After more than 4,500 episodes over 16 years, Network 10’s The Project will air its final episode on Friday, June 27—marking the end of an era for the current affairs program that helped turn Waleed Aly into a household name.
“I’m amazed I ever got the chance to do this,” Aly told ABC News.
“The odds of landing a role like this are incredibly small. That it ended up being me is something I can only view with gratitude—and, honestly, a bit of disbelief.”
Despite its impending conclusion, Aly considers The Project a clear success.
“There’s no show like it anywhere in the world,” he said.
“We’d hear that all the time from international guests—people were genuinely impressed. It felt too frequent to be just flattery.”
The program, originally launched as The 7pm Project, earned 11 Logies and one Walkley Award during its time on air. But the conversation around its cancellation has been dominated by talk of declining ratings.
According to OzTAM’s 5-city metro data, the show’s average metro viewership in its 2009 debut was 677,000, peaking at 786,000 in 2010. As of 2025, that figure has fallen to an average of 188,000.
Aly says the drop in ratings is part of a broader trend in the TV industry and not unique to The Project. However, he believes ratings are no longer the biggest problem for television.
“The issue is revenue,” he said.
“In the past, strong ratings meant strong income. That’s no longer the case.”
He points to the shift of advertising budgets from traditional media to tech giants like Meta and Google, who offer data-driven targeting advertisers find hard to resist.
“They’ve built these platforms using massive amounts of user data,” Aly said.
“There are serious ethical questions around that, but it’s the reality we now face.”
Broader Challenges in Legacy Media
Aly warns that with ad dollars disappearing from traditional platforms, major cost-cutting is inevitable across the media industry.
“Some of it will be obvious. Some won’t. But eventually, it will all become clear,” he said.
“I hope I’m wrong.”
ABC recently cancelled its long-running political panel show Q+A, which debuted in 2008 and became known for holding public figures to account.
Network 10 plans to rework its early evening lineup, replacing The Project with a new national news and current affairs show that will air from 6pm for an hour, six days a week.
Aly believes The Project leaves behind a unique gap.
“It leaves a hole that won’t be filled—and I think we’re worse off for that,” he said.
“If this kind of show no longer has a place, it says something much larger about the state of media.”
‘A Privilege to Be Part of It’
Fellow host Hamish Macdonald echoed Aly’s thoughts, expressing sadness for the team members losing their roles.
“This is a tough result for many talented professionals I’ve had the joy of working with—on and off screen,” Macdonald told ABC News.
“It was an incredibly creative, fulfilling place to work.”
He praised the show’s format for sparking lively discussion and connecting with viewers.
“Good or bad, everyone had an opinion about The Project—and that alone shows how much it resonated,” he said.
Macdonald, who also hosted ABC’s now-cancelled Q+A, said he learned a great deal from the diverse range of guests—comedians, musicians, politicians, and authors.
A Show from a Different Economic Era
Tim Burrowes, publisher of marketing industry newsletter Unmade and co-host of MediaLand on Radio National, said the show’s end is a matter of simple economics.
“It’s a costly show, with a large on-air team and big behind-the-scenes staff,” he said.
“The new program will be cheaper to produce. That’s what it comes down to.”
Burrowes doesn’t view the show’s cancellation as a failure but rather a reflection of how much broadcast media has changed since The Project launched.
“It was a show built on the financial model of a different decade,” he said.
“Audiences today have far more options—especially with the rise of streaming.”
