Excluding these noncash impairment losses, our operating income was a positive $3.3 million compared to a positive operating income in prior year of $4.7 million. Third quarter interest expense decreased $176,000 year-over-year to $6.4 million and our outstanding debt at the end of third quarter was $287 million. Now we used 100% of the net proceeds from the sale of WJBR FM, which closed early October and some balance sheet cash to repurchase 10 million of our bonds at a discount of 37.375%. This was completed on October 17, 2023, and decreases our total debt to $277 million. Third quarter 2023 EBITDA declined 23.3% or $1.7 million from the comparable prior year quarter to $5.5 million. LTM adjusted net leverage, including add-backs such as certain taxes, noncash compensation, losses from our digital agency build-up, pro forma for our 2022 agency acquisition and pro forma 2022 and 2023 risk was 7.03 times.
We ended the third quarter 2023 with cash on hand of $29.7 million, net of $12.4 million interest payments that we made on August 1st. We are generating cash from operations, and we’ll continue to build up our cash during the fourth quarter as we expect to generate positive free cash flow in fourth quarter. Our capital expenditures for the quarter were $1 million and that compares to third quarter 2022 CapEx spend of $4.7 million, which was related to our Boston build-out. Year-to-date CapEx spend was $3.1 million and that compares to year-to-date 2022 of $11.2 million. We expect our CapEx spending in 2023 to be around $4 million to $5 million for the full year. And with that I’ll turn it back to Caroline.
Caroline Beasley: Thank you, Marie. While we were faced with headwinds in third quarter, especially from National, I’m pleased with our third quarter digital revenue and new business initiatives. Our continued digital revenue growth has allowed us to partially offset the decline in spot. Our successful content strategy helped drive the growth in our digital revenue and we expect this to continue into fourth quarter and beyond. Our multi-platform local content strategy continues to drive tremendous audience growth in the third quarter. Our O&O audience monthly reach is now almost 32 million compared to approximately 29 million during the same period in 2022. This represents a 13% overall monthly audience increase from last year.
Our radio brands continue to maintain dominant positions in Nielsen, where our market share grew by 6% year-over-year with the key demographic of adults 25-54. However, like other recent quarters, the largest audience growth was seen on our digital O&O assets with unique users increasing by 37% from Q3’22 to Q3’23 for a total of 31.2 million unique users in the quarter and this is compared to 21 million in the year ago quarter. And on a year-to-date basis, unique users increased 63% from 51.8 million to 84.3 million. This audience growth led to an 18% increase of sellable digital impressions from Q3’22 to Q3’23. And during Q3, our growing total digital and esports audience represented over 50% of our total monthly audience. In Q3, we successfully rolled out a more technically advanced version of our branded apps.
Plus, we launched a new National content brand, podcastradious.com and broadcastradious.com, which is the first-ever radio brand in the US dedicated to podcast discovery and curation. Additionally, in October, we launched a new country format on our side channels in markets where we currently have a country format process, which is solely focused on featuring new artists and their music. Now moving on to esports. We just closed out the season with our best finish ever winning second place in the Overwatch League. And this when accounted for an additional $400,000 in prize money for a total of $620,000 this year. And as you may have heard, the league will likely shut down by year-end and we’ll have more on this on our next quarterly call. Looking into fourth quarter with continued uncertainty in advertising, our goals remain on driving further revenue diversification and audience expansion to maximize revenue and lessen the impact of National decline.
