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Ireland's political and cultural magazine
54May 2015
among younger cohorts are in double
figures: minutes among -s, and
minutes among -s. Both audi-
ences had lost more minutes, from a
lower initial base. Eventually, those
declines will bite into advertising
revenues.
“Younger people are listening to far
fewer minutes per day of radio com-
pared to older people. My radio sources
tell me this is a major source of concern,
although not one they are much inter-
ested in talking about in public”, one
industry commentator said. “Similar
patterns can also be seen in television.
These are increasingly media for old
people”.
“The really interesting issue is the
lack of an RTÉ product for people born
between and . That whole
cohort has been abandoned. The only
people really making an effort to chase
younger audiences are Communicorp.
Head of FM Dan Healy is trying but he
is operating under heavy constraints”.
There may be a limit to what can be
done, however. The problem extends
beyond improving content. There are
simply more demands for listeners’
attention, from podcasts and internet
radio, to all the other audio, visual and
text offerings on mobile, tablet and
desktop computer screens.
As always, where America leads, the
world will follow, and the fortunes of US
radio foreshadow what the Irish market
can expect in the next five years. There,
the majority of news websites now get
more traffic from mobile than desktop,
N
EWSPAPERS have grown used to
the idea that they face an existen-
tial threat from the digital world,
even if they haven’t quite figured out
what to do about it. But for a long time
broadcasters, in particular radio,
thought they could be different. The
truth is that, behind the chipper peri-
odic press releases trumpeting new
listeners which inevitably follow the
publication of every new quarterly Joint
National Listenership Research (JNLR)
survey, radio audiences are being hol-
lowed out.
While every radio station promotes
its market share (the percentage of lis-
teners who are listening to particular
broadcasters) and reach (the percentage
of the total population listening to any-
thing), industry boosters have in effect
come to an unspoken agreement not to
mention minutes listened. And the hum-
bling truth is, the average number of
minutes a typical audience member
spends listening to radio is in decline.
The decline has two aspects. Firstly,
like print, radio is becoming a middle-
age medium. Over-s spend over four
hours a day ( minutes) listening to
radio, over minutes more than
--year-olds ( minutes). Even
among the wider - demographic,
mean minutes listened is just over three
hours ( minutes). The younger you
are, the less likely you are to listen to
radio.
Secondly, the mean number of min-
utes spent listening to broadcast radio
daily is in decline. This is the case across
all age groups, although the decline is
more notable among younger listeners.
Since November , mean minutes
listened across all adults (over-s) have
declined by five minutes, but while over-
s are only down six minutes, numbers
and online advertising continues to pro-
vide more revenue to newsrooms, but
not enough to make up for the losses in
print advertising.
Unfortunately for news, their share of
digital advertising amounts to only
$.bn, an impressive enough figure,
but bear in mind that’s the revenue for
all newsrooms. Compared to figures for
the Big Five who dominate digital adver-
tising, it is trivial.
The entire online advertising market
was worth $bn in , and half of
that went to just five companies: Face-
book, Google, Yahoo, AOL and Twitter.
On mobile screens, the situation is even
worse. A slightly different five – Face-
book, Google, Twitter, Pandora and
Apple – account for almost two thirds of
advertising.
For radio, the threat isn’t just an audi-
ence spending more time reading
screens, but that digital competition
can eat into its core offering.
Streaming services have become
more popular, internet radio allows
consumers a greater choice of stations
not limited by distance, and the success
of Serial last year didn’t make it so much
a breakout hit as an indicator that pod-
casting has reached a tipping point with
popular audiences. Recent US research
shows that the number of Americans
who have listened to a podcast within
the last days almost doubled to %
between and , coinciding
with the launch and spread of smart-
phones. The same research shows %
of Americans listened to online radio. •
The internet is eating
radio audiences.
By Gerard Cunningham
Radio is
for old
people
MEDIA Radio
The only
people really
making an
effort to
chase younger
audiences are
Communicorp
and maybe
2FM
“
May 2015 55
