T he first day of the second seasonof the Indian Premier League (IPL) Twenty20 cricket tournament wasdisappointing not only for losers Rajasthan Royals and Chennai Super Kings —defending champions and runners-up respectively — but also for the advertisersand media planners, owing to a 16 per cent dip in TV viewership ratings on SETMAX over last year.

According to the viewership dataprovided by overnight TV audience measurement agency Audience Measurement andAnalytics Ltd (aMap), the television ratings for the first two matches matchesstood at 3.6 per cent (Mumbai Indians versus Chennai Super Kings) and 3.8 percent (Royal Challengers Bangalore versus Rajasthan Royals) respectively,compared to 4.3 per cent for the first match of IPL’s inaugural season (KolkataKnight Riders versus Royal Challengers Bangalore on April 18, 2008).

These ratings are based on cablehomes and among viewers in the 15-plus age group in the top six cities, astandard parameter used by ratings agencies and media planners for measuringthe sports genre of TV channels. India has about 86 million cable homes.

About 1.4 million additional viewerslogged on to SET MAX on the first day. According to the aMap data, about sevenmillion viewers tuned in on Saturday to watch the first-two IPL matches,compared to about 5.6 million viewers that saw the inaugural IPL match lastyear.

For SET MAX, the first day turnedout to be encouraging in terms of advertising spends. According to the aMapdata, between the two IPL matches and its own IPL programming (Extraa Innings),SET MAX aired about 640 advertising spots of 10-seconds each. The topadvertisers were telecom (140 spots), automobiles (70 spots) and durables (55spots), which together consumed nearly 40 per cent of the on-air advertisingtime, said a top aMap executive.