When Josh Innes was fired from WIP, and as he acknowledged when talking to Kyle, his ratings had been falling off for a little while. But in their conversation, he also praised the station he was at in Houston, his listeners, and the people who still listen from up here. Things sounded like they were going well.

Innes’ ratings in Houston aren’t great:

Albeit with an asterisk, KBME (790 AM) continues to struggle in the afternoon drive ratings since ousting Charlie Pallilo in October for Josh Innes. Since Innes’ debut Oct. 10, KBME has lost almost two-thirds of Pallilo’s audience from late September among men 25-54.

Now, for the aforementioned asterisk: The Media Ratings Council, which audits ratings services that provide measurements estimates for Internet, print, radio, TV and cross-platform media use, declined to certify Nielsen Audio’s portable people meter estimates for December.

Nielsen says it lost contact with 8 percent of its approximately 5,600 meters nationwide from Nov. 3-9, which meant it was unable to monitor radio use during that time for those panelists. It’s not known how many Houston meters were included in the outage, but Nielsen says it still achieved its reporting goals for the month and the outage was no big deal.

Houston Chronicle’s David Barron specifies that the December ratings book is not yet certified for use by advertisers because of the outage, but “even an 8 percent outage, however, wouldn’t be enough to mask the degree to which KILT (610 AM) continues to dominate the four all-sports stations in Houston and the degree to which Innes has thus far been unable to hold on to KBME’s existing audience, let alone build on it.”

Pallilo was let go while he was receiving his highest rating of the year, but “it will be February or March before we get a clearer picture of the degree to which the Innes hire is succeeding, or not” due to holiday music stations skewing the numbers.

Since October, KBME’s rating in Innes’ slot has dropped from 2.3 to 1.4 to 0.9. The top station, KILT, in that same period posted 4.7, 4.5, and 3.9.

Innes’ numbers are also hurt by the fact that KBME does not carry the Texans games. But overall, Innes’ 0.8 for December was the second lowest in the sports talk radio market for the month, bested (or worsted) only by the morning show at his own station. Maybe it’s the station…