$200 million gamble on the Kylie and Jackie O show being successful in their move into the Melbourne radio market has led to parent company ARN losing a number of major advertisers.

Falling audience numbers and a chaotic marketing campaign a year on from Kyle Sandilands and Jackie O’ Henderson’s show launch in Melbourne has seen revenue dwindle.

Kyle and Jackie O

New figures from The Age reveal that since the beginning of 2025, ARN has lost $6 million in ad revenue compared with the first five months of last year. This means it’s down by 13 per cent according to unpublished Guideline SMI figures.

ARN, which owns the KIIS and Gold networks, has fallen from 28 per cent to 24 per cent of metro ad revenue (the total amount spent by ad agencies and the biggest brands with the major networks).

Meanwhile, their rivals Southern Cross and Nova have subsequently experienced big growth. Agencies have directed $6 million to the companies, giving them the market lead with a 33 per cent combined share. Southern Cross’ share includes Triple M and The Hit Network, while Lachlan Murdoch privately owns Nova Entertainment, which operates Nova and Smooth.

Due to Kyle and Jackie O’s flop in Melbourne, ARN has had to cut more than 200 roles in the past six months, with shares dropping 36 per cent since January 1.

During the campaign launch, billboards were seen throughout Melbourne telling viewers that Kyle and Jackie O’ were “behaving”, with initial signs that the pair were cleaning up their show’s content. However, it’s been reported this may have begun to affect their native audience in Sydney, with numbers sliding.

The show is known for its controversial content and views, with critics saying the breakfast program normalises “violent misogyny”. Last year, many high-profile advertisers boycotted the show’s campaign due to these concerns.

Coinciding with the top-rated Sydney program’s expansion into Melbourne, the grassroots activist group Mad Fucking Witches launched a community campaing targeting the show’s co-host Sandilands in May. The group said advertisers were withdrawing from the show because it doesn’t align with their corporate values.

The group’s founder, Jennie Hill said at the time that the campaign was against Sandilands, rather than Henderson, and that he was speaking about women “in demeaning and objectifying and sexualised ways”.

“We don’t like seeing ourselves as wowsers or anything like that but the content is so beyond the pale in terms of the violent misogyny, we felt like we had to do it,” Hill told The Guardian.

In another outrageous incident last year, the Kyle and Jackie O show aired audio recorded from the “girls” in the office urinating while declaring that “the boys will try and figure out whose flaps made that wee”.

Rejecting this year’s marketing claim that the show was “behaving” in Melbourne, Sandilands told listeners: “We’re not just going to suck Melbourne off all day, every day”.

Following this comment, the show’s share appeared to rise until ultimately falling in the number of people tuning into their show.

ARN chief executive Ciaran Davis called the past 12 months an “unmitigated disaster” during a live Q+A with Sandilands and Henderson last week, according to several media reports.

The national rollout of the Kyle and Jackie O show is expected to continue into Brisbane in 2026. The pair are originally from Queensland, and top sales execs are hoping for better results than the fall-out in Melbourne.