Why are southwestern CT’s markets so small?

[Tomgsinger]

Many of them only have a couple of stations and contain only about 5 or 6 communities. Many of them could easily be merged into other markets. For instance, Stamford-Norwalk could be merged with Westchester county (the two areas are pretty tied together) for a combined market of well over a million people. Bridgeport and New Haven’s markets could also be merged — even WYBC makes it down to Bridgeport with a decent signal. The two cities are only 15-20 miles apart and are the two largest cities in the state, so it would make lots of sense to combine the two markets. Across the state line in the mid-Hudson Valley, the Poughkeepsie market could be expanded substantially to include Ulster and Orange counties (directly across the Hudson River from Poughkeepsie) for a combined population of 800,000. And yet the corrupt company known as Nielsen fails to make these or similar changes. Why?

 

[davideduardo]

Many of them only have a couple of stations and contain only about 5 or 6 communities. Many of them could easily be merged into other markets. For instance, Stamford-Norwalk could be merged with Westchester county (the two areas are pretty tied together) for a combined market of well over a million people. Bridgeport and New Haven’s markets could also be merged — even WYBC makes it down to Bridgeport with a decent signal. The two cities are only 15-20 miles apart and are the two largest cities in the state, so it would make lots of sense to combine the two markets. Across the state line in the mid-Hudson Valley, the Poughkeepsie market could be expanded substantially to include Ulster and Orange counties (directly across the Hudson River from Poughkeepsie) for a combined population of 800,000. And yet the corrupt company known as Nielsen fails to make these or similar changes. Why?

Two or three things have to be done for markets to merge:

1. If two markets are to merge, the subscribers in each have to vote. Voting made Miami and Ft Lauderdale merge in 1981 and kept LA and Riverside / San Bernardino from doing the same some years later.

2. There has to be enough listening to the "home market" stations in the expanded area to justify considering it a combined market. There is also a Nielsen requirement for commuting in / out of the home market that is similar in intent to that of the OMB / Census requirements for "trade zone" in the OMB's similar MSA definitionsñ

3. There have to be enough subscribers to pay for it. For a market to be created, there first has to be enough subscribers to make it worth Nielsen's investment. And markets are dropped when they don't support a book, such as the Hamptons / East End book in the NYC area or the Orange County book in the LA MSA.

Also, in this case, part of Westchester is in the NYC MSA and those NYC stations don't want to see audience size reduced. Same with Fairfield County West in CT: it is part of the NYC MSA.

Orange County is part of the Newburgh/Middletown MSA, so it is already in an MSA.

There is no corruption in the determination of markets. Arbitron established long ago criteria for adding counties to or dropping them from a MSA definition, and these have only slightly been changed over many decades. The information is there in the DoM books issued every year (the ones that used to be called "The Purple Book").

https://www.americanradiohistory.com/Archive-Arbitron/DoM/DoM-2018-1.pdf is the latest Description of Methodology. There are also white papers on market changes. The change paper mostly describes why counties are added or dropped in the annual revisions done by Nielsen.

 

[CTListener]

Many of them only have a couple of stations and contain only about 5 or 6 communities. Many of them could easily be merged into other markets. For instance, Stamford-Norwalk could be merged with Westchester county (the two areas are pretty tied together) for a combined market of well over a million people. Bridgeport and New Haven’s markets could also be merged — even WYBC makes it down to Bridgeport with a decent signal. The two cities are only 15-20 miles apart and are the two largest cities in the state, so it would make lots of sense to combine the two markets. Across the state line in the mid-Hudson Valley, the Poughkeepsie market could be expanded substantially to include Ulster and Orange counties (directly across the Hudson River from Poughkeepsie) for a combined population of 800,000. And yet the corrupt company known as Nielsen fails to make these or similar changes. Why?

How do these highly debatable points of yours in any way indicate that Nielsen is "corrupt"? And no, there is no way New Haven and Bridgeport should be merged. While WPLR and WEZN do well in both cities, WYBC is far from a city-grade signal in Bridgeport and Bridgeport's WFOX is actually a fringe signal in New Haven.