An appetite for news on COVID may well be behind the rise of 3AW’s breakfast to the top in the latest survey from GfK.
Ross & John/Ross & Russel have moved to the top of the Cumes table with 622,000 listeners, de-throning Kyle & Jackie O who dropped back slightly to 557,000 listeners.
Sammy J was next, up from 10th place in Survey 2 adding 86,000 listeners, while his ABC Radio Sydney stablemates Wendy Harmer & Robbie Buck also improved their numbers.
Notable downward movements were Christian O’Connell, Fifi Fev & Byron, Jase & PJ, Mike Perso & Jennifer Hanson and Chrissy Sam & Browny who all suffered triple digit loses.
The drop in individual breakfast shows in Melbourne is reflected in the loss of over 440,000 listeners to that time slot across all stations.
Ben Fordham was a surprise to most with little change in Alan Jones’ numbers, down ever so slightly by just 9,000 to 467,000 listeners. As an aside, Alan Jones new Sky News evening show is drawing an audience of about 60,000 viewers per night, around 400,000 less than he, and now Fordham, draw to 2GB’s breakfast radio show.
Top 20 Breakfast Shows
smoothfm 95.3 was at the top of the stations with 1.042m listeners, with GOLD104.3 and Nova96.9 the only other stations to get over a million listerners.
Raw results figures here, see also Analysis, Digital Radio and Spin
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Melbourne is the extraordinary market in the survey, not surprisingly. White collar workers have typically been working from home and the blue collar working classes have typically been working at the workplace as usual. Radio listening is less common at home and more common away from home, so 3AW and the ABC, stations with the highest proportions of listeners that listen in the home have done well. Stations that target white collar audiences like Gold and Smooth have taken a hit. Triple M's blue collar format has done quite well this survey and the contemporary hit music stations have taken a hit too with their younger audiences most affected and more confined to the house by lockdown and hospitality industry shutdowns.