Rising Listenership for Sports Programmes

By John Considine

According to the latest Joint National Listenership Research (JNLR) the programme with the largest listenership figures is Morning Ireland (broadcast on RTE Radio 1, weekdays from 7-9am).  Morning Ireland attracts 433,000 listeners.  The highest ranked sports programme on the list is RTE's Saturday Sport with listenership numbers of 178,000.  Two other sports programmes make the Top-30.  RTE's Sunday Sport is twenty-first on the list with 173,000.  Today FM's Premier League Live is at number 30 with 135,000 listeners.

Both RTE programmes have opened up a listenership gap on the Today FM programme as can be seen in Figure 1 below.  Just over two years ago there was very little difference between the three programmes.  In the first quarter of 2013 the three programmes attracted a combined listenership figure of 396,000 (with 136,000 for RTE Sunday, 133,000 for Today Sat, and 127,000 for RTE Sat).  A year later the combined listenership figure had risen by 28%.  This is a substantial increase.  Even more impressive was the 54% increase delivered by RTE Saturday Sport over the period.

The weekend sports programmes offered by NewsTalk do not make the list of the Top-30.  However, its weeknight offering, Off the Ball, is well ahead of its RTE 2FM rival as is shown in Figure 2 below.  In the two years since the second quarter of 2013, the combined listenership rose by almost 10%.  The overall growth in listeners is down to the NewsTalk offering as there was a slight decline in the Game On listeners between these two endpoints.

The data for this post came from the blog ilevel.ie.