"JNLR day" has come round again for Irish radio presenters, producers and executives, with a fresh batch of Joint National Listenership Research figures due to be published later today.
It is frequently claimed that the Irish radio ratings surveys have an “everybody’s a winner” feel to them, and indeed there have been occasions in the past on which the overall radio market has swollen, making the majority of shows and stations look as if they’re doing brilliantly.
But in recent JNLR surveys it hasn’t been at all difficult to spot the losers, with many big national station names conspicuous by their absence from the station press releases.
The last survey, for example, showed that Today with Seán O'Rourke was the only weekday daytime show on RTÉ Radio 1 not to shed listeners, while many of the station's weekend programmes were also in decline.
The preceding John Murray Show, which last month joined Mooney on the chopping block, had seen its listenership fall 28,000 to 287,000 over the year to the end of March 2015, for example.
Murray's long-term replacement has yet to be announced, but whether it's 2fm refugee Ryan Tubridy or someone else, they will have to contend with the might of Ivan.
Both the 9am-10am slot and Morning Ireland before it, which lost 27,000 listeners over the year to the end of March, have been hurt by the growing popularity Newstalk Breakfast, which runs until 10am.
The programme, hosted by Ivan Yates and Chris Donoghue, recorded an audience of 172,000 in the last quarterly survey, up 35,000 year-on- year, and will be hoping to sustain that performance.
