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October 22, 2012

Comments

Kurt Hanson

Admittedly, Triton's nomenclature is confusing -- AQH and AAS sound different but are almost precisely the same, while TSL and ATSL sound the same but are radically different.

Kurt Hanson

Richard and Glenda --

I believe your analysis is flawed, as you are confusing two different statistics -- "TSL," which is the traditional radio industry measure of Time Spent Listening per consumer per week (or per month), and "ATSL," which is Triton Digital's term for the average length of a single listening session.

You repeatedly refer to the latter statistic as "TSL," which is wrong -- and which leads to a flawed conclusion.

In fact, while ATSL is declining as people migrate to mobile, their number of SESSIONS per week is increasing at a FASTER rate, so that total Internet radio listening hours per consumer per week (or per month) -- i.e., TSL -- is INCREASING, not decreasing.

For example: In December 2009, in the M-F 6a-8p daypart, the average Pandora user listened to about 8.6 sessions per month with an ATSL of 1 hour per session, which calculates to a monthly TSL of about (8.6 x 1 =) 8.6 hours per month per listener. In August 2012, in the same daypart, the average Pandora user listened to about 22 sessions per month with an ATSL of .65 hours per session, which calculates to a monthly TSL of about (22 x .65 =) 14.3 hours per month per listener. In other words, while their ATSL is down, the far-more-important number, their TSL, is UP.

This is difficult to see in the Triton Digital monthly Webcast Metrics releases, because they don't show cumes, but all webcasters have access to their own numbers and Pandora's cumes can be inferred from their quarterly SEC filings.

While I'm using Pandora as my example, the same analysis is almost certainly true for the broadcasters who stream their AM/FM signals (and for I Heart Radio).

As consumers increasingly use their mobile devices to listen to streams, we're seeing a pattern of shorter, but more, listening sessions -- and, overall, growth in TSL and AQH.

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