstra

Just saw an as for abc to watch football Saturday 5:00 29 days. Maybe it would be better if they advertised the teams?

Ad

I haven’t seen the ad in this case, but I think a lot of the advertising used over the years on our broadcasting partners has been poor. 

it's a shame that fox plugs afl/nrl ads before the game at HT and at the end
do they show ads for the A-league when showing afl/nrl?

O’Rourke did an interview with Lucy Zelic on TWG in which he was talking about how misleading that 12k figure for the Syd vs Nix game was...said that we are typically now telecast across 5-6 platforms and that number was actually up over 60k when you stack the numbers...

Interesting I just watched the interview and he said the actual ABC number was over 80k and when you add in all the other platforms it was closer to 120k.
Then he had a spray at elements in media who try to bring the A League down by not telling the whole story.
Minutes later the whole interview is goooooone.Not there anymore.
Whats going on?

The 53k is probably metro FTA and the 80k is probably metro FTA, plus regionals plus Fox.
Not sure how that climbs to 120k.  He's not really clear on that point, it would be good to have all the info.

It's here.  https://theworldgame.sbs.com.au/video/1766660675655/o-rourke-hits-back-a-league-ratings-myths?playlist=latest-videos-twg

Lucy had an interview with GOR and he spoke at length about our rating... I am still trying to open the link but for some reason SBS vids are not loading...

Anywho, he provided quite a detailed analysis of our ratings and in brief, the Fox published rating represent about 20% of our ratings with no FTA and less than 10% of our rating with FTA.

Its still not good but according to GOR, the reporting on the A-League rating is massively inaccurate, and he believes its driven by people outside Footbal;l wanting to make the A-League look far worst than it is. 

In no way was he saying and he went out of his way to say they are not good, but whats being reported is highly selective,.... 

What he's saying is a little misleading and also selective as there is only 1 FTA match broadcast so the % contribution of foxtel will swing massively the other way for the other 4 matches per round.

I don't know, opening game got 12k, next game got 9k (but also got 53k  on ABC).
Whichever way you slice it and dice it, no one is going to open up the cheque book for that.
Now maybe Fox is intent on driving down the value of football, but twice in two weeks, they have done up a media release talking up the NRL and the AFL on Kayo, each having a game on Kayo getting 100k on alternate weeks.
What does that all mean?
Well, we don't have enough info to draw conclusions, but if we assemble the numbers we do have, I'm not sure how it ends well for football.
For example, what are Kayo subs currently?
Running  at about one-sixth of Fox?  Something like that.
So AFL one week, then the NRL the next, managed to top 100k on Kayo for one of their games, and that was around 40% of the Foxtel rating.
So if Kayo subs are running at one-sixth of Foxtel subs, but the NRL and AFL can manage 40% of Fox ratings on Kayo, then you'd have to conclude that's an impressive result for Kayo (and clearly there are lots of NRL and AFL fans on Kayo).
Then we turn to the A-League, and obviously 40% of 12k is nothing.
So then you have to try and jump through hoops to get that number higher, arguments like, there is a higher percentage of football fans on  Kayo than  Fox relative to  the other sports, so our percentage of kayo ratings to Fox ratings is going to be higher.
Ok, maybe, but how much higher?  I'll give you double (but no more, because as we can see the other sports are getting high numbers).
So that means we can add 80% of 12k.
Well, you see where I'm going with this....

I highly encourage you to just watch the interview with GOR. You don’t need to make up assumptions and do guess work he just spells out how the 12k game was actually 5-6 fold higher.

sure - but can't all sports do that?

we twist ourselves into gymnastic pretzels to try and convince each other that its really much higher than 12k ----- cos kayo, cos myfootball, cos timeshifted, cos youtube, cos everyting else. 

couldn't the nrl make all those arguments?  and still rate 300k on fox?

I think the point that GOR was trying to make was that things aren’t as dire as they are being made to seem, but even he has also said the Fox figures aren’t good enough. 

https://twitter.com/YeeeeeesHowGood/status/1286246202632105986

General manager of Fox Cricket having a dig at Simon Hill on Twitter, shows what we are up against

I dont think its as simple as, Fox abandoned the game.  Fox isn't into games, it isn't into A league, it isn't into AFL and it isn't into NRL.  Its into subscribers, and money.
Fox no longer think they can get money invested into the A league, back.  They don't advertise, because the return doesn't make it worth their while.
There is no agenda beyond that.
If this changed, they would invest again.  Their favourite sport is the one that generates the most money, and if that was the A league, they would be all over it.

isn't that guy an enemy of football and usually knocks the game

Tweet is deleted go sit yourself down and put a bucket on your head you #%^

can you give us the jist of the tweet now that it has been deleted?

Hopefully someone got screenshots.

Was a debate on Kayo numbers counting in official TV ratings, the Fox Cricket GM replied to Simon Hill's tweet saying they don't count Kayo in AFL/NRL's stats to so our stats are bad no matter how you spin it. Hill replies 'stick to cricket and justify that massive overspend Matt'. Can't remember exact wording but Matt then says 'the quality of the product has improved since you got the rissole... stick to copy and pasting Guardian articles and calling games for 9 people on Facebook.'

Then did another tweet saying:
Blocked by Simon HillIt's like giving Phenergan to a whinging whining 3yo and it finally nods off

To summarise, this matt is a bit of a fuckwit

Ouch

Pretty ordinary stuff.

Hoping nix vs Adelaide does ok on abc Saturday night. None of the upcoming fixtures look that amazing for a neutral

69k Nationally on the ABC Saturday