Conall O Móráin: Don't broadcast it, but the radio industry's JNLRs don't add up

A finding from a survey is that nearly half of US teens say they use the internet 'almost constantly'. As is likely, if Irish teens mirror this behaviour, I struggle to understand when they find the time to listen to the radio as claimed by the JNLR, says Conall O Móráin

The JNLR numbers have no meaning. They are an aggregation, an addition, of those people who say they listen during the period of the show.

Once a quarter the radio industry publishes the Joint National Listenership Research, the JNLRs, that are the sector league tables. 

Always eagerly anticipated, they provide great newspaper copy, pitching well-known radio personalities against each other, in a faux listening war. Each quarter of the year, every station claims a victory.

The JNLRs are commissioned by the radio sector with backing from, inter alia, RTÉ, Today FM and other independent broadcasters, as well as the advertising industry. The stated objective of the JNLR survey is to provide reliable — albeit not independent — estimates of audiences for national, regional and local radio. 

This, the industry says, is to help with the planning of advertising schedules and to provide radio audience estimates to facilitate programming analysis/planning. It’s also, in my view, radio telling a willing advertising sector why their clients should advertise on radio, which is financially beneficial to both. So no surprise there.

Yes, media buyers and the broader industry wants and needs reliable and accurate information on listenership across all mediums. However, when it comes to the actual numbers, I have doubts.

Before explaining why, I should claim some professional knowledge. I worked, front of mic, for RTÉ for eight years and a further 13 years presenting Today FM’s most popular Sunday radio programme, The Sunday Business Show. For the last three-and-a-half years I have produced and presented ‘That Great Business Show’ business podcast and more recently I also produce ‘The Fifth Court’ — Ireland’s legal podcast. I love the broadcast industry.

Few, if any, of the many hundreds of people I have asked, say their kids listen to radio. Yes, they listen to Spotify, YouTube and podcasts. 

So what’s my beef? It’s simple. For me, those JNLR numbers don’t add up. Quarter after quarter, there’s a big number that keeps popping up that makes me question the entire survey. The JNLRs claim over 66% of people between the ages of 15-24 listen to radio. But I don’t know anyone in that age group that knowingly listens to radio.

Very recently I ran my own survey on LinkedIn. I asked my 9,000-plus followers on that social media platform, ‘How many people between 15-24 do you know who listen to 'traditional' radio’? When the polls closed 92 people had bothered to vote, so not as scientific as the JNLRs, but still the result totally contradicted the JNLRs. 

Some 67% of the voters on LinkedIn said young people did not listen to radio. According to the JNLRs, 66% did listen to radio. Somebody is wrong.

I have my own ‘children’ in that age bracket and despite having lived in a household where the radio was a constant, I know they never, ever listen now. Few, if any, of the many hundreds of people I have asked, say their kids listen to radio. Yes, they listen to Spotify, YouTube and podcasts. 

They may occasionally switch on SpinFM to avoid having to talk to their ‘boring’ parents when in the car but even that is about to cease as car manufacturers remove radios from cars, replacing radios with online access. The radio sector realises this will be a massive blow to listenership and have been lobbying hard to keep radios in cars. King Canute comes to mind.

When I was with Today FM until 2018, our audience numbers fluctuated over the years from 60,000 to 90,000 over the hour we broadcast. We were a specialist business programme, with no competing business programme at that time-slot on any other station. We had Ireland’s business audience to ourselves. 

But what I could not get my head around is that our numbers could, and did fluctuate, up and down, by up to 50% over the years. It just did not make intuitive sense. That, in turn, made me ask, everyone, anyone, ‘were you ever interviewed for the JNLRs?’ Decades later and I still have not found that person. That’s when I became hyper-curious about the numbers.

Research company Ipsos say they conduct in-home surveys. I’d love to find anyone in a block of apartments (35% of households in Dublin according to the CSO) who lets a stranger, buzzing on the intercom, in to answer a survey. Unfortunately, those days in Ireland have surely passed? 

I also asked Ipsos, by email, if I could have a copy of their survey questionnaire, but at the time of publishing, I haven’t had an answer. I’m curious to see, like the ‘no religion’ option, eventually introduced into our National Census, if there’s a ‘I don’t listen to radio’ box in the survey? That could be very interesting.

When the JNLRs are published there’s always a flurry of newspaper headlines claiming that ‘Joe loses 3,000, Pat jumps 4,000 and Ian is flat’. But as these fluctuations are usually within the margin of error, they are irrelevant. 

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More importantly, there’s a tendency to look at the ‘big number’, the total numbers of claimed listeners. So, these headlines will read, ‘Pat ahead with 200,000, Joe drops to 380,000 and Ian steady at 190,000’.

These numbers have no meaning. They are an aggregation, an addition, of those people who say they listen during the period of the show. It does not mean that 400,000 people are listening, open-mouthed, for an entire two- or three-hour show. It means that they listened to a part of a show, a claimed minimum, I think, of just eight minutes to say ‘I heard the show’.

Now, back to the kids who may never listen. Assuming that most teenagers across the developed world can and do listen and watch the same popular culture programmes, movies and music, it’s fair to say, I think, that Irish 15-24s do more or less the same things as Americans of the same age.

Very recently the Pew Research Center, one of the best regarded non-partisan American think tanks, said YouTube continues to dominate (93%) with kids in the 13-17 bracket, in this case — so including some of our 15–24-year-olds. In the Pew survey, roughly 90% of teens say they use YouTube, making it the most widely used platform. 

Other platforms of choice are TikTok (63%), Snapchat (60%) and Instagram (59%). Also, there is not that much fluctuation in the level of engagement based on household incomes. Rich and poor kids are doing the same thing.

A further finding by Pew is that nearly half of US teens say they use the internet “almost constantly”. This is roughly double the 24% who said this in the 2014-2015 Pew survey. As is likely, if Irish teens mirror this behaviour, I struggle to understand when they find the time to listen to the radio as claimed?

If, as I believe, the bond is broken between young people and radio it’s unlikely that it’ll be repaired and that’s very, very bad news for the radio sector. We may not be reading about JNLRs for very much longer.

• Conall O Móráin is host of That Great Business Show podcast