FM station KIIS has claimed the number one spot in the Sydney market, in the first survey of a much-touted and long-anticipated change to how radio ratings are calculated, published on Tuesday morning.
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Its share of all listening was up 1.5 points across the week to 13 per cent, over the period from February 26 to May 20, minus two weeks for the Easter school holidays. In breakfast, Kyle Sandilands and Jackie O lifted 2.8 points to a 17.9 per cent share, with an average audience of 141,000 listeners. That made them, yet again, the clear leaders in the Sydney radio market.
Despite the change to the audience measurement system, Kyle Sandilands and Jackie O remain Sydney’s top-rating breakfast radio hosts.Credit: ARN
On the AM dial, ABC Sydney lifted from a 5.5 per cent share to 6.5 per cent, a welcome bump after a run of three consecutive falls. The biggest boosts came in breakfast, where James Valentine was up 1.3 points to 8.3 per cent share, Richard Glover’s drive shift (up 1.4 to 7.3 per cent), and Indira Naidoo’s evenings program (up from 5.1 to 6.8 per cent).
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Rival talk station 2GB (owned, like this masthead, by Nine) saw a slight drop in average listening in breakfast with Ben Fordham (down 5000 to 119,000 listeners) despite increasing share (up from 14.7 to 15 per cent). In mornings, Ray Hadley’s show lifted from a 14.3 per cent share of the total listening audience to 15.5 per cent, adding 10,000 listeners on average (up to 104,000).
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In comments typical of his broadcasting style, Sandilands attributed the latest results to his on-air partner’s physical appearance.
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“I feel that more people are listening because Jackie’s lost all that fat and she is, like, totally rootable again,” he told the show’s audience, while Jackie O laughed encouragingly.
“That’s brought all the fringe people that thought, ‘I wouldn’t bang that, I’ll go and listen to Nova’, and then they’ve thought, ‘Well they’re unrootable’, they’ve come back … Jackie is hot. I thank you for losing all that blubber and assisting the ratings to spike.”
This is the third ratings survey this year, but the first under the new system, known as Radio 360. Combining traditional recall methods, digital monitoring of streaming, and a wearable digital watch monitor to produce a “total radio” listening result, the introduction of Radio 360 had been expected to produce a bump in audience numbers.
