What an interesting move – News Corp purchased the Wireless group, formally UTV radio. The main station in the wireless group is talkSport reaching 3.1m listeners in the UK every day. Within the Wireless stable are a group of Irish Radio stations: FM104 and Q102 in Dublin, Cork’s 96FM and C103, Limerick’s Live 95FM, LMFM in Louth/Meath, U105 in the Greater Belfast area. Collectively (in the RoI) the stations reach 713,000 listeners every day and UTV105 is listened to by 215,000 daily. For all the stations they have 370,000 Average monthly unique users and 1.7m pageviews per month
In their own words: “News Corp believes that Wireless represents an excellent strategic fit with its existing operations, broadening News Corp’s range of services in the UK, Ireland and internationally”
This means that the Wireless Group is now backed part of a media colossus and will soon be able to lean on some serious media mussel. Below is a map of the station that are owned by Wireless and the two it sells advertising on behalf of.
And should you wonder what the next step is – ” there is significant opportunity to increase engagement and monetisation through cross-promotion and leveraging Wireless’ and News Corp’s respective talent and advertising sales forces” .
Given that there are currently sales teams in the two previously unrelated groups (News International and wireless) is makes sense that some rationalisation takes place. A cursory glance at the Wireless financial reports suggests that there is a huge interest in the digital platform – something close to the hearts of the News Corp management.
I very much doubt is the BCI have any issues with the sale, given the existence of pooling of media here currently.
