If you exist in Australia, particularly its East Coast, you probably know the name Kyle Sandilands. For anyone catching up, he’s a long-time Aussie media personality who is, in retrospect, probably the best example of how Trumpian damage control works: When you’re under fire, triple down.
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The notorious shock jock and his long-time female counterpart, ‘Jackie-O,’ who, up until a stoush a few weeks ago, held the title of Australia’s most popular broadcast and the world’s highest paid media personalities, has long been known for deliberate inappropriateness.
Whether that’s interviewing underage girls about sexual assault live on air or constant discussion on interviewees’ favourite sex positions, Sandlilands has made a name for himself by being deliberately bodacious, being deliberately offensive, and clear evidence that all publicity can be good publicity.
ASX-listed ARN Media (ASX:A1N), which runs the KIIS channel in the eastern states that hosts the duo – or hosted – has long been the subject of regulatory scrutiny.
And after Kyle’s and Jackie-O’s relationship blew up on-air in very public fashion a few weeks ago (which really did seem like the kind of tiff one may have with a partner when both are coming down), the regulator ACMA has moved to put the screws in.
Sun Tzu said not to interrupt your enemy while they are making a mistake; clearly, ACMA was listening. Now that Kyle and Jackie-O have been axed and both personalities are publicly engaged in a feud that seems like it’ll run a while, the regulator has imposed a half-decade order on KIIS that basically ratchets up the strictness around not talking about depraved sex stuff live on air.
Depraved sex stuff is, after all, the real appeal to the duo’s erstwhile programming; it was a deliberate “fuck you” to the seriousness of mainstream media. Australians are known for apathy, but the global audience perhaps overlooks this country’s firm enthusiasm for irreverence.
(Something this finance journalist absolutely can’t relate to.)
So basically, the government have just castrated ARN’s lead money-maker. Sandilands still has TV spots, and Jackie-O still has her half of the story and legions of supporters; the people themselves will probably be fine.
So that leaves the question of ARN Media’s stock price: was there a bloodbath session on Monday? The answer is no. The market doesn’t care about this development, because nobody trades ARN anyway.
Perhaps they used to: Returns are down -43% over the last year; the last time the stock was worth more than $2.00/sh was in CY22.
Now, it’s at 34cps. And the news of the government basically killing the show for good? Absolutely no movement. In fact, as at 12.55pm SYD on Monday, 11.9K shares had traded hands. That’s compared to a 4wavg of 70.8K shares trading hands daily; compare that to the fact ARN has 313M shares on issue.
It’s an illiquid Australian stock. That’s the long story short. Anybody long-term still holding on is probably loss-harvesting at this point.
“The Licensees must ensure that the Program does not broadcast content which is highly offensive or which contains strong and explicit Sexual References by the standards of an ordinary reasonable listener,” one of ACMA’s new licence conditions on KIIS reads.
It’s a death-knell. These people literally have nothing else to talk about. The fact that worked so well for ratings is definitely correlated, at least, with declining book consumption in Australia.
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