Comment from Peter Saxon
Don’t laugh. It is not yet April 1st. However, it is entirely possible that Kyle may end up owning the entire network if he wins his breach of contract case against ARN’s current owners.
The bottom line is that ARN likely has no ready cash with which to pay out anywhere close to the $80 million or so that Kyle is claiming – let alone another similar amount to Jackie O should she demand it too. With ARN’s current share price at around 34 cents, (almost half what it was a year ago) which translates to about $105 million in market capital, it is not beyond the realms of possibility that the current shareholders may agree to a deal to dilute/divest their own holdings to make Kyle the majority shareholder while they still retain a smaller stake along with a glimmer of hope that with King Kyle at the helm, their investment may still turn to gold down the track.
Alternatively, Kyle could buy ARN outright with the help of a few rich buddies or a venture capitalist firm putting in the shortfall between whatever the settlement figure comes to plus a premium to entice the current shareholders to sell up and escape with their shirts intact.
Let’s humour ourselves for a moment and imagine that Kyle, and perhaps Jackie O, end up taking over the entire ARN network of stations. What would happen then?
Well, as karma would have it, Kyle’s first problem would be exactly the same problem ARN faces right now: how to find the money with which to pay himself and perhaps Jackie… as well as the money to pay for the already deeply depleted staff payroll, the marketing costs, and the myriad creditors that a large media organisation such as ARN is committed to.
Although Kyle has generously offered to stay and work out his contract till 2034, he doesn’t yet seem to have grasped the nettle that ARN simply can’t afford to pay him anywhere near $10 million a year he currently gets while:
- Success in Melbourne remains as remote as ever, having finished 8th on the breakfast ladder on a 5.1 share (GfK Survey 1, 2026).
- Major advertisers are being warned off his show by activist groups such as the MFW.
- The ACMA has placed ARN stations airing Kyle and/or Jackie under the strictest licence conditions yet, for the next five years, for breach of the decency codes.
With Kyle’s lack of formal business qualifications, like an MBA, his numerous sick days and his self-admitted lack of basic work ethic he is hardly the ideal candidate to run a company while hosting a breakfast show.
And if by chance, despite all that, the ARN board of directors decide to back him, and he starts to make a success of his breakfast show nationwide, his poor health and his ever-growing girth puts any upside at grave risk. Meanwhile, at least his tailor’s making a big quid.
Back in the real world: In a media release to confirm his decision to sue ARN, Kyle suggested that the company knew exactly what they were getting when they signed the contract. According to him, the network was happy to pay because the show delivered.
“I held up my end. I always have,” he said.
While that may be true of Sydney, where he and Jackie had been paid $5 million a year each on a three-year deal, surely Kyle understood that if a national rollout of the show, starting with Melbourne, failed to draw the numbers expected in both audience and sales, then that extra $5 mil would be in jeopardy.
Early last year, before I was “elevated” to the lofty position of Editor Emeritus of this proud masthead, one of my last opinion pieces, was titled: Funny How Luck has a Habit of Running Out When You Push It.
Mostly, it excoriates those at the very top of the board of directors and the network who signed off on an over-ambitious plan to take over rival network SCA. Having listed many of (as NASA would say) the “single failure points” that could sabotage the entire mission I left the following to last:
Whether the cascading calamity of the aforementioned events was more to do with bad luck or bad management may be moot, clearly the outcome would not be near as bad if ARN hadn’t signed Kyle and Jackie O to a staggering 200 million dollar contract.
To be fair to Kyle, he had nothing to do with the takeover deals and the redistribution of assets between the ARN and SCA networks. But he can’t shirk responsibility, at least in part, for his own show’s utter failure in Melbourne. As they say in content management, ‘you can either buy a Breakfast show with established talent or grow a breakfast show hosted by unknowns. The first is way more expensive but you find out quicker whether the show is working or not.
Both Kyle and ARN worked out quite quickly that the show wasn’t working in Melbourne. Nor could ARN afford to wait for it to “grow” at $10 million a year (relative to the $10 mil they were already paying for sustained success in Sydney).
It’s not as if K&J were unknowns in Melbourne. They were already household names. But not in a good way. Almost 95% of the measured breakfast audience hates Kyle. As I wrote in that same article last year…
The hapless Jase and Lauren who’d been sacrificed on the altar of their replacements were offered a lifeline by KISS rival, NOVA100. The educated guess at the time was that ‘If Jase and Lauren struggled to pull a six share on KIIS, why would they do any better on NOVA? And, once K&J started their show on KIIS, surely Jase and Lauren would be cactus, right?’ Ummm, no.
As of the latest survey, GfK Survey 8 (2024), Jase & Lauren scored an 11.5 share of Melbourne’s Breakfast audience ahead of K&J’s 5.0 on KIIS. With great respect to Jase & Lauren, my (somewhat educated) guess is that it’s not so much that they have suddenly discovered a hidden talent that they didn’t know they had, it’s that Melbourne has discovered a way to clearly demonstrate their profound dislike of having a Sydney show foist upon them and the way in which the foisting was done.
Since then, the numbers have stayed pretty much the same.
If that’s not bad enough, perhaps the bigger choke hold on K&J’s once free-flowing revenue streams, because it also affects their show in Sydney, is the concerted efforts the Mad Fucking Witches (MFW) that have been successfully lobbying advertisers to place their schedules elsewhere. They were instrumental in forcing Nine Radio to dump Alan Jones and now Kyle is firmly in their sights. In an interview with the founder of MFW, Jenny Hill, timed to coincide with Halloween last year, she made it clear that her group is not going away anytime soon, or at least not till Kyle leaves or mends his ways to their satisfaction.
Hill: With the Alan Jones issue, there was a producer who used to call us up once a week saying that there was staff being laid off, and we were damaging their profits and all the rest of it. And again, our response, my response to him was: You’re damaging your own profits because you’re allowing a man to broadcast, live on air, who is damaging and demeaning at least half the Australian population. So, it’s your problem to solve, not ours.
Saxon: And in the end, they did, (solve the problem) didn’t they?
Hill: Well, they had to sack him because he wouldn’t change, and they wouldn’t change him. So that’s not a punishment, it’s a consequence. All we’re here to say is, if we can, we will prevent you from doing this in future. So yes, we’ve heard Kyle tone it down. But if you look back through some of the memes that we’ve published, just in the last few weeks and the transcripts we’ve published, you can actually see that there’s still an enormous amount of unacceptable content that’s going to air.
The end of 2023 was ARN’s best ratings year ever. Today it is a shell of its former self, the decline so fast few saw it coming.
Many of the staff and executives that were employed then are now gone whether they had a hand in this whole fiasco or not – mostly not. Just like you’d see in a movie, they left quietly, clutching a cardboard box of personal pictures and nick-nacks that served to identify them as more than a cog in a wheel. As far as I‘m aware no one was suing anyone.
Very few of the “old guard” that was part of the problem are left of which Kyle is the biggest and loudest example. There now new people in the upper echelons whose job it is to pick up the pieces and put Humpty Dumpty back together again. As the network’s marquee talent, Kyle needs to roll up his sleeves and help rather than add more mess to the mix with a court case that could backfire badly.
Allow me to offer my own cautionary tale. In my experience, Civil cases such as this are not about finding one party “guilty” but rather a judge must find a reasonable compromise to a business dispute in which the combatants insist on a ‘winner take all’ outcome. Often, a “fair” result is one that leaves both parties dissatisfied.
In my own case, many years ago, when I was about the same age as Kyle, I was a partner in a small content distribution business. We got into a dispute with a client that we believed had reneged on a distribution deal they’d signed with us, worth about $40,000. They refused to pay. And, in the end we took them to court. When we finally entered the courtroom, after two years of back and forth between our lawyers and theirs, the first thing the judge did was call a half-hour recess to give both parties one last chance to negotiate a settlement between us. His Honour strongly advised us to take this opportunity to save us all from further expense and frustration as well as the court’s valuable time.
At the end of the recess, which only served to reveal that I was as pig-headed as they were, we were as far away from a compromise as ever.
After three days of hearings and a massive invoice from our barrister, we won! Well, “technically”, anyway. The judge awarded us $10,000 in damages for the work we’d completed thus far but dissolved the rest of the agreement so that we had no chance of completing the work to its full $40,000 potential. On the upside, His Honour ordered the other party to pay the bulk of our legal costs which meant that financially we’d almost break even.
After our erstwhile client had dumped us, they found that they weren’t as successful at distributing the program themselves as they’d hoped they’d be – which made us feel vindicated.
But here’s the kicker…
With no other solid income stream, they applied to the court to pay us in instalments due to their financial hardship. After examining their recent tax returns, the court agreed to a peppercorn rate per month over virtually a lifetime. But creditors expected payment form us, in full, within 30 days. So much for our technical “win.” As the plaintiff, a similar thing could happen to Kyle as happened to me, only on a much larger scale.
Today it is clear that many in the radio industry, especially those at ARN who have been retrenched over the past couple of years, rightly or wrongly, resent Kyle for taking an exorbitant salary to live the life of a rock star while they live on Struggle Street, struggling to find work. My guess is that a judge might be reluctant to order a company, struggling as ARN is, to pay the equivalent of a major Powerball jackpot to a foul-mouth, entitled celebrity who is already obscenely wealthy if it risks putting more decent hardworking people out of a job.
If I were him and/or Jackie O, I’d be looking to help the new management rebuild ARN. Unless I really had a better offer lined up, I’d be looking to work out a way to live on a measly 2 or 3 million dollars a year, instead of 10.
Peter Saxon – Editor Emeritus.
Related reports:
ARN wanted Kyle to be “deliberately outrageous and often offensive” court documents reveal