Radio is for old people - Village Magazine

54May 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,

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

“