Welcome to Unmade, written on a quick pitstop in Victoria.

I’m becoming quite the connoisseur of budget hotel desks. I struggled to jam both legs under the desk at the Ibis in Darling Harbour last week, but my desk here at the Ibis in Melbourne is so generously proportioned that George Costanza could easily nap undiscovered.

Happy Flip A Coin Day.

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Short term status quo, long term shifts

Yesterday saw the release of the third of the year’s eight sets of radio ratings.

We now know who metro audiences say they were listening to from March through until the end of May.

There were no major changes to the pecking order in the commercial radio space. I’ll briefly summarise that utter status quo before turning to a more long term trend I’ve been examining. (I’m avoiding thinking too hard about whether “utter” can be justified as a pronoun ahead of status quo.)

A romp around the radio markets:

• Ross Stevenson and Russel Howcroft still have the biggest metro audience in the country, delivering 3AW a 19.4% share of the Melbourne listening audience. On FM, Christian O’Connell still has top breakfast slot for Gold 104.3 with an 11.8% share. 3AW and Gold 104.3 also remain the top stations in Melbourne.

• The status quo remains the same in Sydney too. Despite losing 3.2 share points, Ben Fordham’s 2GB breakfast show is still number one overall, with a share of 15.7% of the audience. Kyle Sandilands and Jackie Henderson grew their lead in FM by 1.1 points to a share of 12.4%.

• In Brisbane, there was a rare bit of good news for Southern Cross Austereo with B105’s Stav, Abby & Matt overtaking ABC Brisbane’s Craig Zonca and Loretta Ryan for top breakfast show.

• In Adelaide, ARN’s Mix 102.3 was top commercial station, although it was overtaken by ABC Adelaide for overall top position.

• And in Perth, Nova stretched its lead as top station.

ABC’s slow fade

The trade press tends not to focus on the ABC’s ratings, given that it is not a competitor for advertising dollars. However, it occasionally deserves a little more attention. It competes with the commercial sector for listeners; it’s culturally important; and it’s funded by a lot of tax payer dollars. (As far as I can tell from the ABC’s Annual Report, the ABC doesn’t publicly break down how it allocates the $1b or so it spends each year by platform.)

So this seems a good moment to examine some long term trends.

One of the best available data sets lives on Commercial Radio Australia’s Radio Alive site. All of the ratings surveys since 2014, when GfK became the research provider, are available on the site.

For this exercise, we’ve looked at the audience numbers for the third ratings survey of each year, to tie in with yesterday’s data. (It’s worth mentioning that the surveys were suspended in 2020 because of the pandemic, so the third survey release of the year was much later, and would normally have been the sixth.

So what do we find? Let’s start with audience share, which is a gentle way to begin. We’ve broken it down by the five capital cities, and examined the five ABC city stations - Radio National, NewsRadio, ABC Classic, Triple J and the local station for each city.

We begin with the biggest market, which is Melbourne. There are more radio listeners in Melbourne than Sydney, by the way. The survey suggests that the cumulative weekly radio audience in Melbourne is a total of 4.9m people, compared to 4.8m in Sydney.

As for the average number of listeners at any given time, there are estimated to be 506,000 tuning in to the radio in Melbourne and 477,000 listening in Sydney. The ratings also cover listening via digital devices, but only to the traditional stations covered by the survey.

ABC radio listening in Melbourne

So let’s get to that Melbourne share…

The stacked graph shows the five ABC radio outlets. ABC Melbourne (or ABC 774 as it was still known back in 2014) is on the bottom, in teal (I swear that’s not a political reference). Next comes Radio National in red, followed by ABC NewsRadio in mustard, Triple J in light blue and ABC Classic in lilac.

You’ll probably notice how much Radio National, ABC Melbourne and ABC NewsRadio’s numbers jumped during the 2020 lockdown as listeners turned towards talk radio, against a long term trend of falling share.

In. the long term though, the ABC’s share of the Melbourne listening audience has declined significantly - from a stacked total of about 23% in 2014, to just under 18%. As you’ll be able to see, based on yesterday’s numbers, the ABC’s share of the listening audience in Melbourne has never been lower.

That includes ABC Melbourne’s Monday to Sunday share declining to just 7.3% in yesterday’s ratings. That’s well off the 12.3% share it enjoyed in 2014.

On average, just 37,000 people are listening to ABC Melbourne in any given 15 minute period. That’s 43% down on the 2014 numbers.

Cumulative reach across the week has also fallen for ABC Melbourne, from 814,000 a week in 2014 to 690,000 in 2022 - a fall of 15%. That’s despite the market’s available audience growing by 16% in the same period. People are still listening to the radio - but they’re increasingly turning away from the ABC towards the commercial options.

The ABC’s Melbourne problem goes beyond the local station. Listening to Radio National in the city is also way down, from a share of (an already low) 2.3% in 2014, to 1.8% this time round.

Even though RN’s new breakfast host Patricia Karvelas is based in Melbourne, she’s struggling to find a local audience, with just a 2.6% share of listening for the national broadcaster’s flagship radio show.

Perhaps most surprisingly of all, the ABC’s NewsRadio, which subsides mainly on wire copy and syndicated international content, has overtaken RN in Melbourne, despite having a fraction of the budget of its sibling.

ABC NewsRadio grew its share of the Melbourne audience from 1.7% to 1.9% while RN declined from 1.9% to 1.8%.

Let me emphasise that point: ABC NewsRadio has overtaken Radio National in Melbourne.

Nobody under 40 is listening to Radio National in Melbourne. And I do mean literally nobody. 3RN’s average Melbourne audience for the demographics of 10-17, 18-24 and 25-39 is shown as an asterix in the data, which means zero.

At least they were able to find 2,000 25-to-39-year-olds who said they were listening to ABC NewsRadio.

A caveat, by the way, on that asterixed number. Like all ratings systems, it’s based on surveys, so what the asterix literally means is that too small a number (or zero) of the 2,400 people surveyed in Melbourne said they listened.

ABC Classic is also bumping along at rock bottom in Melbourne, with a 2% share.

The only ABC station which has held its own in Melbourne is youth station, Triple J.

ABC radio listening in Sydney

So let’s turn to the radio industry’s second city of Sydney.

For the ABC in Sydney, radio listening peaked in 2016, and even information hunger during the pandemic failed to bring audiences back to that level in 2020 and 2021.

Just like Melbourne, in 2022 the ABC’s share of radio listening in Sydney has hit an all time low since the GfK surveys began - from a share of almost 22% in 2014 to below 18% now.

Radio National has also sunk in Sydney, down to a 1.6% share of the listening audience. Again, it’s been overtaken by ABC News Radio, on 1.7%.

Meanwhile, the flagship breakfast slot of 5.30am to 9am is drawing Radio National just a 3.1% share of Sydney listening. That’s an average of 24,000 people.

Like Melbourne, nobody under the age of 40 in Sydney is listening to Radio National.

It’s asterixes in all three of the 10-17, 18-24 and 25-39 demographics.

ABC radio listening in Brisbane

In Brisbane, the ABC’s overall share is also down, but not as dramatically - from about 23% in 2014 to just under 22% in 2022.

But even in this less competitive radio market, Radio National is seeing a lot of asterixes across the demographics. You have to go to above the age of 55 to find a measurable average listening audience for RN. There were 1,000 of them back in the previous survey in the 40-54 bracket, but they vanished this time round.

ABC radio listening in Adelaide

In Adelaide, which avoided the tougher lockdowns of Melbourne and Sydney, the jump in appetite for speech radio was shorter lived.

Overall listening share for the ABC in Adelaide peaked in 2015, on nearly 28%. It’s now down at about 23%, but has improved a little since last year.

However, Radio National had its worst share of the audience, with just 1.7% of listeners. Again, it was beaten by ABC NewsRadio, on a 1.9% share.

In the breakfast slot, RN - with a share of 2.5% - was again beaten by NewsRadio on 3.2%.

And in terms of average listening audience, they were unable to find anyone below the age of 55 who was listening.

ABC radio listening in Perth

And on we go to Perth.

Although the ABC’s 22% share of the radio audience in Perth is some way off the 28% of 2014 and 2015, it’s worth noting that it’s not quite as bad as 2020 when the audience turned away from ABC Perth in particular.

However, that overall share is mainly boosted by the recovery of ABC Perth.

Once again Radio National’s share is at rock bottom with a share of 1.6%. In 2014, that number was 2.2%.

And similarly to the other states, nobody can be found in Perth below the age of 40 tuning in to Radio National.

Is Radio National’s problem content strategy, resource or marketing?

Having done the research because I had a sense that the ABC’s national talk audiences had been fading, I must admit I’m still a little shocked about just how bad things have got.

ABC Radio National - arguably the nation’s most important radio station - is averaging across the five cities just 28,000 people listening in any given 15 minutes. ABC NewsRadio is averaging 27,000.

RN’s cumulative audience reach across all five of the capital cities across the week amounts to 502,000. That’s less than ABC Sydney does on its own. NewsRadio reaches 1.035m.

The fact that, on average across the five capital cities, ABC Radio National is not reaching anybody below the age of 40 is really quite shocking.

Let’s clarify that a little. The stat means that in a given 15 minutes, the average is somewhere below 1,000.

And when we look for cumulative reach - where somebody has tuned in just once, at some point during the week, there are some small numbers of under-40s; across the week 64,000 in Melbourne, 57,000 in Sydney; 23,000 in Brisbane, 10,000 in Adelaide and 12,000 in Perth.

Still, that’s a cumulative under-40 audience reach for Radio National across the five capital cities of just 166,000.

It’s not that there’s no appetite for news radio - commercial competitors are finding audiences in that demographic. The fact that ABC NewsRadio’s rip-and-read service is finding bigger audiences than RN, which has a budget many times bigger, suggests that audience demands are not being met.

One of the challenges for Radio National is that its content strategy has evolved over the years and, in the process, drifted. Strong morning and drivetime news and current affairs shows sit awkwardly next to a mishmash of arts and cultural content, which often feels like they are being done on the cheap. Yes, resource is an issue, as the ABC faced budget cuts under the Coalition government, but not every show on Radio National feels to the listener like they make every dollar count. Some of the content feels low energy.

I suspect that internal politics has something to do with how RN and NewsRadio often follow parallel tracks. NewsRadio is under seperate management, out of the organisation’s news division.

The audience-first approach would be to rethink what content sits where. Imagine a better funded hybrid of RN and NewsRadio, with the breakfast and drive offerings of Radio National moving across to create a high class news and information service. Radio National would then focus on culture and arts.

Remember, by the way, that this loss of audience cannot be dismissed as a side effect of the drift to digital. The ratings capture listening via digital devices, and the loss of share to commercial radio comes when audiences stick with radio, but not with the ABC.

And yes, some ABC listening will be taking place on podcasts now as it does for the commercial audio companies. However, the ABC is yet to sign up for the Australian Podcast Ranker, so we don’t know exact numbers. But if the pattern matches commercial radio, then it’s not enough to make up the shortfall.

Other than resource and content strategy, the third factor where ABC radio may be struggling is marketing. Spending money on marketing while under financial pressure is politically difficult - internally and externally. Yet, if audiences do not know what is available then they can’t listen.

The long term trends are clear though. If the ABC wants to find its next generation of listeners, something needs to change.

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The Unmade Index: Seven’s shocker

Seven West Media had a rotten day on the ASX yesterday, with the share price down all of the day, then dropping drastically just before the market closed.

The 9% fall for the day was unusually large without the context of a sensitive market announcement. Seven’s market capitalisation is now below $800m.

It was a bad day for most of The Unmade Index.

The index of media and marketing companies listed on the ASX dropped by another 3.1%.

All the broadcasters were down - Nine by 3.1%, Southern Cross Austereo by 1.7% and HT&E by 1.3%.

On the go

Time to let you get on with your day.

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Have a great day.

Toodlepip

Tim Burrowes

Unmade

letters@unmade.meda