B105 breaks away from the pack
Radio ratings survey brings joy to some players, raises questions for others.
It’s radio ratings day again and, as usual, while everyone’s a winner (because they work in a great industry) some are bigger winners than others.
In the overall numbers game, the station with the biggest slice of the pie in survey four with audiences over 10 is B105, which has broken away from the tight pack at the top.
B105 has an overall share of 14.4pc, and its breakfast show with Stav, Abby and Matt has 15.0. That’s higher than any breakfast show has been in recent times.
Second overall (11.5) and in brekkie (12.1) is Triple M 104.3, with Nova 1069 (11.2, 11.7) not far behind. KIIS 973 is fourth in breakfast (10.7) and overall, where it has dropped below double figures (9.8). 4BH continues to be nipping at the heels of the leaders with 8.9 overall and 8.8 in breakfast.
Further down the dial, in the battle of the news-talk stations, it’s been a relatively good survey for ABC Brisbane; not so much for its commercial rival 4BC.
The ABC has increased its share, to 8.4 in breakfast (where Craig and Loretta added 1.1 points) but just 5.4 overall, while 4BC has continued a recent slide, down to 5.2 in breakfast and 5.5 overall. That’s not where either station wants to be.
It seems that few people want to listen to talk radio during the day. Or, at least, the kind of talk radio they are being served.
The Olympics are coming up, so that will skew the results (perhaps for the better, perhaps not), but the big question remains: why does talk not work well in Brisbane?
At 4BC, it might be tempting to “blame” the fact that the lighter breakfast show with Laurel, Gary and Mark is out of step with the rest of the programming — but people can and do dial hop.
The fact that the bulk of their listeners are 65+ is a challenge for 4BC, which is happy to embrace it when it comes to taking ads from funeral directors but also seems desperate to trend younger to shore up a continuing and future audience.
I sense change is afoot, but it needs to be well considered by people who have really analysed the Brisbane market, not assumed it’s the same as Sydney. (See below for the consequences of that kind of assumption.)
My two cents: endlessly talking politics, and especially vigorously pushing one particular side, probably isn’t going to do that.
Meanwhile, media industry eyes are on the performance of Kyle Sandilands and Jackie “O” Henderson in the Melbourne market, where their show has been relayed (or is that repackaged?) from Sydney for the past few months.
The news is not great, with the show steady on 5.9 points in Melbourne — way behind market leaders 3AW’s John and Russel (18.8) and almost half the number achieved by Gold 104.3’s Christian O’Connell (10.8).
KJ&O also lost 0.6 points in Sydney, where its breakfast share is 14.1, compared to market leader 2GB’s Ben Fordham on 17.
This doesn’t augur well for KIIS owners ARN, which has invested a huge amount of money in the often-controversial team — I think I recently used the term “bet the farm” — and will be looking for much better results soon.
ARN is performing much better with O’Connell on Gold (who it was prepared to shed in a now-collapsed deal to buy the Triple M network from competitors Southern Cross Australia).
ARN is also believed to be keen to further its expansion plans, but one imagines the folk at SCA — who also recently resisted an approach by Australian Community Media — are having a quiet laugh this morning.
Despite all this, mergers or buyouts are inevitable given the state of the media market at the moment. All three commercial TV networks and publisher NewsCorp have laid off large numbers of staff and undertaken other cost-cutting measures in the past few weeks as the advertising pie continues to shrink.
Further change is coming.
Disclaimer: Brett Debritz has worked for 4BC and the ABC and has been heard on most Brisbane radio stations over the past few decades.