The latest radio industry audience ratings show Mike Hosking Breakfast on NewstalkZB hitting new highs - while online readership numbers reveal a strong bounce back for Stuff to number one, with rnz.co.nz soaring
Only the knighthood and a National government awaits. Mike Hosking's breakfast radio show has ticked off almost everything else: eclipsing the great Sir Paul Holmes in the ratings, leaving RNZ's former powerhouse Morning Report in the dust and now pulling almost double the listeners of any Auckland music show.
Thursday's GfK radio survey results, the first for the year, were gilt-edged for Hosking's Newstalk ZB, with its total weekly nationwide audience rising again to 744,000 (up 30,000), stretching its lead over second-placed RNZ National on 633,700 (up 7,000) and its audience share figures growing in Wellington and Christchurch.
But it was the Hosking show that stood out in the tables of numbers for the commercial radio industry. Newstalk's owner NZME cited the 511,700 (up 20,000) listeners nationwide for Hosking as "a record number for any breakfast show in the country, ever".
One industry figure familiar with radio audience data over the years said: "Holmes never got anywhere near it."
The programme's audience share dipped slightly nationally to 23.6, and by 4 points to 30 in Auckland, but these remain at historic levels.
This audience survey was conducted from August to November and then January to April. The demand for news and talk is likely to have been driven by the lockdown and traffic light system for Covid-19 from August last year, so it could be that when the next round of ratings are released some of that Hosking and Newstalk audience peak may have ebbed this year.
While Newstalk basked in its latest triumph, the non-commercial RNZ also released its audience numbers, showing small gains for RNZ National (at 633,700, up 7000 across the week) and Morning Report (429,100, up 2400).
But these numbers build on small gains progressively through 2021 after RNZ fell sharply following the big audience numbers of the beginning of the pandemic in 2020. For example, Morning Report was the runaway industry leader in the survey to September 2020, with 531,000 listeners, falling by July last year to 412,000 and since then edging back in small increments.
RNZ chose to announce its numbers separately from the normal GfK industry releases, including the radio listenership as part of a much broader statement on awards won, online audience numbers and the future for state broadcasting.
The survey did not include enough weeks for the new MediaWorks talk station Today FM to be meaningful, and the NewstalkZB results will no doubt have produced awe but also confidence at that station that within the strong news and talk market there must be potential to carve off even small slices of audience numbers.
In the overall figures for cumulative weekly audience, Newstalk's 744,000 listeners kept it at number one and setting new highs in that measure, followed by RNZ National on 633,000 and then the music stations that once reigned supreme in these figures: MediaWorks' The Breeze and More FM third and fourth on 624,000 and 593,400, followed by the leading NZME music contender ZM on 560,000, then MediaWorks' The Rock, The Hits, Mai FM and the Sound before NZME's Coast at number 10.
In audience share, nationwide Newstalk's 23.6 was way out in front, followed by More FM on 8.9, The Breeze 8.3 and The Rock on 7.3, and in the main centres Newstalk was at number one, in Auckland leading The Breeze, Mai, Magic and More. NZME's best music brand, ZM, was sixth. In Wellington Newstalk headed The Breeze, then ZM and The Edge, and in Christchurch, The Sound ran ZB closest (11.9 to 17.8) followed by More and The Breeze.
There wasn't much good, or bad, for the bigger radio company, MediaWorks.
MediaWorks highlighted a tiny move up in its combined market share for all its stations (from 53.4 to 53.5), keeping a substantial lead over NZME (38.4, up from 37.4) in the overall commercial radio market. But its increased total audience across the country of 33,000 was smaller than the number NZME's Coast station (up 36,000) added on its own.
Online audience numbers
RNZ's audience statement revealed big moves in the online news market in the March Nielsen survey, with Stuff rising to one of its highest readership totals ever at 2.36 million unique readers, blasting past NZME's nzherald.co.nz (1.9m) which had last year repeatedly highlighted its position as number one for online audiences. Interestingly, rnz.co.nz broke the one million reader mark also, hitting 1.14m and taking it past its soon-to-be-public broadcasting partner TVNZ at 1.02m and Newshub on 998,000.
Stuff had fallen behind the Herald mainly because of it choosing to pull its content from Facebook, which drives big audiences for news businesses. Stuff restarted distributing stories on Facebook when the Delta Covid outbreak occurred from August last year, but in a limited way. Its March readership and reclaiming of the number one position, and RNZ's big rise, could be due to high readership during the anti-mandate protest at Parliament.
