Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Radio Cité, the former religious radio station in Geneva, which was saved from bankruptcy by a CHF1 million annual investment by Genevan Viviane de Witt’s Fondation de Chênes, has seen its audience slipping steadily since January 2007, from 1.9 percent to 1.3 percent of the French-speaking Swiss market. It was granted a license as a community service station in October, one of five stations given licenses in the Lake Geneva region, of 14 federal licenses assigned in October 2008 after months of suspense. The others are commercial stations.
Turnover at the station has been high, reports 20 Minutes (Fre), which interviews disgruntled former employees. By comparison, the two other largest private stations, Radio Lausanne and Radio Rouge have 7% and 6.9%. The largest share of radio listeners goes to French-language public radio’s several stations, with Radio 1 having 37.2%.
WRS, World Radio Switzerland, has had an unchanging 2.3% of market share in the region since it was included in Radiocontrol’s statistics at the start of 2008. The number of listeners has slipped slightly to 33,500 but the time spent on the station has risen from 11.9 to 12.6 minutes a day.
Radiocontrol measures radio listeners by tracking a large, representative sample audience.
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News story, GenevaLunch, 6 March 2009.
Filed under: Uncategorized
Tags: Fondation de Chenes, Geneva, Media, radio, Radio Cite, Viviane de Witt, WRS
August 24th, 2009 at 2:39 pm
[...] Radio Cité, which was given one of three new licenses among the 14 in total, has lost ground in Geneva and remains the least-listened-to station, with some 12,000 daily listeners on average in Geneva, while One FM, which initially lost its license despite being the city’s most popular private radio station, then was offered Buzz FM’s license by that station, has gained ground and now has 75,600 daily listeners. [...]