The big news that rocked the Bay Area sports radio was Ralph “The Razor” Barbieri getting axed from KNBR. Unfortunately, because of the lag in the reporting of the ratings, it won’t be until next month that we can see what effect that news has on the sports radio landscape. Even then it might be hard to tell, because the ratings for each show isn’t public information.
So even though we can’t take a look at how the big news of the day is affecting things, there are still fresh ratings we can take a look at.
Here are the numbers updated through March (numbers on demographics or specific shows aren’t available to the general public):
San Francisco |
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January |
February |
March |
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| Station |
AQH% |
Reach |
AQH% |
Reach |
AQH% |
Reach |
Owner |
| KNBR-AM | 3.7 | 744,400 | 2.5 | 484,700 | 3.7 | 566,100 | Cumulus |
| KGMZ-FM | 1.0 | 197,00 | 0.7 | 161,700 | 0.7 | 190,300 | Entercom |
| KTCT-AM | 0.7 | 257,600 | 0.5 | 135,400 | 0.7 | 215,000 | Cumulus |
San Jose |
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|
January |
February |
March |
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| Station |
AQH% |
Reach |
AQH% |
Reach |
AQH% |
Reach |
Owner |
| KNBR-AM | 3.8 | 168,300 | 2.3 | 116,900 | – | – | Cumulus |
| KGMZ-FM | 1.1 | 41,000 | 0.9 | 37,300 | – | – | Entercom |
| KTCT-AM | 0.8 | 56,700 | 0.4 | 36,100 | – | – | Cumulus |
I’m not sure what happened with the San Jose ratings this month, it seems like the number of stations in the report is significantly lower than normal. Maybe there was some sort of issue with the population of the sample, if any sort of corrections or updates are made I will update them in future months.
The big change from last month was KNBR starting to pull out of the ratings noise dive we saw in February. With the Giants season in full swing, I expect they’ll move away from the winter lows they experienced — unless there is some sort of mass exodus of listeners caused by the Barbieri firing.
“The Game” once again held steady, but KNBR 1050 rebounded a bit, retaking the second spot in total listeners among the sports stations. I am really interested to see how The Game’s numbers change with the A’s season starting. With KNBR likely rebounding and “the Game” basically standing still, it appears they may have missed an opportunity to cut into “The Leader’s” lead. I’m not sure what they could have done differently because they seem to be throwing out all sorts of ideas to try to draw ears, but it sure feels like they had a chance to close the gap before baseball season started up again.
We are getting close to having a full year’s worth of ratings data 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. The soap opera that are these radio wars continue and we will still be here to cover every little bit of it.
