Radio reaches 85–90% of UK adults every week.
A number that has held remarkably steady through a decade of streaming growth, podcast proliferation, and social media audio. What has changed is not the reach figure but the shape of how and where that reach happens.
Smart speakers, connected car dashboards, mobile apps, and workplace streaming have broken the old morning and drive-time dominance into something more fragmented and, for advertisers, considerably more interesting.
The audience is still there. It has just spread across more surfaces and more moments in the day. Someone listening through a smart speaker at 11am while working from home is a different advertising context than the commuter tuned in via DAB at 8am. Both count in the reach numbers. Only one of them used to be accessible to radio advertisers at scale, and now both are.
Among those fast-growing categories is online entertainment, and within that, online gaming sits in an interesting position. The sector releases new content on a near-constant cycle. New online slots, for instance, are added to platforms weekly, sometimes daily, each one pitched as a fresh reason for an existing player to return or a new player to register.
That cadence of new product suits audio advertising well, because the radio’s live. Additionally, habitual format reaches people in a state of relaxed attention rather than active search, which is exactly the condition in which a well-placed audio ad plants a seed rather than interrupts a task.
Why Online Gaming Tracked the Shift
Online gaming brands have been among the more analytically rigorous buyers of radio advertising over the past three years. Partly, it’s because the sector’s own data infrastructure is well developed and partly because the audience overlap with sports radio is well documented.
The connection to sports coverage is the obvious starting point. Live sport on radio brings an audience that over-indexes for gaming activity, and the in-play betting window during a match is a natural fit for audio that can be placed in real time.
But the smarter operators in the space have moved beyond the sports moment. They have recognised that the smart speaker and mobile listening audience represents a broader leisure profile than the sports radio listener specifically.
Someone listening to a music station on a Friday evening via a smart speaker is also a plausible online gaming customer. Moreover, reaching them with an audio message about new online slots launching that week works because the product and the mood align. Audio can carry that message in a way that does not demand the listener stop what they are doing, which is the exact quality that makes radio valuable in a fragmented attention landscape.
The content release cycle matters here too. Online gaming platforms update their libraries constantly. New titles from established studios are added regularly, and operators use each release as a hook for fresh advertising. That frequency suits radio well, because audio campaigns can be turned around and placed quickly, matching the pace at which the product itself moves. Few entertainment categories have that combination of high release frequency and audience alignment with radio’s listening moments.
What Changed About the Listening Context
The smart speaker shift is the most structurally significant change to radio’s audience habits in the last decade. RAJAR data shows a 107% increase in total commercial audio connected listening hours since 2018. That is not a marginal shift in listening behaviour. It is a doubling of the hours spent with commercial audio on connected devices, which means a doubling of the inventory available to advertisers at times and in locations that were previously unreachable.
Kitchen listening during the morning routine. Background audio during a work-from-home afternoon. Weekend cooking and cleaning. These are the moments smart speaker listening captures that traditional broadcast measurement either missed or could not monetise effectively.
For entertainment advertisers whose audiences spend leisure time at home, the value of reaching someone in those specific moments is obvious. An ad for a new gaming platform heard while someone is already settled at home, near a device, with leisure time ahead of them, lands in a fundamentally different context than one heard on a commute.
The mobile listening shift reinforces the same argument from a different angle. Radio app listening has grown steadily as broadcasters have built out their digital platforms, and it brings with it precise location and time-of-day data that makes targeting genuinely useful rather than approximate. Advertisers can now reach radio audiences during Saturday afternoon with a degree of contextual accuracy that simply did not exist five years ago.
What the Revenue Record Actually Signals
The £747 million figure for 2025 is meaningful not just as a record but as a signal about where radio’s commercial model is settling. The growth came from digital audio formats, up nearly 15% year on year, which means it came from the connected and mobile listening that has expanded radio’s inventory beyond traditional broadcast slots. That is a structural shift, not a good year.
For the industry, the practical implication is that the audience transformation radio has been managing for a decade has started to produce commercial returns that match the reach numbers that were always there. Advertisers who understood the reach were not always willing to pay for it in formats that felt like traditional broadcast. Digital audio formats, with their targeting precision and measurable outcomes, have changed that calculus.
The entertainment categories that will grow their radio and audio spend fastest in the next few years are the ones with high content frequency, digitally native audiences, and products that benefit from habitual awareness rather than active consideration. Online gaming fits all three. Radio, in its current multiplatform form, is well placed to serve exactly that need.
