Welcome to a midweek update from Unmade. Today, a faint signal from the new radio ratings on Kyle Sandilands and Jackie Henderson’s Melbourne adventure; and now even SEN has overtaken ABC Radio National.
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Bad news, or a blessing for Kiis in the ratings?
More than usual, you can draw whatever conclusion you like from the breakfast show ratings for Kiis FM.
So widely anticipated was the arrival of The Kyle & Jackie O Show into Melbourne that every radio person in the country will have turned first to the data for the 5.30am to 9am segment when GfK emailed out the numbers yesterday morning.
They might have been surprised to see Kiis occupying breakfast’s bottom slot of the FM stations - neck-and-neck with Triple M’s Marty Sheargold with a share of just 5.9%. By comparison, when Kiis fired Jase Hawkins and lauren Phillips at the end of last year, they bequeathed a 9.1% share in their last trip.
This new number is joint fifth in FM, behind Christian O’Connell on Gold (10.4%); Fifi, Fev and the-comedian-they-won’t-give-room-to-say-anything-funny on Fox (10%); Jase & Lauren on Nova (8.7%); and Mike Perso on Smooth (8.1%).
However, Survey 3 covered the ten weeks of February 25 to March 30 and April 14 to May 18. The Kyle & Jackie O Show only launched into Melbourne on April 29, with just three weeks left of the survey. The other seven weeks were occupied by Byron Cook, whose job was to run dead to give Kyle Sandilands and Jackie Henderson an easy baseline to beat.
So it’s impossible to know for sure how The Kyle & Jackie O Show rated on its own. However, there is a decent clue. In Survey 2, Kiis averaged a 6.4% share when Cook occupied the timeslot on his own.
The surveys cross over, so exactly half the data in Survey 3 - covering Feb 25 to March 30 - is the same as that from Survey 2.
That means that in the five new weeks (two with Cook and three with K+J) in the survey, Kiis lost half a point of share compared to the previous weeks. The most likely explanation for that is that the newcomers did indeed lose a little more audience.
One other indicator: the average weekly cumulative audience - the total number of people who turned in for at least eight minutes at some point - actually went down, from 462,000 to 454,000. Given the amount of noise being made about the show’s arrival, that’s a surprise.
But there will still be a wait to know with absolute certainty how Melbourne is taking to Sandilands and Henderson. Survey 4, due out in five weeks, on July 9, covers April 14 to June 22. That will have seen the Kyle & Jackie O show in place for eight weeks out of the ten covered. That will be enough to show the direction of movement.
However, the full picture will only come on August 27, with the release of Survey 5, covering May 15 to June 22 and July 7 to August 10. That’s a long time to wait.
Meanwhile, although The Kyle & Jackie O Show retained its FM lead in Sydney, it was once again overtaken by 2GB’s Ben Fordham for overall lead. It’s the ninth time the two shows have swapped leads since K+J first moved past Fordham in 2021.
Radio National now has fewer listeners than SEN
The ratings delivered a new embarrassment for ABC Radio National. For average listening, the network has been overtaken by SEN in every market where the AM sports minnow is part of the survey.
In Sydney SEN has a Monday to Friday 2.3% share to RN’s 1%; in Melbourne SEN has a 5.1% share to RN’s 2.3%. And in Brisbane SEN has a 1.2% share to RN’s 1%.
Average listening to RN in the network’s flagship breakfast timeslot fell back to just 53,000 people across the five capital cities.
One of the problems for Radio National across all the markets is low cume - In Melbourne just 171,000 of 4.6m potential listeners tuned in at any point across the week.
In Sydney, RN’s cume was 163,000 out of the 4.5m listening audience - 14th out of 15 stations.
In Adelaide, RN’s cume was 59,000 from a possible 1.1m, the lowest of the 11 stations in the survey.
In Brisbane, RN’s 63,000 cume (from 2.1m radio listeners) was second lowest of the 12 surveyed stations.
In Perth, RN had the lowest cume of 11 stations with 64,000 out of a potential 1.7m.
In other words, the number of people listening to RN across the five capital cities at any time during the week is just 600,000 out of a possible 14m.
Or to put it yet another way, just 4% radio listeners tune in to ABC Radio National (and yes, that number does include listening via streaming).
RN’s nearest public service broadcasting equivalent, BBC Radio 4 in the UK, has a cumulative reach of 9.6m of 56.3m total radio listeners, which amounts to a 17% reach.
Remember that old cliche about the definition of insanity being doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results? The most radical thing RN had done over the last two years is swap 84-year-old Phillip Adams for 76-year-old David Marr on Late Night Live.
No rally for the Unmade Index
Hope that Monday’s improvement might see the Unmade Index move back above 500 points was shortlived on Tuesday when a 1.67% fall instead took the index to a new low of 491.1 points.
Outdoor firm Ooh Media has the worst of it, losing 5.4%. Nine lost 1.4%
Meanwhile despite the shock announcement of the departure of Brag Media co-founder Luke Girgis, Vinyl Group’s share price lifted by 4.35% yesterday. Vinyl acquired The Brag earlier this year with a plan for Girgis to stay on board for the long term. We’ll be returning to this topic later in the week, Email tim@unmade.media if you know more.
How the Unmade Index lost half its value:
Our interview with Girgis and Vinyl boss Josh Simons:
Time to leave you to your day. We’ll be back with more tomorrow. In an audio-led edition, we’ll be sharing one of the highlights from last week’s HumAIn conference.
Have a great day.
Toodlepip…
Tim Burrowes
Publisher - Unmade
tim@unmade.media
RN also dumped it's two right-of-centre programs, moved it's 5.30pm specialist report programs to 6, added a Life Matters repeat to the early evening, and not too long before all that changed it's breakfast and drive hosts. It's podcast figures should be considered when measuring it's listenership, though even with those they are still far from the Radio 4 benchmark.