RTÉ’S 2FM HAS surpassed its rival Today FM in daily listeners for the first time since Gerry Ryan’s death in 2010.
According to the latest Joint National Listenership (JNLR) survey, 2FM has 404,000 daily listeners to the Communicorp station’s 402,000.
The survey covers the summer months and shows that over 3.1 million Irish people listen to the radio every day.
On the whole, the results make for good reading for 2FM, which has seen year-on-year increases for a number of its shows including Breakfast Republic, The Nicky Byrne Show and Tracy Clifford.
Today FM has also recorded an 18 month high of 870,000 weekly listeners and is the number one station with 25-44 year olds.
Head of 2FM Dan Healy told TheJournal.ie that the figures were the result of many years work.
“We’ve had a very good day. The station changed in 2014 and from there we anticipated a decline but maybe not the level that came.
“Today FM is a great station and they invest heavily in marketing to make noise, so while we’re not competing against them, we do benchmark ourselves on those figures.
“(The turnaround) was a bit tougher than I thought it would be, but I’ve had lots of these JNLR days and when you get a day like today, you’ll take this.
“I was told that if we didn’t turn it around, 2FM was dead in the water. What’s interesting here is that 2FM was built around Gerry Ryan, now it’s built around every one of our shows.
“It’s not over by a long shot, but we’re happy with this.”
In Today FM, Ian Dempsey’s Breakfast Show gained 6,000 listeners in the past 3 months bringing his morning audience to 169,000, Dermot and Dave are up to 167,000 and Al Porter is now on 118,000. Fergal D’Arcy’s show is at 97,000.
In Newstalk, Pat Kenny is up 4,000 to 150,000 and George Hook’s lunchtime slot, since taken over by Ciara Kelly, has passed 100,000 listeners.
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