PEOPLE AGED BETWEEN 15 and 34 made up the bulk of the viewers of this year’s Rose of Tralee, comprising 60% of those who tuned in.

Over half a million people switched over to RTÉ to watch New Zealander Keely O’Grady take the crown, with an average of 543,000 watching the final. Across the two nights, nearly 413,000 on average switched over to watch the 64th edition of the competition.

This is the first year that 15-34 year olds have made up the majority of viewers since the event returned from a hiatus forced on it by the Covid-19 pandemic, with this year seeing a 15% increase on 2022.

However, viewership numbers have not returned to those that the competition saw pre-pandemic. Between 2015 and 2018, the contest drew an average peak viewership of around 735,000. It saw a drop in 2019 to just under 550,000.

The numbers since the Kerry-based festival returned from its hiatus have been on the increase, however. This year’s contest saw on average nearly 30,000 more people watching the crowning of the winning rose compared to 2023.

Where the event has seen massive increases in the last few years have been in social media engagement.

Almost ten years ago, the festival bragged about Twitter engagements in the tens of thousands. In 2015 and 2016, the official accounts saw just over 55,000 tweets around the event.

This weekend, there were over 500,000 engagements across Facebook, X, Instagram, and TikTok, with posts by official accounts raking in over 5 million views across all platforms, an increase of almost 3 millon compared to last year.

The scope of the competition has similarly changed. RTÉ’s streaming service RTÉ Player recorded streams being viewed in 81 different countries across Europe, America, Asia, and the Middle East.