Arbitron, the company that rates who's listening to whom in radio, reports Howard Stern's radio ratings are going down.
According to the spring radio figures compiled by Arbitron, listenership for The Howard Stern Show has fallen in his home base of New York, as well as in Los Angeles over the last two years.
"His audience is growing older, they listen to less radio and tend to change the dial," Nicole Ovadia, an editor at Inside Radio magazine, tells Reuters. "Also he's not recruiting new young listeners at the same rate, he has been copied left and right and there are a lot of shock jocks out there."
Even though he's still number one in the Big Apple, Stern's cumulative audience on WXRK-FM has dropped 12 percent from 1.2 million weekly in 1998 to 1.05 million now. In Los Angeles, where his four-hour daily talk show is broadcast on tape on KLSX-FM, the show is down 20 percent from 451,900 two years ago to 357,800 per week today.
Arbitron's numbers indicate that Stern's usually diehard fans are listening less, as ratings have also slumped in Chicago, San Francisco, Miami and Philadelphia.
Stern, 46, broke the mold of traditional American radio in the last decade by combining raunchy humor with over-the-top antics--a potent combination that lured millions of fans, most of them men. ("He's very much a male phenomenon, I don't even look at the numbers for women," Arbitron's Thomas Mockarsky tells Reuters.)
Since his show took off, Stern and his endless parade of surgically enhanced bimbos have earned a ton of money for Infinity, which is now part of the sprawling Viacom empire. And despite the ratings dip, Stern's show is carried on 50 radio stations and brings in some $20 million annually in advertising revenue and licensing fees for Infinity.