• Get involved.
    We want your input!
    Apply for Membership and join the conversations about everything related to broadcasting.

    After we receive your registration, a moderator will review it. After your registration is approved, you will be permitted to post.
    If you use a disposable or false email address, your registration will be rejected.

    After your membership is approved, please take a minute to tell us a little bit about yourself.
    https://www.radiodiscussions.com/forums/introduce-yourself.1088/

    Thanks in advance and have fun!
    RadioDiscussions Administrators

San Diego 91X FM getting "as many or more listeners" via its stream than RF?

Y

yeoldeschool

I would have not thought this possible, but Dean Imhoff, while giving a station tour to The Broadcast Engineer, said that 91X is getting as many listeners or more via its stream than its signal. 3:00 to 5:00 here:


He said it twice in that timeframe, so it wasn't a misspoken statement.

How is this possible? He did mention that people from out of the area are listening to 91X a lot. Do the published Nielsen ratings for streams exclude all out-of-market listeners or something? Every time I look at any town's ratings, the RF signals are beating the pants off the streams.
 
Nielsen publishes any stations that are encoded and that register at certain minimum thresholds. (Non-subscribing stations do not show in the public numbers.) If an out-of-town stream gets enough listening in a market by panelists in that market, it will show up. (eg. LA stations have shown up in Vegas before, but it is a rare occurrence.) A broadcaster in San Diego will not see a universal nationwide estimate of listening to a stream, only the listening in San Diego will register. A San Diego station could, in theory, register in another market, but those numbers would not count toward the San Diego numbers.

Furthermore, streaming data is a census, (ie. you know exactly how many streams are being downloaded at any given time.)
Nielsen's audience measurement is a representative sample. There's no way to count every single listener listening to a station at any given time, so they use a representative sample from which they extrapolate totals.
Server counts and Nielsen estimates are not comparable, they are apples and oranges.
 
Are stations/station groups that subscribe to their home market able to see any of the captured streaming from other markets? I feel like until recently those numbers would sometimes show up in the public release if they were high enough.
 
vw86 said:
Are stations/station groups that subscribe to their home market able to see any of the captured streaming from other markets? I feel like until recently those numbers would sometimes show up in the public release if they were high enough.
Click to expand...
"A broadcaster in San Diego will not see a universal nationwide estimate of listening to a stream, only the listening in San Diego will register. A San Diego station could, in theory, register in another market, but those numbers would not count toward the San Diego numbers."
 
vw86 said:
Are stations/station groups that subscribe to their home market able to see any of the captured streaming from other markets? I feel like until recently those numbers would sometimes show up in the public release if they were high enough.
Click to expand...
Expanding on Huff's response I have a good example:

The better signal Los Angeles FMs and several of the AMs from there do very well in the Riverside / San Bernardino market. On average, half of the top 15 stations in the Inland Empire are LA operations.

Yet nearly none of the LA stations subscribe to the book in that market, as they can't see any benefit in added revenue by doing so. Ad buyers that use ratings, mostly agencies, look at markets individually. And if they are buying the Inland Empire, they are not going to pay LA rates for a vastly smaller market; they will buy local stations.

This example is for over the air listening, not streaming that you mentioned. But since the numbers are much bigger, this is a better comparison.
 
I think I figured out how to better formulate my question based on the examples above.

Can subscribers of the Riverside/San Bernardino marker see all of the LA stations getting meter hits that aren't showing up in the public release? And if so, can/do different groups share that? For example, iHeart subscribes their Riverside stations - can they see how the LA stations are doing because of that?
 
vw86 said:
I think I figured out how to better formulate my question based on the examples above.

Can subscribers of the Riverside/San Bernardino marker see all of the LA stations getting meter hits that aren't showing up in the public release? And if so, can/do different groups share that? For example, iHeart subscribes their Riverside stations - can they see how the LA stations are doing because of that?
Click to expand...
They can't see "meter hits"... if a non-subscribing station shows up with greater than a 0.1 AQH rating it will show up (rating = % of listening universe as opposed to "share", which is % of radio audience and what people commonly refer to as "ratings")... anyway, any station with greater than a 0.1 AQH rating will show up in the ratings for subscribers to see.
In most markets, a 0.1 AQH rating translates to around a 2 to 3 share of audience.
 


Back
Top Bottom