THE AVERAGE ADULT in Ireland listens to over three hours of radio every day – with the figure rising to just under four hours when considering only people who listen to radio.
That is the finding of a new study of radio listeners carried out by Ipsos MRBI on behalf of JNLR, which also found that 85 per cent of people aged 15 and over are likely to answer ‘Yes’ when they are asked if they listened to the radio the previous day.
That figure is only slightly lower than a similar poll ten years ago, when 88 per cent of people answered ‘Yes’ to the ‘yesterday question’.
The average radio listener listened to slightly more radio than a decade ago; the 237 minutes of daily listening recorded in the survey, carried out in 2011, was up from 230 minutes on a previous sample taken in 2001.
By comparison, 31 per cent of people told a similar poll, carried out by the same company last month, that they had used Facebook in the previous day, while 5 per cent of people said they had been on Twitter.
The survey found that although teenage listeners had many distractions other than radio, with the ‘yesterday reach’ slipping from 88 per cent a decade ago to 80 per cent in 2011, many teenagers combined listening with other more predictable activities like texting, using Facebook or reading.
It further identified that 21 per cent of radio listeners can be described as ‘heavy listeners’ – listening to over 5.5 hours of radio each day. Heavy listeners account for 52 per cent of all minutes of radio listened to each day.
The daily radio ‘footprint’ has also not changed much in the last decade: listenership still peaks in mid-morning, with jumps at lunchtime and after 5pm before declining off throughout the rest of the day.
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