Numeris has demanded Canadian stations immediately pull their Voltairs in a terse very non-Canadian toned communique claiming that Voltair isn’t fair.
This knee-jerk action completely misses the point.
Every station should be rated solely according to its popularity with listeners.
Period.
Stations with more listeners should be rated higher than stations with fewer listeners.
Period.
PPM is a technology that disrupts with this simple relationship.
With PPM it is possible (perhaps even likely) for two stations to have identical size audiences and have different ratings.
Is that fair?
Some formats encode better than others. Some programming encodes better than other programming.
As a result, PPM rewards stations in formats that encode well while punishing stations that encode poorly.
The gains of stations using Voltair simply prove the point.
Those stations using Voltair didn’t grow. They are no more popular today than they were before installing Voltair.
The difference is that now decoders are finding more listeners than they found before.
Yes, some other stations take a hit as a result, but now we know they didn’t deserve all those shares in the first place.
How fair is it to let those leading stations regain their double digit shares now that we know that other stations were under-counted?
How fair is it that stations that proved their audiences were undercounted now see their listenership numbers drop again without Voltair?
The radio industry has to agree that the purpose of ratings is to measure popularity, not the ability of PPM to identify a radio station.
Start there, and then vow to take whatever steps necessary to minimize PPM’s influence on the ratings.
Right now we have only Voltair.
Rather than treat the box like an unfair advantage, treat it as the first of hopefully more devices that start to fix PPM and move us closer to the goal of having ratings reflect only popularity not flaws in the system.
Radio Stations should be allowed to use Voltair until PPM is fixed.
Do you really expect Nielsen, who gets less than half it's revenues from ratings - and a minuscule percentage from radio - to really care? Have they ever really shown they care?
Posted by: Realist | June 17, 2015 at 10:55 AM