An extra 51,000 radio listeners have joined Alison Curtis for breakfast

Plenty of big names in Irish radio can only dream of a 60 per cent year-on-year gain in their listenership right now, but not so Today FM's Alison Curtis. She's actually done it.

Curtis increased her audience by 51,000 to 135,000 last year, a performance that propelled Saturday Breakfast with Alison Curtis into the top 30 most popular programmes on Irish radio.

The show, which began when Curtis returned to Today FM in 2013, was boosted by a one-hour shift in its time slot. Since the beginning of 2014, it has gone out at 8am-11am instead of 7am-10am.

Curtis was also the first port of call for substitute duty when Ray D'Arcy abruptly departed the Communicorp station in December.

The cheery Canadian broadcaster, now an Irish citizen, started out as a researcher and later a producer on The Ian Dempsey Show and has presented various music-led shows for both Today FM and Dublin station Phantom FM (since reinvented as TXFM).

And to put her rising popularity in further context, the Joint National Listenership Research survey released last week showed that the majority of the big shows in Irish radio lost rather than added listeners in 2014.

Meanwhile, Communicorp One, the newly merged sales team for Today FM and Newstalk, is hosting its first research briefing today. It will present findings from the Radio Advertising Bureau’s Audio Now study into the different roles fulfilled by various types of audio services.