Kyle Sandilands and Jackie “O” Henderson’s second year in Melbourne is poised to end on another low, as the KIIS FM duo delivers another hit to its market share while the media regulator sharpens its tools to enforce bans on the shock jock team’s explicit content.
The Kyle and Jackie O Show, which launched in Melbourne in April last year, had a 5.5 per cent audience share in the fiercely contested breakfast slot in the seventh ratings survey released on Tuesday morning, a drop of 0.5 percentage points.
Kyle Sandilands and Jackie “O” Henderson’s show has dropped again.Credit: Facebook
It is the show’s worst result since the third survey for the year as it languishes in eighth place in the time slot. This is the final radio survey to be released this year, with survey eight – spanning October through to mid-December – to come out in January.
It has been a start from hell for the pair’s 10-year contract with KIIS, which will run until the end of 2034. The Australian Communications and Media Authority is also planning new licence conditions on the network banning the duo from making strong and explicit sexual references, which helped their success in Sydney over decades.
The new conditions would prohibit the show, or any other show on the network featuring either star, from making any reference to sexual activity for five years, and demand the network conduct an audit into the show and its hosts’ contracts.
As advertisers abandon the show – partly due to a campaign by activist group Mad F—ing Witches, and also as its prolonged ratings slump become the new reality – KIIS has paused its plans for a national rollout, instead installing a new presenter in Brisbane in 2026, and scheduling former Nova duo Ben & Liam onto the newly rebranded KIIS in Adelaide next year.
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The Kyle and Jackie O Show dropped another 25,000 cumulative listeners in the latest survey, spanning August 24 to November 8, with a break between September 28 to October 5. This represents a 30 per cent drop from the same survey two years ago, and 26,000 fewer listeners than this time last year, meaning the show is continuing to lose its audience in Melbourne.
Elsewhere, KIIS’s sister station Gold delivered a strong result, up 1.3 percentage points to a 12.5 per cent share of listeners, with breakfast host Christian O’Connell the number one show in the market, excluding talkback station 3AW.
