Here’s another contrary story about media audiences. Conventional wisdom says that people are switching off the TV and radio and moving to the web. Wrong.

The hard numbers tell a different story. Audiences are fragmenting from terrestrial broadcasts to digital broadcast. Where there are falls they are so small that they could be dismissed within a margin of error.

Radio listening in the UK is close to saturation with 89.2 per cent of the UK population tuning into the radio each week. Listener numbers are up year-on-year for Q3 at 45.7 million but down from 46.3 million in Q2 2009.

Listening to radio via a digital platform has risen 11 per cent year-on-year with 17 million people tuning in to radio via a digitally enabled set each week up from 15.9 million in Q3 2008.

There are no real surprises in the TV market.

TV audiences are fragmenting from terrestrial TV to other platforms. Audiences are down almost one per cent year-on-year with the greatest falls seen by ITV, Channel 4 and Channel 5. BARB lumps non terrestrial channels into a catch all category called Other Viewing. This was the only category to see year-on-year growth (6.74 per cent).

The Ad Contrarian carried a typically brutal analysis in a recent post called The Death Watch Continues (via @nbishop).

“It’s been 5 years now. All the pundits and media geniuses have assured us TV is dead. All the web maniacs and new age marketing gurus have promised us it’s dead. All the social media snake oil salesmen and ad agency bozos have guaranteed us it’s dead. Apparently, the only people who aren’t convinced of this are the viewing public.”

It’s a different story in the newspaper industry of course.