Who’s the king of Utah sports talk radio? Here’s what the ratings say.

What once was a lopsided battle between the two major contestants in Utah’s sports radio scene has recently become much closer.

The Zone Sports Network — recently rebranded as KSL Sports Zone after Bonneville International purchased the rights to operate the station in 2021 — counts the Utah Jazz as its biggest athletic partner, while also airing Utah State University content. ESPN 700, meanwhile, boasts a recently-renewed five-year contract with the University of Utah to be its radio home.

For years, The Zone was the dominant player in Utah sports radio. The Zone’s ratings on 1280 AM and 97.5 FM multiplied those held by competitors ESPN 700 and the now-defunct 1320 KFAN.

Now, though, ESPN 700′s ratings have rebounded in a major way, now nearing or exceeding those of The Zone in key demographics for the last few months. The station has also added an FM signal on 92.1 FM in order to boost ratings further.

“We just feel like we’re competitive, you know?” ESPN 700 parent company Broadway Media president Steve Johnson said. “We really took a big jump.”

The two stations pulled back the curtain on their ratings, giving a rare look at the state of local sports talk radio.

The ratings picture

Radio ratings are complicated — and there are always ways to spin the numbers to tell a story.

With traditional radio numbers, Nielsen Radio Data incentivizes selected people to record their radio listening habits, either through a listening device or a manual diary. They then compile those numbers to understand what stations a market listens to most.

But, of course, we live in the 21st century, when so many aren’t listening to radio programming over the air. Nielsen also allows stations to encode their online live streams to be included in separate radio numbers. Stations also use their podcast hosting platforms to track downloads of entire shows or shorter segments.

Generally, radio sales personnel will say that the key demographic in the space is men 25-54 — the ones advertisers want to target most on sports radio. But that misses real potential buyers who are outside of those age ranges, especially boomers with disposable income. It also misses women entirely; given that the number of women sports fans is growing rapidly, this approach seems out of touch.

“For some reason, sports radio is still sold in this antiquated way,” Nate Dowdle, the sports director for Bonneville International, acknowledged. “And they keep making it work and making us money, so I can’t knock it much. But at the same time, it’s antiquated. It’s not 1996 anymore. What are we doing?”

Then there are the different ways to measure listeners. There’s average persons: the number of people listening at any given time on average. Then there’s “weekly cume persons,” the number of people who listened to the station for at least five minutes at any point over the week. There’s also average share: the percentage of people in a given demographic with their radios on who choose to tune in to the specific station.

We’ll start with the small, targeted demographic: men 25-54. This graphic shows traditional radio only, no streaming.

In general, ESPN 700′s ratings have actually surpassed those of The Zone over the last year or so in these metrics. That’s especially true during the midday and afternoon. Trends generally seem to favor ESPN 700, though The Zone had a big uptick in May.

What about over a wider audience? Let’s look at both men and women, 18 and over. This data also includes streaming numbers for The Zone; ESPN 700 didn’t have streaming numbers tracked.

Here, The Zone retains a significant advantage, especially during its first three shows of the day. That advantage may have tightened somewhat over recent months, though — the weekly cumulative persons gap is closing in particular. The station’s 12-3 p.m. programming (the Hans and Scotty show) looks especially strong, while ESPN 700’s later afternoon show is most catching up.

Why the ratings changes?

So what’s going on?

Dowdle, representing The Zone, credited the ratings fluctuations to seasonality.

“This station traditionally, well before they came into the Bonneville umbrella, has always shot up right around June and July. Then, they’re just a blow torch in terms of ratings and content, until about April when the Jazz get out of the playoffs. And then there’s a three- to four-month tank and then they’ll come back up as soon as college football hits,” he said. “It’s a peaks and valleys system.”

On the other hand, Steve Johnson, president of Broadway Media (the parent company of ESPN 700), credited the ratings changes to strong programming from ESPN 700 and newer, unfamiliar programming from its main competitor.

ESPN 700 currently has two mainstay shows. First is The Bill Riley Show, weekdays from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m., with Riley, who has been with ESPN 700 for 19 years, including 15 years as the play-by-play voice of the University of Utah. Then, from 2-6 p.m., the station airs The Drive with Spence Checketts. Checketts has been on air since 2006, though he only rejoined the station in 2019 after he resigned from The Zone in 2018 after a DUI arrest. Checketts, though, has garnered increasingly strong ratings in the market in recent years.

Meanwhile, The Zone boasts four local shows, some with long-term credibility while other pairings are finding their footing. The DJ and PK show with David James and Patrick Kinahan airs from 6-10 a.m. on weekdays, while Jake Scott and Ben Anderson host the 10 a.m. to 12 p.m. show. Former BYU and NFL player Hans Olsen joins station program director and Utah State Aggies play-by-play man Scott Garrard from 12-3 p.m.

The newest show from a sports perspective of the bunch is The Zone’s Unrivaled show, with Alex Kirry and Scott Mitchell. Kirry hosted Cougar Sports Saturday along with the Nightside Project on KSL’s main radio station. Mitchell and Kirry’s first appearance on the daily airwaves came in 2021, when KSL took over operations of The Zone.

“There’s no secret that familiarity with talent is always going to be a thing, and always has been,” Dowdle said. “It’s going to take more than 18 months to get people to A) like it, B) to be familiar with it, and C) to feel comfortable with it. So that’s no secret that when you make changes like that, yeah, it’s going to upset a part of the audience. ... You have to win back some listeners.”

Other notes

There’s another unique aspect of the relationship that The Zone says is chilling their ratings among some demographics. When the Larry H. Miller group owned the station, they contracted with Broadway Media — their sports radio competitors — to maintain the station’s radio towers and repeaters. That relationship remains in place after the operational transfer to KSL, but The Zone says that its radio signal isn’t always up to snuff.

“One of the repeaters is just not working,” Dowdle says. In particular, its Davis County signal appears to be buggy in some areas. And overall, Dowdle says that the 700 AM signal is simply stronger than 1280′s, allowing it to reach more radios.

“I don’t know about the maintenance issue, because I feel like it has a whole lot more to do with the limited signals,” Johnson said. Johnson also estimated that the 97.5 FM radio transmitters only may have “75 to 80% coverage” of the market, which could be causing issues.

And of course, there’s the podcast element of all of this: more sports fans are consuming their audio sports content through podcasts than ever before. How many more? Dowdle acknowledged that, for his station, podcast listenership still isn’t the size of live radio listenership.

In general, the Zone declined to share its podcast numbers with The Tribune, but cited “six-figure” download numbers for the Hans and Scotty show during the course of a given football season.

ESPN 700, meanwhile, did release podcast numbers. From June 15, 2022, to June 15, 2023, shows and guest appearances on the Bill Riley Show had 1,106,831 downloads, they said. The Drive with Spence Checketts’ content had 964,266 downloads over that same time period. In total, they noted roughly 5 million downloads for its content from The Bill Riley Show over the past seven years, and three million downloads for The Drive with Spence Checketts since Aug. 2019, when Checketts was hired.

Broadway Media also runs the ESPN960 station, which runs a smaller radio signal targeted to Utah County covering BYU and UVU sports. That station’s main show is Cougar Sports with Ben Criddle, which runs from 3-6 p.m. on 960 AM. That station doesn’t receive much traditional radio listenership, generally attracting 1,000-2,000 cumulative listeners per week.

Sports radio, while profitable thanks to its ability to target a demographic of high interest to advertisers, isn’t the leading player in the radio scene overall. Neither station broke the top six radio stations in any timeframe in May 2023′s Nielsen report.

Still, Johnson, from Broadway Media, is optimistic about the future of the medium.

“We’ll get out into the fall with the Jazz, and that’s gonna really help them. We’re gonna get into the fall, and it’s gonna be University of Utah season, that’s really going to help us,” Johnson said. “When I look at all of our indicators, both of our stations will grow.”