Club Asia radio's audience figures were published for the first time, showing lower than expected numbers.

The east London based station posted an average of 206,000 weekly listeners, exactly half of its rival Sunrise radio which showed a jump in listeners from 332,000 in the third quarter to 412,000 in the last quarter of 2006.

Sunrise's sister station Kismat Radio has 105,000 listeners within Greater London.

Rajar is the industry body that measures audiences for UK based radio stations. Its figures, which are sampled and generated every quarter, are used as a guide by advertising companies for their campaigns.

AIM magazine revealed in October last year that Club Asia had joined Rajar to independently verify its audience figures. The numbers published yesterday were an average of the last six months of 2006.

They will come as some disappointment to the company since it had previously claimed audience figures of 329,000 based on a survey by a different company. Its breakfast show from 6am to 10am has proved to be immensely popular with 99,000 listeners tuning in every morning. The station was launced in October 2003.

Rajar measures the number UK adults who listen to a station for at least 5 minutes in the course of an average week.

Nationally, the digital radio station BBC Asian Network recorded a small rise in audience figures, from 481,000 to 493,000 listeners in the last quarter of 2006.

Sunrise radio publishes listening figures for London and the whole of the UK. Nationally its figures inched ahead of BBC Asian Network to reach just over half a million. It has stopped measuring listeners through Rajar for its youth station Yarr Radio as they were too low and erratic.

16% of households in the UK now possess a digital DAB radio, while a higher percentage listen to radio via the Internet (22%) and Digital TV (39%).

11% of mobile phone users (3.9m) claimed to listen to radio via a mobile phone. Over 2 million people now use their mp3 player to download and listen to podcasts.