Funny how rock fans in Philly don't have that problem.
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WAAF sold to EMF....
- Thread starter Time Traveler
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Funny how rock fans in Philly don't have that problem.
Have you seen their stock price? $10 million looks mighty good.
The problem is that every panelist for Nielsen has to have exactly the same equipment, or some would detect more, or less, than others.
The meter is uniform. It conforms to a standard. Every make and model of cellphone is different, and there is no way at present that Nielsen could get accreditation for non-uniform devices and, thus, advertisers would give less credence to the system.
Radio does not determine how ratings are done... advertisers do. Radio pays for it, but the accreditation entity is mostly represented by advertisers and their agencies.
Well you're the one who said...
In any case, Nielsen also excludes students. So the whole system is pretty much stacked against any format that tries to target a younger audience.
Not students, but temporary residents. They have a lot of students in Philly too.
80% of the problem is in the 80% of the Boston MSA that does not get a 65 dbu signal from the station. The only way that they even get listed as a Boston station is by having moved the city of license into the half of the county that is part of the Boston MSA.
No, they don't exclude students. They exclude non-permanent residents in a market because the PPM panel is eligible to remain for up to 24 months. But the panelists have to be fulltime residents, not transients.
So all the college age, and, for that matter, 18-24 year olds, are measured proportionally to their percentage in the total population.
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It has not been cut back. But the FCC has licensed new translators and LPFMs and the like on every available channel outside of the protected coverage area, reducing the fringe coverage... something that stations were not guaranteed to begin with.
Oh, no surprise at all that they did it. Just not encouraging for Entercom's future that cashing out makes more sense than monetizing your asset.
Pretty sure it was cut back in 2005 with the move from Paxton to the directional site in Boylston.
Yes, that was what way in the past changed things... but the poster who raised the question said "recent" so I assumed he meant "in the last few years" and not nearly two decades ago. In any case, that move slightly improved coverage of the Boston MSA, although not a huge amount.
Its more significant effect was to cut off the Springfield market, which probably wasn't even an attractive throw-in for the Worcester advertisers and would be completely irrelevant to the Boston advertisers for whom the station made the change in order to gain.
Attempting to strengthen their signal in Boston, in 2005 the transmitter was moved from the high Asnebumskit Hill in Paxton, MA (just north of Worcester) about 12 miles east to Stiles Hill in Boylston, MA with a directional antenna favoring east-northeast, toward and a bit north of Boston. They had to null somewhat to the southeast (toward the neighborhoods and cities/towns south of Boston proper and the South Shore) due to adjacent stations in New Bedford and on Cape Cod.
This did not noticeably improve their signal in Boston as they had hoped (except slightly in the metro-northwest and inland Merrimack Valley where it was already OK from Paxton), and it caused a major loss in all other directions. It still covered Worcester and Central MA pretty well, but no longer got into much of the Pioneer Valley, Western MA, or other NE states, though they were not interested in marketing to those areas that were more remote and/or less potentially lucrative than Boston (except Worcester where it already had some following for what it was worth).
YES!!! (Please)
Maybe I spoke too soon. I'm not sure I like Entercom any more than I tolerate iHeart. But, yeah, the only reason I endorse this is to get WBZ back in the family with its other news/talk sisters (WINS, WCBS, KYW, KDKA, WBBM, KMOX, KRLD, KCBS, KNX) in big cities. iHeart has no decent AM presence in NYC, Philly, Chicago, San Fran.; but, hey, it's got WLW, WHO, KOA, KFI; yay.
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Ah, I was looking at Boston itself. Not Marlborough, Worcester, Waltham or other suburbs.
Worcester, the second-largest city in Massachusetts, is not a Boston suburb. I know it's difficult for people in great big Western states like Washington to wrap their heads around the idea that cities 45 miles apart could be distinct markets, but that's the way it is in the itty-bitty states of the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic.
Worcester is a separate radio market? I thought there were only two media markets in Massachusetts: Boston and Springfield.
https://www.americanradiohistory.com/Archive-Arbitron/Market-Maps/Arb_US_Metro_Map_19.pdf
You can expand it to about 200% to make the state readable.
Worcester is a separate market, as is Cape Cod, and there is a county in MA which is part of the Providence market (Bristol).
In media, we name our markets after metro areas, and I do not believe there are any measured markets that are a single city; they are always a county, or piece of a county, or group of counties.
Politics differentiates between very arbitrary city limits. Radio metros, named generally after the main or central city or cities, is based on a combination of station usage and commute patterns.
Radio has a Metro Survey Area. For example, the one of San Francisco extends from Santa Rosa to the north to Gilroy to the South... based on station usage.
The government has an MSA, too. But it means Metropolitan Statistical Area and there are different, economic, criteria for their formation. In many cases the radio MSA and the gub'mint MSA are different.
Oh, and radio MSAs change. Every year, Nielsen (and Arbitron before them) release lists of changes based on listening patterns. Generally, the changes affect the outlying counties in places like Houston (one example).
What that move did was allow the station to re-license to a portion of their original county (Worcester) that is in the Boston MSA, and thus qualify as a "home" station to the Boston ratings.
Worcester is one of quite a few counties that has pieces in two different metro survey areas.
Before the PPM, non-home stations were listed "below the line" and appeared to advertisers and agencies as out-of-market. But it took them years to get the move permitted, and just 4 years afterwards the PPM began, and did not have "above" and "below" the line distinctions.
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