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Lowest rated station you've ever seen? (Not including rimshot/low power stations)

What's the lowest rated station that has a full signal licensed to a city you've seen recorded? This includes demos which are particularly abysmal. This doesn't include npr/noncom/rimshot or lpfms
 
Not sure where this thread could go. Every month we see ratings for major cities with stations pulling 0.1s, 0.2s or doing no-shows. This month in Los Angeles, KTNQ, 50,000 watts at 1020 on the dial---a 0.2 (up from an 0.1 last month). The once-dominant KHJ, same story (an 0.2 after a 0.1).
 
And since 0.1 can represent no listeners at all, it being a "participation trophy" of sorts from Nielsen to its less successful subscribers, that 6+ rating is the ultimate meaningless number. Yet here we are discussing it!

Mr. Hagerty is right. There are plenty of 0.1s out there, most of them down-on-their-luck AMs with ethnic, talk or occasionally sports (non-local) formats.
 
And since 0.1 can represent no listeners at all, it being a "participation trophy" of sorts from Nielsen to its less successful subscribers, that 6+ rating is the ultimate meaningless number. Yet here we are discussing it!

Mr. Hagerty is right. There are plenty of 0.1s out there, most of them down-on-their-luck AMs with ethnic, talk or occasionally sports (non-local) formats.
I meant any full-powered radio station (one that covers an entire listening area or close to it.)
 
I meant any full-powered radio station (one that covers an entire listening area or close to it.)
So do I. WEEI(AM) in Boston routinely gets 0.1s and 0.2s with its format of who-cares sports events and syndicated sports talk. WPOP Hartford does similarly poorly with second- and third-tier syndicated right-wingers.
 
And since 0.1 can represent no listeners at all, it being a "participation trophy" of sorts from Nielsen to its less successful subscribers, that 6+ rating is the ultimate meaningless number. Yet here we are discussing it!
Yes, a subscribed station gets a 0.1 even if they only get a single quarter hour of credit.
Mr. Hagerty is right. There are plenty of 0.1s out there, most of them down-on-their-luck AMs with ethnic, talk or occasionally sports (non-local) formats.
And many stations with good full market signals don't need ratings as they are religious or ethnic and so their 0.1 or 0.2 shares are not shown in the public Nielsen releases.

Another example of a station that does not care about ratings but which has a major signal is Bloomberg's WBBR... 50,000 "powerful watts" on 1130. But they get as high as a 0.7 to 0.8 at times.

Best example: Most of the K-Love stations don't subscribe, and so they don't show in the "free sample" public releases from Nielsen.
 
KBLA 1580 is a live & local talk station in LA that gets zero share. That's pretty low.

Tavis Smiley paid $7 million to get this zero share.
But KBLA is far from being a full market signal. A couple of miles east of the site, you can not hear it. And it protects the Mexican border 24/7 as 1580 is a Mexican clear channel.
 
WLS 890 in Chicago is my recent champion. Scoring a 0.8 share late last year in the December 21 survey. But like most markets, the the AM stations in Chicago all perform poorly.

There was a time that WGN, WLS, WBBM, WMAQ and WCFL were important stations in the midwest, but today they combine for about 1/12th of listening in the market.
 
WLS 890 in Chicago is my recent champion. Scoring a 0.8 share late last year in the December 21 survey. But like most markets, the the AM stations in Chicago all perform poorly.

There was a time that WGN, WLS, WBBM, WMAQ and WCFL were important stations in the midwest, but today they combine for about 1/12th of listening in the market.
In 25-54, it is less than that... a lot less. Together they have a declining average 5 share in that demo.

Almost all of the WBBM listening is now assumed to be on the FM simulcast.

WGN gets small shares in Rockford and Bloomington, but they are declining. They used to show in South Bend, Peoria and Quad Cities, but no longer.
 
I believe that in 2008-09 ESPN Deportes aired on what is now KKOB-FM 96.3 Albuquerque and had near 0 ratings on a 20kW signal from atop Sandia (elevation 10,679' equivalent to a 100kW if not better). From what I could tell that is the worst a full-powered commercial station from that broadcast site ever did but there could always have been something else. At that time, it was managed by the Last Bastion Trust before Cumulus re-acquired it around 2013 or so.
 
I believe that in 2008-09 ESPN Deportes aired on what is now KKOB-FM 96.3 Albuquerque and had near 0 ratings on a 20kW signal from atop Sandia (elevation 10,679' equivalent to a 100kW if not better). From what I could tell that is the worst a full-powered commercial station from that broadcast site ever did but there could always have been something else. At that time, it was managed by the Last Bastion Trust before Cumulus re-acquired it around 2013 or so.
ESPN Deportes at the time was mostly about US Sports, like baseball and American football and the like. Spanish dominant listeners want coverage of their three favorite sports: soccer, soccer and soccer.

Further, ABQ has a tiny percentage of Spanish dominant Hispanics, so programming in Spanish about mostly American sports was destined to fail.
 
ESPN Deportes at the time was mostly about US Sports, like baseball and American football and the like. Spanish dominant listeners want coverage of their three favorite sports: soccer, soccer and soccer.
So why was it that when I tuned in (mostly at night, though) I heard replays of the popular Mexican soccer radio show?
 
But KBLA is far from being a full market signal. A couple of miles east of the site, you can not hear it. And it protects the Mexican border 24/7 as 1580 is a Mexican clear channel.
But how well is KBLA heard in South Central and other African-American areas of the LA metro?

Separate question: How do they count Cume? I'd imagine that's an estimate? How accurate is it, really?
 
So why was it that when I tuned in (mostly at night, though) I heard replays of the popular Mexican soccer radio show?
You answered your own question: "at night".
 
But how well is KBLA heard in South Central and other African-American areas of the LA metro?
The transmitter is just a few miles northeast of downtown, and the signal is pretty much a flashlight beam over the city out to the ocean... right over most of the African American areas of LA.
Separate question: How do they count Cume? I'd imagine that's an estimate? How accurate is it, really?
Cume is projected just as AQH share, rating and persons are projected. They have a panel that is a tiny percentage of the market but that theoretically is a perfect mirror of the market. So everything is multiplied to produce universe estimates. Cume is just as accurate as share.

In other words, in a perfect panel, each person with a meter might represent 5,000 persons. So whatever they do is just multiplied to get the results.

All ratings are estimates, just as political polls are estimates.
 
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