We wrote this piece on the day the RAJAR figures came out, 24.July.2008, but for some reason we didn’t publish it, then forgot about it. The story on the Phone-in rejig yesterday reminded us of it, so here it is.
The radio industry are somewhat obsessed with RAJAR figures. RAJAR is the organisation — RAdio Joint Audience Research — that reports how many people are listening to each and every radio station across the UK.
We’d imagine there’s great anticipation at all radio stations, including IW Radio, on reporting day.
Whereas Internet-based media can tell pretty much tell how many people are looking/listening/watching their output, the radio world has to wait for RAJAR figures.
On 24, July 2008, the figures were released.
The survey period is 25th June 2007 – 22nd June 2008.
The results
RAJAR report that IW Radio is listened to by 38,000 people, for at least 5 minutes, during the course of an average week. They say this is 32% of the population of the Island … but of course IW Radio can be listened to from the mainland, so perhaps the percentage on the Island is lower – not sure on this.
Amazingly each of those listeners have the radio turned on and tuned into IW Radio for 10.9 hours during that week.
Comparison with previous years
Those figures, while taken alone give a view, it’s only with comparison with previous years, does perspective arrive.
2007 was a fantastic year for IW Radio, where they hit 49,000 weekly listeners. That had built on the the growth that they’d had in 2006, where they had reached 43,000. The year prior to that, 2005, was at 38,000 tuning in a week.
Here’s a little graph to illustrate.
Hours of listening
A strange thing appears to happen when more people listen to IW Radio – the figures show that those people listen for less time.
As mentioned above, this year, each listener is hearing 10.9 hours of IW Radio a week.
Last year, when there was 11,000 more people a week listening in, they were only listening for 7.8 hours a week each.
The highest number of listening hours that we found, was back in 2005, when the number of weekly listeners were at the same level as now. Back then they had their ears glued to IW Radio for 12.5 hours a day.
Summary
Wow, that was a lot of detail wasn’t it? Here’s the summary – the number of people listening to IW Radio has dropped back to 2005 levels, BUT the number of hours that each of those people listen to has gone up.
If you’re interested in this sort of thing, have a look at the latest figures. You’ll find IOW Radio on page 13, under The Local Radio Company Group – the company that actually owns IW Radio.
The previous years figures …
2008 Q1, 2007 Q4, 2007 Q3, 2007 Q2, 2007 Q1, 2006 Q4, 2006 Q3, 2006 Q2, 2006 Q1, 2005 Q4, 2005 Q3, 2005 Q2, 2005 Q2
