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KRTH tops Nielsen Audio ratings for June

Thomps2525 said:
So why, when the Dodgers announce the attendance figure for a baseball game, do they give only the total number?
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They give a total. But they don't break out the paid tickets, the promotional tickets, the freebies they give with stadium ad packages, the visiting celebrities tickets, the charity auction tickets... all the ones that got in without paying. Then there are the bulk rate tickets that they sell to the bus tour operators from Bakersfield and Palm Springs and Victorville.

So what is important is not the number of people, but the number of dollars. 12+ vs 25-54 in a ballpark.
 
DavidEduardo said:


They give a total. But they don't break out the paid tickets, the promotional tickets, the freebies they give with stadium ad packages, the visiting celebrities tickets, the charity auction tickets... all the ones that got in without paying. Then there are the bulk rate tickets that they sell to the bus tour operators from Bakersfield and Palm Springs and Victorville.

So what is important is not the number of people, but the number of dollars. 12+ vs 25-54 in a ballpark.
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Actually years ago, the MLB teams gave out two numbers - total tickets sold, and total turnstyle count, which is usually higher because of the freebies and promotional tix. But at a certain point they started to believe that giving both numbers was rather pointless, since most people don't care or even understand the difference, and it was too much of an insight into their operations which they would prefer to be somewhat opaque to the public. Now they just give out tickets sold and not turnstyle count. I am not sure how promos and freebies count in the sold definition though. Doesn't matter, because they are small potatoes anyway.

In stadium ticket operations, there are only three kinds of tickets, and this is how they are broken out. (1) season ticket sales (2) single game tickets including ticketmaster and gameday walk-up sales, and (3) promotions, and freebies. Of these the most important is the season tickets, because they are sold in advance and are generally the higher priced tickets. By knowing that number, they know how much of their fixed costs are going to be covered with those sales and the other guaranteed revenue streams such as broadcast rights. They then add the net expected revenue from categories (2) and (3) to determine their annual revenue budget. This budgeting aspect is of far more importance to them than the demographic aspects, which are handled by a small (by comparison) promotions department of the team plus the league office, which dictates the national advertising and public relations.

I really don't know why I have to set the ticketing operations of an MLB team straight on a radio information website.
 
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Now my head is starting to hurt! Before I go take an aspirin and lie down, I want to ask something: In the early days of radio rating services such as Pulse and Hooper, were listeners to the various stations categorized according to age group, sex and other factors? Or did the earliest ratings show only the total audience size of each station? Today we know how many males and females in each age group are listening to a station at any particular time of day and for what length of time but have those statistics always been included in radio ratings? I'd love to know what the first ratings service was and how they determined audience sizes and shares. Diaries? Call-out research?
 
Thomps2525 said:
Now my head is starting to hurt! Before I go take an aspirin and lie down, I want to ask something: In the early days of radio rating services such as Pulse and Hooper, were listeners to the various stations categorized according to age group, sex and other factors? Or did the earliest ratings show only the total audience size of each station? Today we know how many males and females in each age group are listening to a station at any particular time of day and for what length of time but have those statistics always been included in radio ratings? I'd love to know what the first ratings service was and how they determined audience sizes and shares. Diaries? Call-out research?
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As ratings developed, particularly as listening shifted from "households" (when radio then was like TV today) to "persons" the ratings started to be broken into age groups.

Of course, The Pulse had extensive demo breaks by the mid-60's. And Arbitron, which began in 1965 with radio measurements, went even deeper in demos and dayparts. So the transition from program ratings and households to age and gender and persons occurred somewhere in the late 50's and 60's.

The first ratings were the Crossley Ratings going to 1927 and were done in the telephone coincidental fashion and counted households. If there were break-outs, it was by program and network, not demos. The telephone, using central zone local dialing, was the preferred method. The Pulse liked to do in person in-home personal interviews polling aided 24 hour recall. Arbitron moved into the diary. Some of the variety of competitors from Birch to Mediatrend used the phone, using 24 hour aided or unaided recall.

One of Arbitron's significant early contributions was the expanded, often multi-county survey area. Using the mail and personal placement, they did not have to focus on smaller inner cities due to the high costs of long distance to outlying areas. This paved the way to the success of much better coverage FMs as market geography expanded.
 
I remember a few times in the late 1950s when my father got a phone call from someone who never identified herself but asked two questions: "Are you listening to the radio right now? If so, which station are you listening to?" I assumed the calls were from Pulse or Hooper. They may have also come from one of the radio stations. We never knew for certain. The caller never asked my father how old he was. By the way, he liked KFI and KNX in the 1950s. I wonder whatever happened to those stations.
 
And for those of us still interested in the AM band look at what's going on -

KFI as usual is #1, KNX is # 2 and KSPN #3 - all 50,000 watt stations (well KSPN only part of the time). But KSPN has only a half of KNX's share and a third of KFI.

#4 is now KEIB and #5 is KLAC (both iheart stations as is KFI).

KRLA is now #6, beating KABC for #7 (both talk format stations). KLAA is tied with Spanish language KTNQ for #8 and #9. KFWB is dead last in #10 position.

KHJ is apparently not being rated after its recent sale.

So iheart is king of the AM hill with three of top five positions. I tend to think the ranking will stay the same in all demographics; certainly there are plenty of commercials on all the leaders.
 
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Art Landing said:
And for those of us still interested in the AM band look at what's going on -

KFI as usual is #1, KNX is # 2 and KSPN #3 - all 50,000 watt stations (well KSPN only part of the time).

#4 is now KEIB and #5 is KLAC (both iheart stations as is KFI).

KRLA is now #6, beating KABC for #7 (both talk format stations). KLAA is tied with Spanish language KTNQ for #8 and #9. KFWB is dead last in #10 position.

KHJ is apparently not being rated after its recent sale.

So iheart is king of the AM hill with three of top five positions. I tend to think the ranking will stay the same in all demographics; certainly there are plenty of commercials on all the leaders.
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I'd be interested in how Jim Rome is faring compared to the rest of the station (KFWB) and head to head against KSPN and KLAC. He took big bucks from CBS to anchor their sportsradio network, which also has landed him some CBS TV network airtime as well as some Showtime specials, but I believe he has much less visibility both locally and nationally than he had when he was on KLAC and Fox Sports on the radio and was a fixture on daytime ESPN. I know I don't listen nearly as much as I used to and never see him on TV, even though I suppose I know where to find him in both places if I really wanted to. I have a feeling, at least locally, the move to the stillborn Beast format on KFWB was one move too many around the dial for many of his local fans.
 
ChannelFlipper said:
I'd be interested in how Jim Rome is faring compared to the rest of the station (KFWB) and head to head against KSPN and KLAC.
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I'd like to know that as well. I've sort of followed his career since it first began at KTMS/Y-97 in Santa Barbara, where Jim not only did the sports talk show on the AM but also the traffic reports during my afternoon-drive show on the FM, way back in 1988.
 
ChannelFlipper said:
I'd be interested in how Jim Rome is faring compared to the rest of the station (KFWB) and head to head against KSPN and KLAC.
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Can someone post the times the show is on? I am not a sports radio follower.

Of course one issue is that KFWB has such low numbers that almost any hour by hour analysis is statistically invalid.
 
Jim Rome was sports director of UC Santa Barbara's KCSB before joining KTMS. In December of 1990, he became a part-timer at XETRA 690 in Tijuana/San Diego and was given his own daily show in 1992. It went into syndication in 1996. Rome is now heard on KFWB from 9 am to noon. By the way, when he was at XETRA there was a woman working there named Janet Nauman. He married her. Awwww.
 
DavidEduardo said:


Can someone post the times the show is on? I am not a sports radio follower.

Of course one issue is that KFWB has such low numbers that almost any hour by hour analysis is statistically invalid.
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"Jim Rome has returned to Los Angeles and can now be heard on The Beast 980 each weekday from 9am-12pm."

--- http://thebeast980.com/the-beast-980-weekday-lineup/jim-rome/

I've never listened to his program 'cause I'm not a sports radio follower either, but apparently he is popular with sports buffs
 
ChannelFlipper said:
I'd be interested in how Jim Rome is faring compared to the rest of the station (KFWB) and head to head against KSPN and KLAC. He took big bucks from CBS to anchor their sportsradio network, which also has landed him some CBS TV network airtime as well as some Showtime specials, but I believe he has much less visibility both locally and nationally than he had when he was on KLAC and Fox Sports on the radio and was a fixture on daytime ESPN. I know I don't listen nearly as much as I used to and never see him on TV, even though I suppose I know where to find him in both places if I really wanted to. I have a feeling, at least locally, the move to the stillborn Beast format on KFWB was one move too many around the dial for many of his local fans.
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Rome is 50 and will turn 51 this year. His whole shtick on ESPN in the '90s was "young, hip and brash." When he talks that smack now, he has less credibility. He is aging out of his niche.
 
TheBigA said:
Name a talk host who isn't. The Mad Dog isn't as young as he acts either. Chris Russo is 55.
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And he's on satellite, reaching maybe a low six-figure audience scattered across the country. (One can only guess, since SXM ratings are a corporate mega-secret.) Colin Cowherd is the same age as Rome and still on terrestrial radio, but he doesn't try to sound young and hip. He's just a 51-year-old guy who's passionate about sports, especially college sports.
 
ChannelFlipper said:
I'd be interested in how Jim Rome is faring compared to the rest of the station (KFWB) and head to head against KSPN and KLAC.
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12+ 9 to Noon: 0.3 share.

Looking closely at the AQH persons, we see that Rome's 0.3 was at the low end of the 0.26 to 0.35 range for a 0.3, while KFWB was at the high range of the 0.2 share range. So there was barely any difference between Rome and the station overall.

KSPN: 1.3 in 9-Noon, and KLAC a 0.4 share.
 
DavidEduardo said:


12+ 9 to Noon: 0.3 share.

Looking closely at the AQH persons, we see that Rome's 0.3 was at the low end of the 0.26 to 0.35 range for a 0.3, while KFWB was at the high range of the 0.2 share range. So there was barely any difference between Rome and the station overall.

KSPN: 1.3 in 9-Noon, and KLAC a 0.4 share.
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This is very strong corroboration of my suspicions, which was (1) that the power of the name brand ESPN has come to dominate the local sports stations, a feat that is even more impressive given that they are on arguably the weakest frequency (KLAA does not count in this analysis), and (2) Rome's star power has fallen off precipitously. He was supposed to be the talent to drive people not just to KFWB, but to the entire CBS sports franchise on both radio, and (to a lesser extent) tv, and I can see no evidence of that happening. I agree with the poster who mentioned the smack talk above. It was always pretty juvenile, but the older he gets, the less befitting it is. His main competition, Colin Cowherd is simply putting on a better product these days.

I believe his downturn can be easily traced to the moment he signed with CBS. At ESPN and Fox Radio, he was additive to the name of the product, but CBS sports is primarily on weaker sports radio outlets across the country (although his show is still syndicated) and having a daily show on the CBS Sports cable network is one step removed from changing your name to Casper, and he simply doesn't have the star power to drive significant audience to either any more.
 
ChannelFlipper said:
I believe his downturn can be easily traced to the moment he signed with CBS. At ESPN and Fox Radio, he was additive to the name of the product,
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That comment makes me wonder if he really was an "additive to the name." We had a discussion in another area that no single personality is really dominant at ESPN. The brand itself is the product, not the specific individuals. They're just readers and characters in the show. This comes on the same day that ESPN let go of Keith Olbermann for the second time.

As for KFWB, don't blame the programming for the ratings.
 
I count all radio jobs, even the non-paying ones. And wasn't Rome also interning at KTMS while he was still attending UCSB?
 
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