Audacy's Chris Oliviero 'thrilled' with early success of Craig Carton's WFAN return
Chris Oliviero, the market president for WFAN’s parent company Audacy, in his office in 2024. Credit: Ed Quinn
One month into Craig Carton’s return to WFAN, Carton’s boss said he is pleased with what he’s hearing on the air and seeing in the metrics that determine whether a radio program is successful.
Chris Oliviero, chief business officer and New York market president for Audacy, WFAN’s parent company, told Newsday on Monday that he is “thrilled” with the first four weeks of “The Carton Show.”
Quarterly ratings for WFAN’s new lineup won’t be out until the spring. But Oliviero said adding an afternoon drive show with Carton and Long Island native Chris McMonigle has created the kind of listener engagement and social media buzz that WFAN was shooting for when it brought back Carton for a third stint at the station.
“I think the combination of Craig and C-Mac is exactly what we had hoped for,” Oliviero said in a telephone interview. “There’s a nice balance. There’s a nice yin and yang. What I’m most excited about — people know what Craig is. People know who Craig is. He’s a known quantity. I’m excited for people to really get introduced to Chris McMonigle and find out what he’s about.
“He’s obviously done overnights for us, but overnights is not afternoon drive. He’s done weekends. Weekends is not afternoon drive. So the amount of people that are going to get exposed to Chris, even in just the first month, is what gets me most excited because his talent is significant.
“I know some people thought we would immediately go back to just putting Evan [Roberts] and Craig together. But one of the reasons we did not do that besides our confidence in Chris was our confidence in Evan and Tiki [Barber] as a team. So keeping them together with Shaun Morash, putting them in middays, we like kind of the flow now, mornings, middays, afternoons.”
Carton told Newsday before the launch of the new show that he expected ratings success, just as he had when he paired in mornings with Boomer Esiason from 2007-17 and Roberts in the afternoon from 2020-23.
“I think I’m really good at doing it,” he said. “My ratings always have borne that out . . . I feel very confident and comfortable the show with Chris McMonigle will have the same level of success that those shows had.”
The radio landscape has changed since Carton’s first two WFAN stints. The other sports talk station in town, ESPN NY, no longer subscribes to traditional Nielsen ratings. And ESPN NY now airs on WCBS-880, which also is owned by Audacy.
Oliviero said he looks at different daily metrics to determine the success of his shows.
“We get, obviously, digital metrics, social engagement metrics, constantly, daily, like every other media company,” he said. “Nielsen is more of a delayed quarterly type approach. The other thing that we get feedback from is just our listeners themselves. Like, are they leaning in? Are they interacting with the show, which is also something that has been significant over the last couple of weeks. Advertisers: Their response has been positive. So there’s the intangible metrics and then there’s the hard quantitative metrics.”
Also different from days past is the one-on-one ratings rivalry between WFAN and ESPN. ESPN’s “The Michael Kay Show” finally beating Mike Francesa in ratings in 2019 was a big event in New York radio. But the game has changed significantly.
“I view them as one of many competitors,” Oliviero said. “I don’t think it is the one-to-one competition that it was let’s say for the ’80s, ’90s, 2000s because technology has allowed so many other sports media platforms to fire up. It’s not just linear broadcast TV/radio. So they’re one of many competitors.
“And in another way, even non-sports media is a competitor. Music stations are a competitor because at the end of the day, what we try to do at FAN is get you the listener to spend more time with us. There’s only so many hours in the day. You have to choose where you’re going to give your listening hours. You could give it to us, you could give it to a music station, you can give it to a podcast, you can give it to ESPN, you can give it to Spotify. So the competitors are endless at this point.”
Anthony Rieber covers sports media and business and professional sports (you know, games and trades and things). He has worked at Newsday since Aug. 31, 1998, and has been in his current position since Jan. 1, 2026.
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