Radio overpowers pay tv in the ratings

The migration of Alan Jones from radio to pay tv this year has provided an interesting direct comparison of the power of each medium to draw audience for talk personalities.

In the latest ratings Ben Fordham retained most of the listeners in Alan Jones’ former weekday breakfast timeslot, with 467,000 listeners tuning in each week (see our cume report for more).

The Cumulative audience (cume) figure is “the total number of different people who listen to a station for at least eight minutes (in one quarter-hour) during any time period. Cumes illustrate audience size, as they estimate the unduplicated number of people reached by a station at least once during a particular time period,” according to GfK’s ratings toolkit.

 Jones joined Sky News to host a one hour evening program, four nights per week at 8pm.

Both shows are in prime time. Radio’s prime time is breakfast while television’s is evenings.

Jones show is averaging 69,500 viewers each night, which is up by 60% on the previous programming, according to a report by Amanda Meade in The Guardian.

The Jones factor provides a direct comparison between radio and pay tv. The same talk personality moving to tv now has only about one sixth of the audience he had on his radio breakfast show.

It’s not really about Jones or Fordham, ratings will come and go over time for both, but it is an interesting study of the power of both media to influence large population numbers.

Talk radio breakfast trumps pay tv evening prime time six times over.

The point has been made many times when people talk about the influence of free to air breakfast television shows, but then compare numbers with radio breakfast shows, which blow tv out of the water. This latest information reinforces the point that radio can command much bigger audience numbers than tv for some types of programming.
 

 
 


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