Zoe Ball’s Radio 2 breakfast audience slips in latest audience figures

Zoe Ball’s breakfast show on BBC Radio 2 has seen a drop of more than three quarters of a million listeners, according to the latest audience figures released today by the radio industry body, RAJAR.

The show’s audience has fallen in the last three months to 8.26 million listeners compared to 9.04 million in the previous quarter.

Zoe took over the show from Chris Evans in January with the audience staying fairly constant for her first three months, but the latest quarterly figures show a fall of 781,000. Radio 2’s audience at breakfast is now the lowest its been since Q3/2010, when Evans was fairly new in the job.

New breakfast shows usually take some time to bed-in before they become popular, so it could be said that it’s still early days for Zoe’s show.

The drop in breakfast listening has had an effect on the overall audience of BBC Radio 2, which has fallen by 763,000 this quarter – from 15.35 million to 14.59 million.

Chris Evans has seen a slight increase of 63,000 listeners to his Virgin Radio breakfast show, now at 1,111,000 across the UK via Virgin’s three digital radio stations, compared with 1,048,000 during the previous three months.

Elsewhere, Greg James has achieved his highest figures since taking over Radio 1 breakfast last summer – his Monday to Thursday show has 5.69 million listeners aged 10+, compared with 5.44 million last year.