Both the Kyle Sandilands and Alan Jones stories still seem to have plenty of legs in the media. And as those stories play out, new intriguing questions emerge about the future of radio programming and management of its personalities. Till recently, a station’s listeners have always been king. But with the events of recent weeks, it seems that non-listeners are gaining a fair degree of clout. How can this be?

Both Sandilands and Jones command a loyal and adoring core audience that listen to hear exactly what these two do best and deliver in spades. Why would they complain? Of course they don’t.

In both cases, it is outside media that whips up a frenzy among non-listeners so that their tut-tuts can be heard across Australia. So what – all publicity is good publicity, right? Not when it loses sponsors.

While Alan Jones problem is with ACMA and not his sponsors, with Kyle the ad exodus has been breathtaking. Yet, even in the face of scores of major advertisers deserting the Kyle and Jackie O show some pundits argue that they’ll all be back as soon as the dust settles.

I don’t buy it. If 26,000 people through the Change.org website alone have been motivated enough to write in saying they’ll never buy Brand X again if they continue to support the Kyle and Jackie O show, some of them might just mean what they say. Whether they’re regular 2Day listeners or not is irrelevant to Brand X. It’s whether they buy the product that counts.

For Brand X, until a few weeks ago it was all about how many units a week does Kyle and Jackie O sell in return for their advertising investment? Now, there’s a new equation to include in the advertising cost per sale metrics: how many units do KJO sell to their listeners, less how many do they lose through those non-listeners who loathe them?

While Radio has arguably done a better job harnessing the internet than other media, the events surrounding this outburst by Kyle Sandilands has shown that the internet is still doing more to shape Radio than Radio is doing to shape it.

Not only have advertisers been instantly shown the degree of community anger over the incident through sites like Change.org, the internet has provided a mechanism by which that anger can directly translate to lost sales that affect those advertisers’ bottom lines.

Until recently a single consumer would know that a personal boycott of Brand X would be futile. Now emboldened by the support of tens of thousands of their peers, non-listeners could change the sound of stations they wouldn’t listen to anyway.

That’s my opinion, what’s yours?

Peter Saxon