Another World was never the #1 soap; As the World Turns was #1 for twenty straight seasons, per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._daytime_soap_opera_ratings (which uses Soap Opera Encyclopedia as it source; apparently those numbers came from the Nielsen ratings). Another World was a solid #2 or #3 during the early to mid 1970s.
Prefaced with "outright". AW tied for the lead a couple of times, with the last coming the same year that ATWT last led the ratings pack.
You're correct. I scanned through the Wikipedia article too quickly.
So, from October 1973- April 1974, the 3 PM/4 PM time slot competition looked like this:
CBS: 3:00 -
The (New) Price Is Right/3:30 -
Match Game '7XNBC: 3:00 -
Another World/3:30 -
Return to Peyton Place/How to Survive a MarriageABC: 3:00 -
General Hospital/One Life to LiveI would love to see what the actual ratings were for the two games during that season. (I could scan through all the back issues of
Broadcasting magazine, but I really don't have that kind of time.)
Another World had a 9.7 rating and
General Hospital a 9.2; if
Price was in that ballpark it means nearly 30 percent of all the households with a television set had them on at 3:00 in the afternoon and were watching one of those three programs (apparently the total number of television households in in 1974 was roughly 66.8 million).