It’s a brave new world for Sydney’s radio ratings. So, who’s won?

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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.

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).

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).

It 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.

The results of the first survey under the new system, however, show little movement at all – and what there was is not all positive.

The average audience in Sydney across seven days actually fell from the last survey, from 501,000 listeners to 492,000. That was, however, up slightly on the same survey a year ago, when an average of 477,000 people were listening in any given 15-minute period.

The cumulative audience in Sydney – which captures anyone who has listened to broadcast audio for at least eight minutes in any 15-minute block at any time during the week in which they formed part of the survey sample – climbed by a mere 5000 people, from 4.546 million to 4.551 million people.

Indira Naidoo’s evenings show was up for the ABC.Credit: ABC

Though the movement in numbers is marginal at this stage, the change to the survey system has been necessitated by the shift away from linear radio broadcast to other means of audio consumption.

The change has been a long time coming. The new system was first proposed for the Australian market in 2002, and the first trials of the wearable digital watch meter began in 2018. Radio 360 had been supposed to launch in 2021, but its rollout was delayed by the pandemic. A revised launch of 2022 was also delayed.

The new approach involves a combination of manually completed surveys (collected from a sample of 50,000 people nationally), wearable watch meters (2000 people nationally) and automated and anonymised sampling of “millions” of streaming devices around the country.

Over time, the system will be adjusted to more accurately capture the way people are consuming audio. However, the manual surveys will remain part of the picture, simply because watch meters – which detect ambient audio – cannot pick up listening via headphones.

According to ratings company GFK, “The move marks a historic transition to a sophisticated new hybrid measurement system … that will provide accurate and granular information on radio listening across all platforms and devices, anywhere, anytime.”

Its principal objective, the company adds, is “giving the industry and advertisers a clear picture of listening behaviour and the size of the digital opportunity”.

Find more of the author’s work here. Email him at [email protected], or follow him on Facebook at karlquinnjournalist and on Twitter @karlkwin.

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