Reliable to whom? If the advertisers or radio stations have an issue, they contact their Nielsen rep.
You're complaining about the free sample. You get what you pay for.
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John Catsimatidis Will be Acquiring another Station
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Reliable to whom? If the advertisers or radio stations have an issue, they contact their Nielsen rep.
You're complaining about the free sample. You get what you pay for.
That is “share” while most agency buys use rating and they use multi-month rolling averages. And even when agencies use Average Persons so to be able to compare with streaming data, the use of multiple months in an average flattens the month to month variations.
This is why I prefer Lance’s ratings summaries because he shows a full 6 books and we begin to see the difference between trends and normal statistical wobble.
It appears to be good enough for the people who actually pay for the data.
What's your agenda?
Why do so many people on this site keep defending things like this and acting like it should be nobody's business?
You don't have to be a Nielsen subscriber to be affected by bad data. Artificially bad ratings can cause negative programming changes, cause good people to lose their jobs, even threaten the viability of radio stations that people care about.
Any company, even Nielsen, deserves to be held accountable for producing poor results. You can call that an agenda if you want. I call it caring about facts and accuracy.
They are. They're being sued by Cumulus. There's a big difference between Cumulus and you. Cumulus is a business that is directly affected by what Nielsen does. You are not. You have no contract with Nielsen. You are not financially affected by what they report. Therefore you have no standing. If you truly care about facts and accuracy, you should subscribe to their report and read it in context. Rather than basing an opinion on the free sample.
In a way that's true, but you have to be a subscriber to have legal standing. Just being a casual listener doesn't give you any rights.
You can complain to the FCC if you want, since the government is supposed to be accountable to taxpayers. But Nielsen doesn't owe you anything.
That is because the only people with any concerns are not station owners and operators, ad agencies and their staff. And they are not the MRC.
If any station, in this case, in Western Suffolk County, feels harmed, they can bring it up with Nielsen and even the MRC.
Ratings are clearly labeled as "audience estimates". Everyone who uses them knows they are seeing the equivalent of a poll, not a census.
The ratings would improve considerably if the sample was larger. Ask any radio station owner, big or small, if they want to pay for that. The answer is a very clear "no" because just to reduce inaccuracy by one standard error requires four times the sample.
Most of management wishes we had never been pushed into the PPM, which doubled the cost. There is no interest in quadrupleing it now.
That is a patently ridiculous argument. No one needs to have a contract with a company in order to have a critical opinion of them. And people don't need to be *financially* affected by Nielsen's bad data in order to be affected in other ways, as explained above.
Not meaning to be presumptuous here -- I've been out of radio for over 20 years -- and am certainly not qualified to speculate about reading someone's mind. But the DXer bee buzzing in me for decades recently has been interested (among other factors) in the political aspects of FCC chairman Carr's appointment and the accompanying talk months ago of de-regulation.
Basically, Mr. Cats now owns a string of stations that are all omni. One tower to maintain. Even directional translators use one tower. There's not a WHLI or a WNYH or a WNJR or a blinking Meadowlands light show in the bunch. Almost like a rainy-day scenario. Who knows -- in the future, when multi-tower regionals and even higher-power stations are just 'not worth it' .....
Basically, Mr. Cats now owns a string of stations that are all omni. One tower to maintain. Even directional translators use one tower. There's not a WHLI or a WNYH or a WNJR or a blinking Meadowlands light show in the bunch. Almost like a rainy-day scenario. Who knows -- in the future, when multi-tower regionals and even higher-power stations are just 'not worth it' .....
And Cumulus is suing over pricing, not accuracy.
You are calling Nielsen ratings "bad data". That is not true. This is a poll, not a census (I am repeating this as you don't get it). Polls have error. The error increases as the sample size decreases.
But a smaller sample with a bigger margin of error is not "bad data". It is exactly what is offered and what stations willingly buy.
You can have critical opinions of anyone and everyone. But you have no standing with them, and they don't owe you a thing.
But there's nothing you can do about it, because you have no standing. You have no contract with Nielsen or the radio station.
You can complain on a message board. Hooray. Get on line with all the other complainers.
We're all affected by the weather. But there's nothing we can do about it. That's you & Nielsen.
It is bad data. Lance gave concrete examples of wildly implausible audience swings attributed to diary placement which are quoted and bolded above. All you have given is your opinion in defense of a big corporation doing mediocre work, as usual.
But the client is Red Apple. They own both stations affected in the report. How does this reporting affect them?
If Red Apple only owned WABC, and another company owned WLIR, that second company could call Nielsen, demand to see the specifics of the PPM placements, and then discuss ways to rectify the situation. That's a real world situation, and Nielsen deals with that kind of thing all the time. But because you have no standing, you're not part of that discussion. You're left with your opinion. The next book comes out, and things change, and you don't know why.
There are no diaries in the New York City MSA and in the embedded markets like Nassau-Suffolk. They have been metered markets for going on 18 years.
PPMs are place in households for two years, unless there is non-compliance or the household (dwelling unit being the correct term) being measured drops out. All member of the household have to comply with meter usage or the whole household is dropped.
I did contract work for Arbitron an eon ago, and at that time I thought that they tried to do the best possible job. I am not as aware of how Nielsen works, but have delt with their people in the U.S. and a number of itnernational markets and thought they did a good job.
In the overall picture of things, Nielsen is not a "big corporation". They have a niche business, but have operations in nearly 100 countries either with their own operations or associate agreements with local researchers.
Nielsen Holdings - Wikipedia
And they are challenged by changing media usage worldwide, as well as at least one generation that almost refuses to be surveyed and another that is hard to recruit.
Follow up: I did a bit of simple research and found that...
Western Suffolk: The towns of Huntington, Babylon, Smithtown, Islip, and Brookhaven contain approximately 91% of the county's total population
Eastern Suffolk has, thus, less than 150,000 persons. So if meters are placed with some regard to geography, losing just one or two households on the East End that favored a couple of local stations can cause huge swings in listening
Meanwhile back at WRCR radio: Red Apple filed for an extension of time to consummate the deal for Haverstraw's AM 1700 a couple weeks back when the FCC began accepting applications again. The sale was approved back in mid-July, but didn't close within 90 days, hence this first request for an extension.
Listening to WRCR yesterday afternoon and again today, it's broadcasting Greg Kelly's show with double audio. The two programs are about 30 seconds apart, and are both ahead of what's heard on WABC's air.
Things quiet down to just one program for the news at :59, but double again when the Kelly show (from the Red Apple Audio Network!) resumes in real-time, actually competing with the last 30 seconds of WABC's newscast.
Listening a bit longer, it sounds like the doubling consists of, first: the Red Apple Audio Network feed of Kelly, followed about 30 seconds later by WABC's program. That would explain the absence of the second program over the top of the hour.
Listening to WRCR yesterday afternoon and again today, it's broadcasting Greg Kelly's show with double audio. The two programs are about 30 seconds apart, and are both ahead of what's heard on WABC's air.
Things quiet down to just one program for the news at :59, but double again when the Kelly show (from the Red Apple Audio Network!) resumes in real-time, actually competing with the last 30 seconds of WABC's newscast.
Listening a bit longer, it sounds like the doubling consists of, first: the Red Apple Audio Network feed of Kelly, followed about 30 seconds later by WABC's program. That would explain the absence of the second program over the top of the hour.
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