Usually location data, OS type; Android, iPhone, etc., and of course, what they're listening-to and duration.
The data is captured and made available to the owner by the streaming service, or app developer.
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How is KPNW FM doing in the ratings? Particularly in the demos they’re after?
- Thread starter Cobra14
- Start date
What's the difference between a rating and a share? Are you saying that 6+ ratings, not shares, are what we're actually seeing? I always assumed the numbers we get are for total listening. In other words, say 5.4% of all listening in a market was to a particular station.
What we see in the public releases we all call "ratings" are actually shares. The base for "share" is the
"Rating" is the percentage of all people, whether they have their radio on or not, who are listening to a specific station.
"Share" is the percentage of radio listeners that are tuned to a specific station.
6 AM to Midnight there is an average of around 7% of people listening to the radio. So a station with a 3 "share" would have a rating of about 0.2.
Of course, advertisers who buy radio use rating, not share, because their clients want to know what percentage of all consumers (and not the percentage of radio listeners... which they could not care less about) who hear their messages. That is why an agency campaign may be designed to deliver "one hundred Grips a week" where "grips" means "Gross Ratings Points". Shares are not additive, but grips are.
So, when everything ends up online, and OTA radio and TV begins to fade into obscurity, will Neilsen still have the pull that they have now?
Where do websites get their version of "ratings" to sell their viability to advertisers? It isn't Neilsen, is it?
Nielsen is now changing the radio surveys to be "audio" surveys. They call it "Nielsen Audio" and it will eventually measure all audio that does not have accompanied pictures.
Websites, because they have actual "connections" which identify upon logon or connection, can provide all kind of data on user locations and such. However, on shared accounts, like a family WiFi, it can't always know who is listening... just where. Still, the "where" can show average neighborhood income, ethnicity, etc.
So, if the app or streaming service provider can provide all the data a web music service needs to show potential advertisers how large their audience is, along with other datapoints, what need would there really be for services like Nielsen if and when everything ends up online-only?
Earlier you mentioned that Nielsen seems to be getting proactive in developing and using "Nielsen Audio", where they are an audio service measuring company. But if enough stations can gather the data directly from their apps and provide that to potential advertisers, what incentive would they have to subscribe?
I know that this is all theoretical at this point, but I'm curious as to how the radio industry is viewing this, and Nielsen, too.
Earlier you mentioned that Nielsen seems to be getting proactive in developing and using "Nielsen Audio", where they are an audio service measuring company. But if enough stations can gather the data directly from their apps and provide that to potential advertisers, what incentive would they have to subscribe?
I know that this is all theoretical at this point, but I'm curious as to how the radio industry is viewing this, and Nielsen, too.
But that's the thing; not everything has gone on-line only. Whereas on-line media consumption has grown significantly in the past ten years, people still consume news and entertainment in more traditional ways too. It's just that younger consumers of this generation grew up with smartphones apps and streaming, are ultimately who advertisers are trying to reach. Ultimately you still need more than one way of determining how consumers are consuming media.
Nielsen developed PPM to measure what a panel within a market is listening-to, whether that's encoded TV audio, encoded radio, or encoded streaming. Some of the methodology criticism has included; that the relative sample is low, doesn't account for someone wearing headphones or earbuds, doesn't measure non-encoded media, and that being a Nielsen subscriber is expensive.
I see a day where larger media groups will move away from expensive Nielsen ratings services as the streaming audience continues to grow, because these larger groups focus on national ad revenue. National ad agencies are much more familiar and comfortable with results from on-line analytical data, which essentially costs nothing as compared with being a Nielsen subscriber.
The advantage that Nielsen will give advertisers is that it will provide much more precise demographics, socioeconomic data and other information as opposed to basically a head count of streams listened to with no precise demos.
One of the things advertisers like about Nielsen is it's impartial. It doesn't have a dog in the fight. If you go back to the 1930s, radio stations did their own ratings. But advertisers questioned the authenticity of those numbers. Same thing with streaming services.
Amplifying what you are saying: advertising agencies don't want to have to compare multiple sets of data from multiple streaming aggregators or sources. They want one single source with adequate demographic data that shows who specifically is listening to OTA radio, streams, and other paid services.
One of the reasons that radio has always been at a disadvantage is that it takes many buys in every market to cover an advertiser's goals. So if a big campaign buys 5 deep in the top 100 markets, that is 500 stations that have to be selected to match the target of an agency client. Using just Nielsen is already time consuming; using data that is not listener specific from multiple streaming data sources will make some agencies just say, "F it. We won't buy radio".
The other part of this is that streaming services don't have local sales departments. So if you're a local advertiser, it's hard to compare apples to apples. Some advertisers go to Google, and Google will handle placement, but not in the same way.
In those cases, Google is attempting to be the de facto ad agency for those smaller clients. Most of them are not big enough to warrant an actual agency.
I know of one local business here in the Coachella Valley that uses Google services for their small retail outlet. The Google rep... online of course... told them they don't need local radio or TV or print as "Google reaches all your customers" and spending elsewhere was a "waste" so it was better to just spend more on Google.
This is why I say advertisers want data that isn't biased, where the rep doesn't have a dog in the fight.
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