The April Arbitron numbers were released. So, dear readers, that means you get your monthly fix of sports radio ratings.
With baseball on the radio, KNBR has regained it’s dominant position in the sports “Radio Wars” and can comfortably call themselves “the sports leader,” while 95.7 “The Game” treads water. While it is hard to tell for sure without access to show-level data, the loss of Ralph Barbieri hasn’t had any noticeable impact on the station as a whole. However, the April data only goes through April 25th, covering just 2 weeks of radio without “The Razor.”
We will continue monitoring to see if this affects KNBR in the months to come.
Here are the numbers updated through April (numbers on demographics or specific shows aren’t available to the general public):
San Francisco |
|||||||
|
February |
March |
April |
|||||
| Station |
AQH% |
Reach |
AQH% |
Reach |
AQH% |
Reach |
Owner |
| KNBR-AM | 2.5 | 484,700 | 3.7 | 566,100 | 4.8 | 842,900 | Cumulus |
| KGMZ-FM | 0.7 | 161,700 | 0.7 | 190,300 | 0.7 | 219,100 | Entercom |
| KTCT-AM | 0.5 | 135,400 | 0.7 | 215,000 | 0.5 | 198,100 | Cumulus |
*AQH is Average Quarter-Hour Share or the average share during any quarter-hour during the course of the day. Reach is the total number of people that tuned in during the course of the week.
I’m not sure what has happened with the San Jose ratings the last couple of months. For the second month in a row the number of stations in the report is significantly lower than normal and none of the sports radio stations are among them. It looks like Aribtron has decided to only release data starting in March for subscribing stations, so it might be that our sports radio stations don’t really care about the ratings for the San Jose market. If the numbers are updated at some time I will post a bonus “Radio Wars” post to cover those updates.
The big change from last month was KNBR continuing to pull out of the ratings noise dive we saw over the winter. Having daily Giants games has been a major boost to the ratings, which are at the highest level since July of last year. KNBR has vaulted from middle of the pack to the No. 3 station in San Francisco, behind only KQED and KCBS.
“The Game” once again held steady, but saw only a minor bump from the start of baseball season in total listeners during the month. This is pretty surprising, at least to me. I get that the A’s might not be as big of a draw in the Bay Area as the Giants, but a modest increase of just 30K listeners? That was something I didn’t expect at all. On the bright side they did move past KNBR 1050 in total reach, which is something.
We are getting close to having a full year’s worth of ratings data (just two more months), which will be helpful to see how each station is doing — not just on a month-to-month basis but on a year-over-year basis. As the radio wars soap opera continues, we’ll keep covering every episode.
