I was looking at some old reports and some of the numbers from BIA seem way off in the markets I am familiar with. Some radio station billing figures seem greatly inflated, while others seem greatly under reported. How accurate is the data?
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Accuracy of yearly billing info?
- Thread starter Megacycler
- Start date
As accurate as the reporting operations choose it to be.
Megacycler said:
The market billing tends to be very accurate for all the signficant players... it's hard to get real data on the brokered stations and such.
Where discrepancies come in is that the "Big Broadcasting, Inc." cluster may be 3 FMs and an AM, and they report each station at 25% of total revenue because that is the way they allocate internally (a very simplified example, of course). So the folks who do the reports can view the data from souces like Miller Kaplan, speak with station managers and even look for ratings correlations based on typical format power ratios and get their own figure by station.
Even simpler: a 2-FM combo may allocate revenue half and half, but if one station has twice the ratings of the other, we know it is not truly that way... but the station management can say, "well, without the bigger rated station, the little one would not bill at all..."
BIA includes a confidence level score for each market, and that indicates how tight or loose the estimates may be.
Let the truth be told.. The numbers are greatly manipulated for various reasons.
Many owners are trying to get out of radio. It's not the cash cow it used to be. With that said they are reporting earnings that are greatly inflated with the assumption the next potential owner is checking out the BIA.
Many are drawing a rosey picture in order to sell.
We're billing over a million a year! What are we actually collecting? That' s none of your business I reckon!
joshzz
Many owners are trying to get out of radio. It's not the cash cow it used to be. With that said they are reporting earnings that are greatly inflated with the assumption the next potential owner is checking out the BIA.
Many are drawing a rosey picture in order to sell.
We're billing over a million a year! What are we actually collecting? That' s none of your business I reckon!
joshzz
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