You may ask, “Who is Dan Sileo?” Reader, you are lucky—and not alone. The ex-Miami Hurricanes football player and sports radio lunk, who has twice been fired for moronic remarks, is drawing in no listeners on the disastrous San Diego radio station 97.3 The Fan.
As the San Diego Reader reported last week, Sileo’s four-hour morning show earned a 0.0 Nielsen rating in May for men aged 25-54. Woof. Those are precisely the people who are supposed to listen to sports radio, and Dan couldn’t get any of them! Here’s context, from Ken Leighton’s article:
The Nielsen ratings people estimates there are 719,400 men aged 25-54 in the San Diego market. Their May survey says that at any given time during the morning hours, The Fan has an average listenership of 200 men 25-54, which they say averages down to 0.0. In contrast, the English-speaking station with the largest audience in that demographic is KFMB-FM’s Dave Shelley and Chainsaw ensemble who show an average listenership of 6,100 among men 25-54.
Sileo is only in the morning slot because The Fan had to fire the original morning show host Kevin Klein, before the station even premiered, over a bad tweet that pissed off a lot of San Diegans and the Padres. That fiasco prompted a rearranged schedule, a frantic rebranding, and the death of the name “97.3 The Machine.” Things have not improved since then.
The Fan never sounded like a good idea. There wasn’t much room for three all-sports radio stations in a city with one major pro sports team, and it’s shown in the overall ratings. For May, 97.3 (KWFN) earned a 0.7 rating; its two competitors The Mighty 1090 (XPRS) and XTRA Sports 1360 (KLSD) both clocked in at 1.0. It likely doesn’t help that the Padres, who are supposed to be the main draw to The Fan, are sucking wind at the bottom of the NL West. Entercom’s station is just three months old, but so far there have been no indications that anyone will give a shit about anything on it.
H/t to oogumboogum