Related to this, I have been exploring online only radio stations. I intentionally centered primarily on colleges where the online offering was the only 'voice' of the college for the students. Although I am just beginning and have very incomplete data, the figures are dismal at best.
Why look at colleges? The audience is very tech savvy, a micro-market, ease in effectively build awareness and programming by the college for the college. It seems a peach of a target for what a well targeted online station can accomplish.
My goal is a side by side comparison of listening measured in the way we measure over the air listening. Missing data is typically the following:
number of visitors that click to listen
total number of listening sessions compared to unique listeners
length of listening session
More often that not you get data that is worthless: website visitors over a period of time; daily clicks to listen on average; total visitors in USA with no indication of percentage that is the target market. In such cases, this needs to be known as the typical online station run by a college offers some form of advertising via commercials or underwriting.
A college of almost 49,000 only averaged 506 website visitors a week. A college of 11,400 got 919 USA website visitors a month. A college of 33,000 averages 450 clicks to listen daily. One college estimated 4% listen. Two colleges say 1 in 200 students are regular listeners. One college of about 43,000 students managed to get a study done by a firm that measures such. 1,150 total listeners. Of that 1,150, 78% listen via the audio channel on the bulletin board channel on the campus cable TV system. 22% were online listeners. Considering 5,000 of the 43,000 were housed on campus, this is especially revealing. The format has decent appeal and obviously reaches a good number of the 5,000 but not enough appeal to get people to listen online.
In talking with those at the stations, including faculty, these factors are believed to be at play:
1) 95% of online listening is via a mobile device. Data plans costs money and many students are on tight budgets.
2) a mobile device is a multi-function device. One can do much more than listen to an online station. A radio is specifically for radio listener. It was pointed out you can listen to the radio while taking a phone call.
3) Listening habits carry over. Prior to online streaming most students moved away from home to attend school. Radio is geographically focused. Moving to a new town meant developing new listening habits. Online listening means if your habit was listening to Pandora before college, you'd likely maintain the same listening habits at college because geographic change does not mean changing listening habits.
4) The radio dial is finite. Online streaming is virtually infinite. The greater the choices the fewer listen to any given station as a result. The need to listen for 'localism' is offset by other online sites that replace 'local' content for the college station that sees part of its job to stay abreast of college happenings and news.
The only information I have on radio over the air versus online where an over the air station has an online option is mainly Public Radio. It appears the scant information says for every 11 over the air listeners you will have, there will be one online listener. Time spent listening per week seems to be fairly close to over the air listening per week. One top 50 market station consistently #1 in its market has about 350 tuned in on average (per the engineer). LPFMs serving good size populations (ie: located in large markets) seem to average from 15 listeners a day to about 5 listening at a time except, say, for when a personality oriented morning show is one the air and the figure might jump up from time to time to 100. These LPFMs say if the over the air signal goes down, the phone rings non-stop. If the online stream goes down, the phone doesn't ring nor does the email box fill with new messages. Not even the social media pages the stations have go crazy asking what happened. If the over the air signal does, those social media pages have bunches of posts. I have to ask why that is. Might it be the online listener has several choices that run a close second to your station but the over the air listeners does not?
While it appears internet or online listening is killing radio, it is specifically Pandora, iHeart, Spotify and iTunes that are preferred by 78% of online listeners (not all they listen to but 78% do listen at least during some of their online listening). Some 'so called' listening is to YouTube and Podcasts although the average time spent listening to a podcast (example used was a 60 minute program) is about 4 minutes...the first 4 minutes in fact. Everything I have seen says online listeners change stations much more frequently than over the air radio listeners. I wonder how much 'fishing' is going on. 'Fishing' is sampling a stream for 30 seconds or longer to see if you like the offering. If measured by repeat visitors versus total listeners, I wonder if those listening habits might indicate longer listening sessions (after dropping the 24/7 listeners that really bolster listener session times).
While online radio claims to be whipping radio, it is not. Online listening is generally scattered over so many offerings, only a few land at the same place. Over the air radio, however, is still free and can stay with you doing activities you cannot do while listening to a mobile device, the offerings are limited allowing everyone on the dial, no matter how small the coverage or how poorly programmed to eclipse listening numbers of a typical online only stream. Ironically the online listener complaining of radio's corporate stance, chooses corporate owned online stations, if for no other reason, they have the deep pockets to make you aware of them in the first place.
I am concluding, early on (as an election commentator calling the winning when the polls have only been open an hour), that online radio listening is actually very bleak and minimal instead of eating radio's lunch. I suspect online listening will continue to increase with each passing year but I suspect the corporate owned online providers and over the air stations that stream will always be the bulk of the online listening.
I also should note, very niche oriented programming seems to do better online because it is easier to find that niche group and market to them versus doing something for the general public that takes the lining of deep pockets to build awareness.
