My original note was in reply to the following comment posted earlier by Stan . . .
"The death of Limbaugh won’t help their ratings, not that his ratings are that good."
I replied that Rush Limbaugh's ratings are still very high. David criticized my reference to Wikipedia (Limbaugh #1) and Talkers.com (Limbaugh #2), as if to imply that neither source could possibly be accurate, but now he agrees that "Hannity and Limbaugh are at the very top."
Maybe Stan can explain why he stated that Limbaugh's ratings are less than excellent.
Limbaugh is "at the top" among senior demographic talk shows. It is not at the top in overall senior ratings, and is definitely not at the top in overall ratings.
In a few markets Rush is overall #1... except that this claim is valid in persons 55 and older. An example is Houston, but the average listening is 22,000 people. That is in a Top 6 US market. That is an average of 22,000 listeners in a market of 7.2 million! In New York City, he averages 65,000 listeners in a market of 19.2 million.
That's just under 90,000 in two markets that are about 10% of the total US population. That means an AQH listening level of 900,000 in the whole country. So what that says is that at any given moment in the time period Rush is on, at least 330,000,000 Americans are not listening. Rush has a major talk show, but most radio listeners don't like that format or that show.
"At the very top" are music formats and FM stations in general. Most Rush affiliates are AM stations. Start looking at people under 55, and most will say they never or practically never listen to an AM station.
Rush leads in a narrow demographic and a narrow format. Charlemagne tha God likely has more AQH listening!
In his first decade, Rush had lots of listeners in 35-54. But those people, on average, are in their 60's now. While they may be voters, they are not a very salable demographic for advertisers and radio revenue.
