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talkSPORT: exclusive live football scores a winner

From a press release to news@media.info
Posted 4 February 2015, 7.00pm est

Ben Sutherland




  • Audiences of Barclays Premier League matches up 22%
  • Over 3million listeners to the station overall
  • 83% of listeners are male
  • Record visitors to talkSPORT.com

talkSPORT’s exclusive live Barclays Premier League weekend commentaries continue to prove a success for the station with listeners up 22% on the previous quarter. The results are according to official industry figures released by RAJAR today (5 February) which cover the fourth quarter of 2014 from 15th September - 14th December.

Overall, the station reached over 3 million listeners every week during this period, which included exclusive commentaries of Arsenal v Manchester United, and both the Manchester and North London derbies.

83% of all listeners to the station are men, showing talkSPORT’s unparalleled strength in this demographic, and 45% of listeners are ABC1 males.

The latest set of RAJAR figures come less than a week after talkSPORT’s parent company, UTV Media, announced plans to launch four brand new national radio stations. These consist of three new speech stations, talkSPORT 2, talkRADIO and talkBUSINESS, which build on the group’s track record in speech radio. UTV has also executed licence agreements with the Virgin Group to bring Virgin Radio back to UK airwaves. The plans form part of an application to Ofcom by Sound Digital, a joint venture company between UTV, Bauer and Arqiva, to operate the UK’s second national commercial DAB multiplex.

talkSPORT 2 will build on the success of talkSPORT by broadening the availability of live sport on UK radio. The station will add a major new free-to-air platform for underexposed sports, delivering a broad range of live sporting action and complementary sports talk.

Digitally talkSPORT has continued to grow at a rapid pace with record traffic to talkSPORT.com during both Q4 and every month in 2014. The recent January transfer window helped the website to its highest ever number of visitors.

Calum Macaulay, talkSPORT Managing Director said: “We know that live football, and the passion and skill of our excellent commentary teams, is a huge draw for listeners. These strong figures for our Barclays Premier League matches show that there is a massive appetite for sport on the radio, which is something we would build on in our exciting plans for launching talkSPORT 2 among three other fantastic stations.

Equally, talkSPORT.com has grown into an essential resource for sports fans and was the first port of call for the biggest transfer rumours throughout January.

Our clear and focused audience targeting continues to pay off, with our male demographic not matched anywhere else in the industry and proving a huge draw for advertisers.”

talkSPORT is the global audio partner of the Barclays Premier League, official broadcaster of the FA Cup, England internationals and the Capital One Cup.

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