The Ipsos MRBI JNLR radio ratings were released this week and WLR is the most listened to station in Waterford.
With over 64,000 people tuning in weekly, these results confirm WLR’s dominance in the Waterford radio market.
Speech programming on WLR saw a large boost in this period with several programmes, along with news and sports bulletins, recording increased numbers.
Deise Today, which is presented by Damien Tiernan and produced by Jennifer Long, saw the biggest weekday year-on-year boost, with almost 18,000 listeners tuning in every 15 minutes each day.
The Saturday Café with Maria McCann also recorded a record-breaking performance which has seen the programme reach 19,500 listeners every 15 minutes on Saturday morning.
Listeners continue in their thousands to tune in WLR News and Sport on the hour and the results confirm the demand from Waterford listeners for a top-class local news service.
Many of WLR’s destination music programmes recorded major increases in this period including, Weekend Sunrise with Sean Organ, Timmy on Sunday with Timmy Ryan, Showtime with Wayne Brown, and the Sunday Jukebox with Andy McCloskey.
In addition to these programmes, the station's specialist speech programmes also recorded major increases, including Farmview with Kieran O’Connor, Abair Amach é le Mollaí Gough, The Hot Desk with Mary O’Neill, On the Fringe with Geoff Harris and Lár Na Páirce with Tomás McCarthy.
The boost in listenership to WLR comes in the context of increased population figures for Waterford, a busy local news agenda and some major on-air promotions. All of which have helped drive figures to the station.
According to a recent online survey, more and more listeners are migrating to the mobile and smart speaker offering from WLR. The figures for 2022 show WLR had over 3 million listening hours online. 193 countries streamed WLR during the year and female listeners make up 60% of all listening.
Programme Director Michael Byrne said: “WLR is now reaping the benefits of our multi-platform approach as we can see from the statistics. The station has recently invested in technology but mainly in experienced people to ensure WLR continues to offer a first-class service to people in Waterford both on-air and online. Our listeners and advertisers are very loyal to the station and their support has added greatly to our success. ”
Radio’s popularity is stronger than ever, with over 91% of the population tuning into radio each week with the average adult listening to radio for over 4 hours daily.
With the return of live GAA and soccer matches on WLR, the station is very optimistic about another great year in 2023 for WLR.
WLR is Ireland’s local station of the year, 2019, 2020, 2021 & 2022.
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