BBC Five Live Hits 7 Year Audience Low

A poor summer of sport has seen BBC Radio Five Live slump to its lowest audience
for at least seven years in the latest Rajar audience figures for the third
quarter of 2007.

The radio broadcaster attracted 5.49m listeners each week of the quarter,
dipping below the previous record low of 5.52 m registered in the last three
months of 2000.

The station’s fall is dramatic from a peak of 6.7m listeners in 2002 – when
it recorded three quarterly average audiences of more than 6m in a row. It has
now failed to top the 6 million listener mark since June last year.

The drop-off was blamed on a disappointing summer of sport most notably with
a wet Wimbledon with little British interest and no major football tournament.

Despite the fall in listeners, the station’s share of the market over the
past 12 months has remained steady at 4.2%.

Radio Five Live may also have lost some of its audience to its digital sister
station, Five Live Sports Extra, which had 730,000 listeners in the third
quarter of this year. This was up from 649,000 in 2006 but down from 866,000 the
previous quarter.

Commercial rival TalkSport was up year-on-year but down quarter-on-quarter.
TalkSport had 2.31m listeners for the quarter, down 60,000 on the previous three
months but up nearly 50,000 on the same time last year.