Dunphy Picks Up Listeners (and the McWilliams bout goes on)

flogen

According to The Indo, Dunphy has added 14,000 listeners onto the average listenership that McWilliams pulled in before him. Frankly its not surprising that he's doing better than McWilliams was, people are going to tune in to see how he gets on, so I'd expect these figures to drop. There is also the Howard Stern effect of "I want to see what he'll say next", in the hope that he'll go balistic.

NEWSTALK 106's gamble in hiring controversial broadcaster Eamon Dunphy to present its morning early current affairs show seems to have paid off, with new figures showing he has attracted an additional 14,000 listeners since taking over less than a month ago.

Figures from a market research company show that, since taking over from David McWilliams, Mr Dunphy has attracted 14,000 more listeners to the breakfast show, making some inroads into RTE's 'Morning Ireland's' dominance of the morning market.

The radio listenership figures for Dublin among 15-to-54-year-olds show that Newstalk averaged 42,000 listeners between 7am and 10am when the breakfast show was hosted by David McWilliams, who has since moved to the national broadcaster.

But when Eamon Dunphy took over early last month, that figure rose to 56,000, or 8pc of the age group.

http://www.unison.ie/irish_independent/stories.php3?ca=42&si=1262363&issue_id=11503 (Sign in required)

Also in the article it is mentioned that McWilliams has spoken out about the goings on with newstalk (A Herald interview I believe). Basically he was surprised at how he was just dropped, and he took issue with them, and got €100,000 for his troubles (on a salary of €80,000, Dunphy now on €400,000). He also slagged Dunphy saying that he went from A national broadcaster to a local radio station, while McWilliams has gone in the opposite direction. I heard Dunphy made a great rebutal, but I don't know it myself, anyone got it?

flogen

DMC

I dont really know where they got those figure from, you cant rely on them. The JNLR survey is the only one they should be going by.

Belle Ende

Interesting. Alas, Dunphy's major edge is his 'celeb' status, consisting of the occasional rogue outburst/incident to attract attention to his newspaper articles/radio show/sports commentary.

Popularity rarely coincides with quality. Just look at the Top 40 music singles charts.

McWilliams remains a high quality presenter. A shame he doesn't have a morning radio slot anymore.