The streaming audience for Nine’s talk stations continue to grow with new figures showing a 12% annual growth in session starts during February.
The figures, verified by Triton showed 2GB up 18%, 3AW up 10%, and listening across the country growing by 17% YoY. Very positive ahead of Thursday’s GfK Radio 360 Survey 1 for 2024. Podcast downloads were also up 19% MoM, with just shy of 3 million downloads in February.
Nine Radio Head of Content, Greg Byrnes, said:
“Our digital audience is surging. Talk radio dominates Radio360 data and these figures show during February, even more Australians connected to our live and local content via a digital device.
Across the country the live streaming audience has embraced our line-up changes and we thank listeners for their loyalty. It’s clear talk radio is on track for another year of market dominance.”
Nine’s Director of Sales, Total Audio, Ashley Earnshaw, said:
“Nine’s digital audio has had enormous growth, whether that’s across digital streaming or our increasingly diverse Nine podcast network. We bring together this scale of digital listening for brands, through the extension of our Tribes data targeting, across the entire of Nine’s audio ecosystem from our apps, to smart speakers and podcasts.
Ultimately we now deliver a more impactful and effective way to buy Total Audio at Nine.”
Elsewhere, Sam Buckingham-Jones at the AFR reported (subscription required) that Australian Community Media executive chairman Antony Catalano has proposed selling publications including The Newcastle Herald, Illawarra Mercury and The Canberra Times, to Southern Cross Media Group in exchange for becoming a further spanner in the works to ARN‘s takeover hopes of SCA.
Nine currently owns the AFR, Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, and did own the Australian Community Media mastheads too until April 2019 when they sold them to Catalano and business partner Alex Waislitz. If SCA don’t see value in the proposition, especially in light of the breakdown of the Media Bargaining Code with Meta, it may be of interest to Nine to reinvest in these provincial news mastheads themselves, should the option becomes available.