What is a "significant" audience in Houston

[davideduardo]

There have been several threads recently that mentioned that having a "large audience" meant getting "nearly 100 phone calls" or having a thousand likes on FB or some similar metric.

I just thought that some real facts would put this puffery into perspective:

There are 8 stations in Houston that average over 1,000,000 different listeners 12+ a week. One of them hits the two million mark on most occasions. 11 stations generall6y have between a half-million and one million listeners weekly.

The #30 station has about 150,000 cume listeners. As a point of reference, that is three times the total population of Galveston.

About 42 stations "make the book". Among those with the lowest ratings, the cume is around or just over 35,000 persons and that gives them a share of 0.1 and a rating of 0.0.

Oh, and there are, between AM, FM, LPFM and translators, 108 signals licensed to the Houston MSA.

So to be basing any evaluation of listenership level on 50 or so phone calls or a few hundred likes is disingenuous and certainly not, with no other compelling motives, justification for the existence of a format.

 

[davideduardo]

I don't know how accurate it is, but a medium-sized market station manager once told me the percentage of a radio station's audience that calls in requests, comments, or participates in phone contests is quite small -- about four percent.

There is no way to know that unless you want to spend tens of thousands of dollars for useless research.

One station I ran in a top 15 market that cumed about one million often went for days with no listener calls.

When we first went on the air, with what was a totally new format never done anywhere, we had a certain fear that we would not succeed. So when the phone never rang the first few days, it was rather frightening. Then we got our street promotion going and were overwhelmed by the response. Still, the phone did not ring very often. It turns out that nobody called because the music mix and presentation left nothing to be asked for... as evidenced by a #1 share in the first book beating #2 by more than two to one.

So there you have a huge success with no calls. On the other hand, I did a very niche format on what was only the second FM in a market, and we got maybe a dozen calls an hour... yet never showed in the ratings.

 

[b-turner]

I had been told by a PD I worked for that figure was 2% or less at best. I worked stations where every number rang almost constantly and others where you only got a few calls an hour although all 6 lines went nuts once we did a contest. In each instance we were the #1 station. At both stations an event brought a crowd that pretty much left us thinking it was an unbelievable number of people (remotes at businesses, not anything close to that). We considered hiring security at some station events at one station. In both instances I'm recalling, both were rated markets but certainly under 150 in market size. I think one was about #180 at the time.