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How do public radio stations measure listenership?

G

guyinmgm

I had recently written to the station management of Troy University Public Radio suggesting a small programming change and the staff member who replied to me stated the ratings they have dictate listeners are happy with the current programming based on ratings they have accumulated. I know how commercial radio has ratings to determine demographics, listeners, and other vital information useful to advertising but how does non-commercial public radio find or determine ratings?

**Note if this needs to be redirected to another section of the discussion boards, please do so. I am not sure if this is a suitable place to pose this type of question. Thank you. **
 
Back when I saw Arbitrons, they would be listed along with the commercial stations. I don't know of any other. I'm not aware of them purchasing Arbitron but since they are non-commercial, they could possibly at a reduced rate????????? Troy Public Radio should show in three books, Dothan (WRWA), Montgomery (WTSU) and also Columbus (WTJB). You pique my curiosity as from whom the reply was sent.
 
Well, before posting on the forum here, I went to Arbitron but for the Montgomery, Alabama market shown by the link below there aren't any public radio or non commercial radio stations represented. You have to choose Montgomery as the market from the list to see the ratings. I was only suggesting to only air a show once instead of having an encore playing of the same show from earlier in the day.

http://www1.arbitron.com/tlr/public/report.do;jsessionid=F9eoeb8fCfwru8LOqBHXSQ**.piuapp08
 
Guys, public radio stations are not listed in the Arbitron ratings. The are part of the - in Mintgomery's case - the 20% of the listening that is not attributable to any commercial radio station. Local radio listening never equals 100%. I do believe that Arbitron will sell, for a price, the actual listening estimates to the non-comms. That's probably what the local non-comm was referring too - if not total BS.
 
Public stations -- and indeed any station whether in the commercial or non-commercial band -- are all measured by Arbitron. It's the publication of the data which is handled separately.

Public and Non-Comm stations may subscribe to the Radio Research Consortium ( http://www.rrconline.org/ ) in order to obtain audience information. It's the same data, and indeed under that link you can find some interesting reports on the top US Public stations, ranked via the same share and cume that we are used to.

In principle, Public stations are more interested in pure listenership vs. advert... ahem, I mean underwriting sales, so the RRC also provides such programming-specific information as listener turnover and sharing.

On the commercial side, similar information on non-comm stations is available in the Arbitron Maximi$er and PD Advantage products. Again, like specific daypart and demo information, it is just not released to the public.

Public stations can also chose to utilize a more practical and quite-direct method of audience feedback: the number of memberships and/or amount of donations generated during each hour of membership drives. Before the days of fine-arts programming being shuttled off to the HD-subcarrier wasteland, a generous member with lots of zeros in a donation check could keep a favorite classical or opera program running for years.

Regarding the OP's question about the decision to repeat a specific program, the station may indeed be making a programming decision based on reaching new-to-that-hour listeners -- or new/improved donorship -- with a second airing of the same program.
 
Simply count every Prius sporting a "yes we can" bumper sticker, multiply that number by .03. Drivers of the new Volt however can not be counted as the radio drains the battery too fast. :D
 
I agree with a previous post about Arbitron listing non-commercial stations. That was never done during my radio career which spanned 1971 to 1992. The published book did not include those stations; however, the station could pay a fee and get a limited amount of data that was generated by the diary responses. The BIRCH survey reports, which were around in the 80s and early 90s, did list the non-comm stations in the same tabulations with the others.
 
One of the stations I program is an NPR station. Once a year they send out a survey on programming. It is also on their website. Maybe that is what they are referring to.
 
All stations with listeners are listed in the Arbitron numbers we receive as subscribers (Jackson, Mississippi). Since our company uses the data to serve our advertisers, and the "public" stations are not supposed to run "ads", we exclude those stations that are non commercial broadcasters from the data we utilize. One of my pet peeves is hearing obvious commercials on some of these so-called public stations that compete for dollars with real stations.
 
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