Radio InSights

Why Good Books Look Bad & Bad Books Good

Your ratings are just like Presidential polls: Both are estimates, an approximation of something that can’t be precisely measured.

Presidential pollsters like to present their poll numbers as accurate and precise, but there is a limit to their precision and accuracy.

You may have noticed that every Presidential poll mentions a margin of error or confidence interval.

Margins of error are statistical calculations that indicates how much variance we should expect from one poll to another.

The larger the margin of error, the more the numbers are going to jump around.

Nielsen too likes to present their ratings as precise, an accurate measure of how well each station is doing.

However, like Presidential polls, Nielsen ratings are also estimates that have a certain margin of error. The "real" numbers might be higher than reported by Nielsen. They might be lower.

Unfortunately in analyzing Nielsen numbers we rarely acknowledge the uncertainty associated with polling.

We talk about "wobbles" as aberrations, but the truth is that every Nielsen number is a wobble.

Radio's problem is that while Presidential polls always clearly state their margins of error, variance of radio ratings is rarely reported.

You have to dig pretty deeply into the book to find it, and even then it isn’t obvious how much the numbers can vary and still be "within the margin of error."

Here’s one example that illustrates what you would find.

The first graph is a cume ranker of seven stations in one medium size PPM market. The ratings and stations are real but we’ve labeled them generically to avoid running afoul of Nielsen’s "fair use" rules.

They are ranked by Nielsen’s published estimates, but rather than show a single number for each station we’ve shown the range of ratings that would be accepted as "normal," that is within Nielsen’s confidence interval.

For example, Station 1 has a cume audience somewhere between 280,000 and 370,000. Meanwhile, Station 2 has a audience that could be as high as 370,000 or as low as 280,000.

This means that while Nielsen ranked the first station over the second, we really can’t say whether Station 1 or Station 2 has a larger audience anymore than a Presidential pollster can say which candidate is really leading if the lead is within the margin of error.

But it gets a lot more complicated than that.

Draw a horizontal line across at any point and see how many stations it touches.

Draw the line at 350,000 persons and it will run through three stations. That means that the top three stations are "within the margin of error," essentially tied.

Draw a line at 300,000 persons and the line runs through six stations.

It means that any one of the top six stations could be first...or sixth! We just don’t know.

You’re looking at 6+ full week numbers, the numbers with the lowest variance and we can’t definitively say which of the top six stations is number one.

Imagine what the variance is when we get into smaller demos or specific day parts.

The second graph is kind of messy but even more important. Take some time to study it.

The graph shows one station’s four month trend as you’ve never seen trends displayed. Again, the numbers are real but we can’t tell you the market or station. Here we’re looking at share.

The solid green line in the middle is the published share for each of four consecutive months. The blue line is the lower confidence limit according to Nielsen. The red line is the highest confidence limit.

The gray area is the area that falls within Nielsen’s total person estimate variance. In other words, the station’s share could be reported anywhere within the gray area and fall within Nielsen’s confidence interval.

What this means is that it is highly likely that the station’s share is somewhere between the blue and red lines, but we can’t say for sure exactly where it is within it.

So officially month 2 was a good month for the station, gaining nearly a full share. The station then lost ground for two months in a row.

But is that what really happened?

The margin of error for this station is about three shares. What that means is that the station has to gain or lose three shares before we can confidently say something real happened to the station.

(I’m simplifying here since Nielsen margins of error are asymmetrical, but you get the idea.)

The dashes show three very different trend scenarios, all equally likely to have happened.

First, the yellow dashed line shows the station flat over the four months. No change, solid as a rock.

Next look at the turquoise dashed line. It shows a steady uptrend for the station, from a mid four to nearly a six share in three months. Good job!

Now look at the purple line. From a mid six share the station has fallen below a four share!

Imagine how you would feel losing a third of your audience in a few months.

A flat trend, strong growth, or a free fall. All equally possible.

Two of the three plausible scenarios are wrong, but which two? And what if you react to one of two wrong scenarios by making changes to the station?

And keep in mind that our illustration is total week 6+ shares. You are probably studying demos, and typical programming demos have a variance two or three times the 6+ numbers.

This is why we always caution stations to resist the impulse to react to monthly changes in the numbers.

Wobbles are not aberrations. Wobbles are baked into ratings.

Next month when your new numbers roll out you might want to reread this post. And if it's a bad month you might want to make copies and pass them out.

 

If You Think Change is Dangerous....

If you think change is dangerous, try the status quo. It is lethal.

Listener tastes are not carved in stone. They are more like icebergs floating through the ocean, constantly changing shape.

Radio stations grow in this sea of change not by maintaining the status quo but instead responding to these changes.

This continual evolution of listener expectations requires continual innovation and change.

Formats need to evolve to remain relevant, but too often ownership, general managers and programmers (particularly when things appear to be going well) are more comfortable maintaining the status quo.

Its human nature. Most people fear change. On top of that, the more successful the station the more tempting it is to just keep doing what your doing.

The larger the organization, the more maintaining the status quo seems like the safe thing to do.

Multi-station groups develop a “best practices” mentality based on prior successes. If it works in market A, it ought to work in market B.

The assumption might be true in some limited circumstances over limited time-frames, but continual changes in listener expectations can turn prior successes into future failures.

Even once it is clear that maintaining the status quo isn’t tenable and that change is necessary there’s still a reluctance to change.

This reluctance leads to the dragging of feet, half measures, timidity, and incremental change—all deadly if a station wants to remain relevant.

Next time you're tempted to leave things alone, remember: If you think change is dangerous, try the status quo. It is lethal. 

 

The Lie Behind Live and Local

Live and Local!

It is radio’s greatest strength. It is the single most important advantage that local radio has over its digital challengers.

That’s what we’re told.

Invariably Live and Local is the battle cry of industry leaders and broadcast CEOs when they defend local radio against radio’s critics.

How can it be that these same leaders are the ones aggressively stripping radio of both?

Live local shows are disappearing with voice tracking (often with out-of-market voices) replacing them.

Untested inexperienced hosts are replacing successful experienced (but expensive) personalities.

Popular teams are broken up with (less expensive) side-kicks doing solo shows.

Various excuses are given for the cut-backs, but we all know that these are cost-cutting moves.

The sole motivation is to maintain profitability in the face of declining revenue.

How do we reconcile the rhetoric surrounding Live and Local with these actions?

As we recently noted, television seems to be weathering digital assaults better than radio.

Perhaps one reason is because television continues to invest in its people while radio is aggressively shedding people.

Randy Stine writing in Radio World recently highlighted the difference by noting that while television has steadily added jobs since the Great Recession, radio has continued to eliminate jobs. See graph at left. (Click on graph to enlarge.)

When will radio acknowledge the hypocrisy of claiming the importance of Live and Local and then taking actions that undermine it?

At this year’s NAB Show Gordon Smith declared:

There is no other industry in the world like broadcasting... ...no other industry has, at its core, such an overarching focus on bringing communities together and serving the public good.

Perhaps he was talking about local television.

 

Is Television Smarter Than Radio?

Are television people smarter than radio people?

Both television and radio face aggressive challenges from digital alternatives. Both media have seen a loss of audience as well as a decline in revenue.

The arc of the decline, however, differs between radio and television.

Over the past few years television has seen a greater decline in audience, but a smaller decline in revenue, which begs the question: Do television people understand the digital threat better than radio people?

The graph below encapsulates what’s been happening over the past few years. (Click to enlarge.)

We’ve indexed the latest numbers to comparable numbers in 2011. The current index for daily time spent for radio and television is shown on the left in red.

Radio stands at 95, which means that listeners are spending 5% less time listening to radio compared to 2011. Television stands at 90, which means television has lost 10% of viewing time over the same period.

In other words, television has lost twice as much “time spent” (think of it as consumption) as radio has.

Relatively speaking, good news for radio.

The right hand blue bars show the change in revenue over the same period of time. Radio indexes at 93 compared to television’s 96.

It means that while television has seen its audience decline twice as much as radio, radio has seen its revenue drop nearly twice as much as television.

We're only looking at the past four years, but television’s resiliency is nothing new.

It is a phenomenon that we've been discussing as far back as 2009 on Radio Insights. Here are two posts from 2011 here and here that illustrate that television’s defense against digital has been more effective than radio’s for quite some time.

What is television doing better than radio?

Both legacy media face growing competition from pure-play digital alternatives. Both are witnessing declines in audience.

And one can make the argument that local radio ought to be more nimble able to more quickly respond to digital threats.

Yet television, already a medium three times as large as radio has seemed to manage digital assaults better.

It’s an important issue for both media, so Radio Insights is going to explore this issue in greater detail in future posts.

We’ll identify differences between the two media’s responses to digital’s threats, and what it says about how best to minimize the negative impact of digital.

Stay tuned.

 

Can PPM Accurately Measure Streaming?

If Nielsen’s PPM captured and credited only 60% of your listening, would you consider PPM good enough?

Independent estimates put online radio listening at close to 80 million listeners in PPM markets, yet according to Nielsen, streaming listeners total less than half a million.

On top of that, only one quarter of PPM markets have even one station with measurable streaming numbers.

Three-quarters of PPM markets lack a single measurable streaming station.

Can that really be true? Can it be true that essentially no one is listening to the streams of encoded radio stations?

We don’t think so. And a few calculations back up our doubts.

Nielsen publicly releases monthly PPM estimates for all subscribing encoded AM, FM, HD, and streaming radio stations that reach a “minium reporting standard” threshold.

What’s the minimum standard to be rated?

In a PPM market a station only has to achieve a 6+ cume rating of 0.495. In other words, a station only needs a cume audience of one half of one percent of the metro’s population to show up in the book.

If Nielsen is to be believed, out of thousands of broadcast stations that stream, there might be a dozen streaming stations that reach half of one percent of a metro’s population.

Is that reasonable?

Is that likely if PPM really captures and credits streamed listening accurately?

To better understand the extent of the problem and estimate how much radio listening might go missing we decided to look at one small New York Nielsen Audio subscriber, New York Public Radio, operators of WNYC AM/FM and WQXR.

Theoretically Nielsen measures both the analog and digital audiences for the group’s stations. However, the station’s streams don’t show up in the book, suggesting that none of the stations meet Nielsen’s minimum standard.

Fortunately, New York Public Radio also subscribes to Triton Digital to measure the group’s digital properties.

Nielsen and Triton release different metrics, but using a technique Radio Insights first introduced in 2010, we can compare the two company’s ratings.

We convert both service’s ratings into “hours-tuned” a measure that reflects total consumption of a radio station or group.

New York Public Radio is not a client of Harker Research so we don’t have access to complete ratings data for the group, but fortunately the publicly released data is sufficient.

The accompanying table shows a dramatic difference in digital listening:

If we combine New York Public Radio’s PPM estimate of 4.5 million over-air broadcast hours of listening with Triton’s 3.0 million digital hours, we arrive at a total of over 7.5 million broadcast hours total listening to the group.

PPM managed to capture and credit only 60% of the organization’s listening. Or more to the point, PPM might have missed 40%.

Admittedly, comparing the two methodologies are problematic, but Nielsen has demonstrated it’s own willingness to combine disparate methodologies (PDF) to arrive at a single number, so we feel comfortable doing it too.

(The same exercise could be done with any of the commercial groups that subscribe to both Nielsen Audio and Triton Digital, an exercise that we’ll leave to the groups to do themselves.)

How could PPM miss so much streamed listening?

It is considerably more difficult to capture and credit online radio listening than it is to measure analog broadcast station listening.

If PPM misses some listening to analog broadcast stations, it goes without saying that it is going to miss a higher proportions of digital listening.

The fundamental problem is that the digital stream of a broadcast contains much less masking content than the same material broadcast over the air.

Less masking content means fewer opportunities to encode, and a greater chance that station listening credit will be lost.

We’ve heard a great deal about “enhanced” encoding lately, and how it will solve the problem of content dependent PPM decoder capture and crediting.

Nielsen, however, has only addressed this from the standpoint of analog radio. We haven’t heard anything about solving measurement problems unique to streaming.

If radio’s future is digital as everyone seems to agree, the first step is to make sure digital is being measured accurately, and that stations get full credit for their digital audiences.

Next post we’ll explain why digital is so hard to encode. Stay tuned.

 

 

Nielsen to Radio: You Can Keep Your Voltair

It was a rare moment of bravery in the Voltair saga when Nielsen’s Arun Ramaswamy invited audience questions during the recent IEEE Broadcast Technology Symposium.

After months of Nielsen’s stone-walling silence, non-statement statements about Voltair, and the company’s representatives refusing to answer any questions during their three previous presentations, Nielsen’s Chief Engineer opened the floor to questions.

Question:

What do you do to make broadcasters feel good about turning off Voltairs (given Nielsen’s “enhanced” encoding)?

As we reported here earlier, Dr. Ramaswamy first seemed to dodge the question, assuring broadcast engineers that Nielsen was watching out for them, that Nielsen was committed to continuous improvement.

It is debatable whether that’s true given that there’s no evidence that the company’s engineers took any interest in improving PPM’s accuracy until Voltair demonstrated that PPM encoding was flawed.

However, it was when Dr. Ramaswamy finally got around to actually answering the audience member’s question that we heard frank candor.

Here’s how he answered the question:

The technology improvement that we are bringing to the table essentially addresses some of the improvements that were needed: introducing the data validity despite fairly liberal editing and crediting rules.

And in my opinion (there is) always the risk if you add more amplification to something that is leveraging the masking energy you will certainly start distorting and then you cross a boundary.

And you may find out you don’t need all the detections, going from two detections to four detections you may not need it.

So that’s where I will leave it at, that we’re not publically endorsing (Voltair). That’s our position.

It appears Voltair is safe for now.

Nielsen’s Chief Engineer, the technical face of PPM, says that you may not need it, it could create problems, but Nielsen is not banning Voltair.

Unfortunately, this is not the end of the story.

Until more Voltair users upgrade their encoders we won’t know for sure whether Voltair and “enhanced” encoding really do play nice together.

Beyond Voltair there remain many questions about PPM. Nielsen has thus far refused to explain the specific changes that were made to “enhance” encoding–-even during the technical presentation.

Is the patch an interim solution while Nielsen looks for more effective improvements, or is this it?

If this is it, that Nielsen considers the problem solved, does that mean PPM is now truly “format blind?” In other words, does PPM now work equally well across all formats and programming material?

And why, if the solution fits on a USB memory stick, has it taken Nielsen two years to fix it?

There’s also the question of a review of PPM’s editing rules.

Nielsen continually reminds broadcasters that PPM is not just a meter. It’s an entire ecosystem.

There are a whole host of other components that impact ratings including editing rules, how listening credit is handed out.

During its first client presentation regarding Voltair Nielsen mentioned that the company would be reviewing PPM’s editing rules. We’ve heard virtually nothing on the subject since then.

Is Nielsen still looking at changing the rules?

And this list is just a portion of issues that remain.

While Nielsen’s willingness to tweak PPM encoders is encouraging, Dr. Ramaswamy promised broadcasters transparency, continual improvement, and a steady pipeline of PPM innovation.

So what’s in the pipeline?

Nielsen's O'Grady to Radio: "We Own PPM."

During Nielsen’s PPM presentation at the Radio Show Nielsen’s managing director of local media Matt O’Grady made one comment that caught our attention. He declared, “We own PPM.”

Why would he need to remind broadcasters Nielsen owns PPM?

It was reminiscent of a comment that then Arbitron CEO Steve Morris made to the Arbitron Advisory Council during a contentious meeting over the roll-out of PPM.

He declared:

I’m not going to let a bunch of radio people tell me how to run my company.

The Advisory Council was concerned about how PPM was going to be implemented but Morris was determined to impose PPM on radio his way regardless of what the council thought.

And he did.

Perhaps for a moment O’Grady was channeling Steve Morris.

As we write this no independent organization or group has signed off on enhanced encoding.

The Media Rating Council has not made a public statement. The Nielsen Audio Advisory Council has been silent. The NAB’s Committee on Local Radio Audience Measurement (COLRAM) is MIA.

No large radio group has endorsed the enhanced encoding.

Why is there only industry silence regarding Nielsen’s plans?

Is it because no one outside of Nielsen has any idea what the “enhancements” are or how they work?

All we have are assurances from Nielsen that the new and improved encoding works great and is much better than the “legacy” encoding.

How do we square these assurances against previous assurances?

As recently as Nielsen’s July webinar where the company’s chief engineer asserted that Voltair enabled stations to receive credit for unintelligible listening we were assured that the PPM ecosystem was fair, accurate, and unbiased.

In the context of these recent and past assurances, O’Grady’s reminder that,“we own PPM,” takes on a more ominous meaning.

It has been eight years since PPM rolled out and prior to Voltair there had not been a single upgrade to the encoder.

Eight years.

Why the sudden urgency to upgrade every station in a month’s time?

Radio waited eight years for an encoder upgrade, but now Nielsen insists that all stations must be upgraded by the end of November.

It took them four years to develop the eDiary–and then they killed it!

Can we really believe that in the past couple of months Nielsen dissected Voltair to figure out why it worked, developed a firmware update to emulate it, lab tested the new firmware, and completed a thorough field test?

A day does not pass without some major software/firmware upgrade failure making the news.

The stock exchanges, every major airline, AOL along with every other web business, and virtually all hardware/software dependent businesses have been disrupted when “well-tested” upgrades fail.

How often has even Apple needed to patch an iOS update?

Why should radio stations believe that Nielsen’s patch is going to work any better?

If Nielsen is correct and the legacy encoder works well for the majority of stations, why not give stations the option to wait on the upgrade?

Yes Mr. O’Grady, Nielsen does own PPM, but you should understand that without the cooperation of radio stations Nielsen wouldn't have a business.

We believe that the radio stations that allow Nielsen to encode their programming should be told more about changes to the encoder. Nielsen should come clean about why encoding had to be enhanced--and why so quickly?

Radio stations should be the ones to decide how encoding is implemented and when to upgrade.

 

Is PPM Killing HD Radio?

Nielsen has now confirmed that PPM under-counts some formats.

Unfortunately, things are even worse than Nielsen admits.

As bad as PPM is in accurately measuring some formats on traditional (analog) AM and FM stations, HD (digital) stations have virtually no chance of getting their full credit from PPM regardless of format.

For reasons we’ll explain, an HD station playing identical content to a traditional analog station is unlikely to encode as well as the analog station.

Consequently, with identical audiences the HD station will have lower ratings.

PPM relies on the presence of masking content to insert inaudible identifying codes in a station’s programming. The greater the level of masking content, the “louder” the codes. The more often programming contains masking content, the more codes broadcast.

Some formats broadcast more masking content than others, so those formats broadcast codes more consistently than other formats. More consistent encoding means better ratings.

On the other hand, if a station broadcasts insufficient masking content, the encoder can’t insert codes and the station is essentially off the air as far as PPM is concerned.

Digital radio such as HD radio adds an additional wrinkle to this process.

To enable HD to deliver multiple digital streams within the bandwidth of an AM or FM channel, the digital channels are highly compressed using a proprietary algorithm that removes a great deal of content.

In this regard, HD radio is like a low quality MP3 copy of a song.

If you want to better understand what this means and you have access to a Voltair, replace the CD version of a song with a low quality MP3 version and watch your green encoding bars turn to red.

Were it not for PPM, the quality degradation that comes with the HD radio compression algorithm wouldn't be a ratings problem for HD Radio.

However, the process of compression eliminates large amounts of masking content, the very content PPM needs to consistently encode the broadcast.

HD radio turns highly encodable analog content into unencodable digital content.

Granted HD Radio has issues that go well beyond algorithms, but the medium shouldn't be further punished because of Nielsen's inability to accurately measure its audience.

Nielsen is currently testing enhancements to the PPM encoder to address encoding flaws that Voltair revealed.

Nielsen hasn’t announced any test details, but we’re skeptical that Nielsen will be testing the encoding reliability of HD-2 and HD-3 channels.

And we really doubt that results will be released publicly any way.

In a follow-up post we’ll get into the messy details of HD radio’s HDC compression algorithm (codec for shot) and explain the problem in greater detail.

 

Voltair From A Client's Perspective

Today we are turning our blog over to our friend and client Dave Paulus from Max Media, who we believe has summarized this better than anything we could have written.

 Well, as Jimmy Buffett would say, “It’s been quite a summer”. 

When I became so vocal in the “Voltair debate” a few months ago, my only agenda was to use this topic to generate a healthy debate regarding the entire encoding and measurement system process for radio.  

My agenda was never to critique the validity of Voltair as a product.  But, as an industry, we haven’t asked the important questions about the measurement process be it diary or PPM and the Voltair discussion provided a great basis to do just that. 

What I do think I’ve been able to provide throughout this process is a clear perspective from someone who lives with these consequences day in and day out.  That’s why I felt like it was important to write this note. Imagine if you’re sitting in the quagmire of a condensed radio market, with basically the entire marketplace within a few 10^th’s of a ratings point of one another and you see this:

 

You see a station that you feel has not been reported accurately for years and basically all you see is red. Literally and figuratively.

And then you start asking yourself a lot of questions:   Does the guy across the street have this already?  Is it real?  Is it a placebo?   Is this the reason why my numbers suck?  Has Nielsen been scamming us all along?  Have they not been scamming us all along?  Should the industry rethink the entire methodology, TV and radio?   How do these ratings points stack up against TV set top boxes?  Do I really trust a Nielsen radio report that takes 760 pages to explain how a PPM monthly measurement is formulated in Norfolk, VA? 

So, I say, "Let’s ask the source"!  Until last Tuesday the 21^st, we heard nothing but crickets.

I am thrilled and downright giddy that this debate has gotten to this level.  It’s long overdue and very healthy for our industry to openly question and discuss all aspects of the measurement system afforded to us, even when we disagree!  It’s also my feeling that unless the major companies like iHeart, Cumulus, Cox, Entercom, Emmis, Radio One and the like, hold our ratings partner more accountable for their actions and their commitments, we’re really just a bunch of neighbors talking over the hedge.  

To those companies who have the power, I urge you to leverage your weight to ensure that the system works to betterment of our industry.  Otherwise, I promise you that we’ll all be selling 0.7’s forever.

As a reminder:

We are the client here

So, when my kids start asking me at the dinner table “What’s going on with Voltair today?” instead of “How was your day at work?” it’s become obvious I’ve gotten a little “too engaged” on this topic. So, I’m handing the baton over to the aforementioned companies and our radio trades/bloggers that hopefully will take the leadership role.  It’s certainly my desire that this intense discussion continues to hold our measurement system accountable.  While there is no question that there are other pressing issues for our industry, there is nothing that will help the larger markets more quickly than making sure all appropriate encoding is being accurately measured by PPM.    

“Want to survive in business?  Innovate, demand accountability and trust, but always verify”-  Steve Jobs, 2007.

Thank you for your thoughts, opinions and passion on this incredibly important topic for our industry.

iHeart Stations Through the Roof. Is it Voltair?

No group has embraced Voltair as much as iHeartMedia.

Rumor has it that the company has installed hundreds at its stations and continues to buy more as they become available.

If you compete against iHeart in a PPM market, you are probably competing with Voltair.

Because so many of the group’s stations are using Voltair, the company’s recent Nielsen performance serves as a useful metric to measure the impact of the box.

We’ll get into the details in a moment, but here’s the bottom line:

This year iHeart has been able to increase the number of stations gaining share by 50%.

In May 2014 only 42% of iHeart stations were able to better their 2013 May numbers. The percentage of improving stations reached 63% this May. That’s an increase of 50%.

Only a third of iHeart stations declined this year compared to 53% last year.

We’ve been doing these analyses for more than ten years, first with diaries and now PPM.

We’ve written often about how most months the ups and downs hover around 50%.

In any given month you can expect half of stations will go up. The other half will go down.

For a large group to increase share at two-thirds of their stations over the same time period is unheard of.

The over-all performance is pretty amazing, but the details are even more striking.

Look at the graph above. It shows the distribution of gains over the two time periods.

Over the 2013-14 time period most of the station gains were less than 20%. Fewer than one-in-five stations managed to grow their share by more than 20%.

This year the percentage of stations that increased more than 20% doubled to 31% of all the group’s stations.

Maybe iHeart programmers got a lot smarter in 2015, or maybe iHeart stations are finally getting credit for listening that PPM has been missing all along.

The gains were pretty much across most formats too.

We compared the median percent change from the first period to the second in each format where iHeart has a significant presence.

Think of median as the half-way point in a ranker.

Half of iHeart stations in the format did better than the median. Half did worse.

As the chart at the left shows, the median performance for major formats in 2014 was anywhere from flat to a decline of 10%.

Country was the only format where iHeart managed to show a gain in 2014.

Every one of the formats turned around in 2015 with gains from 5% to 15%. Even Country managed to exceed its 2014 performance. Quite a turn around.

Given iHeart’s soft performance in 2014 we would have anticipated a small uptick in 2015 without the stations doing anything differently. In technical terms it is called reversion to the mean.

It is the magnitude of the gains that suggest something more than just a reversion bounce.

Knowing the flaws in PPM and the fact that many formats are not getting credit for listening they have had all along, a far more reasonable explanation is that Voltair has had a major positive impact on iHeart station ratings.

To understand the impact of iHeart’s decision to install Voltair, just add up the shares of all PPM measured iHeart stations.

Those shares increased nearly 9% after the group started installing Voltair. That’s a lot of listeners.

And those shares came from iHeart’s competitors.

Still believe that PPM is accurate and does a good job crediting stations for all the listening they deserve?

You must not work for iHeartMedia.

Up 69%! Better Product or Voltair?

What are the chances of a station increasing share by 69% in four months? Pretty small. Right?

And what if the station has been doing the same format since 1987 and hasn’t made any huge programming changes?

Even smaller, right?

So how do we explain KTWV, The Wave, achieving a 4.4 share in May, its highest share since Los Angeles switched to PPM?

The conventional wisdom is that iHeartMedia’s switch to urban contemporary helped KTWV, but let’s be real here.

It would take nearly all of Hot 92.3's listeners coming over to The Wave to pull that off.

The format change can’t explain a 69% increase.

Even if the Program Director, Ralph Stewart, has The Wave sounding better than ever, can we believe that a twenty-eight year old radio station that has averaged no more than a three share in PPM in six years can suddenly pull a 4.4 share and go from 20^th to 5^th in four months?

Only if they’ve installed Voltair.

Smooth Jazz is a format that PPM punishes more than most other formats. The format itself does not encode well, and it is generally played at a low level, complicating decoding.

Both factors conspire to increase the likelihood that Nielsen’s PPM will underestimate the format’s audience.

So Voltair should help Smooth Jazz more than other formats, and the impact should be immediate...like we see with KTWV.

Take a look at the above trend and ask yourself whether explosive growth like this is better product or something more.

There aren’t many Voltairs in service in Los Angeles, but the big players have them. Maybe that’s the reason that market AQH is up 5%.

That’s 5% in a billion dollar market.

With more than 600 stations using the box and many more waiting their turn we continue to hear nothing from Nielsen, The NAB, The Nielsen Advisory Council, or MRC.

How many more miraculous success stories are we going to hear before somebody admits there’s a problem with PPM?

What's All the Fuss Over Voltair? How About $2 Billion.

In the course of a serious online discussion there comes a time when it attracts pundits who want to demonstrate their higher intellect and superior knowledge by offering a new perspective on the subject.

Too often they do just the opposite. Their comments reveal ill and uninformed opinions that demonstrate their lack of understanding of the subject. Rather than make useful contributions that advance the discussion, they simply add to the noise level side-tracking the discussion.

So it is with the discussion about Voltair. Failing to understand the broad implications of Voltair’s apparent success, too many people new to the issue bring up silly issues. It’s like a child around a group of adults shouting "look at me, look at me!" to get attention.

The first foray into silliness was the assertion that using Voltair was unfair. Anyone who feels this way simply doesn’t understand the economic value of a device that may significantly increase TSL and in turn a station's AQH rating.

The latest diversion is the notion that there is just too much fuss over Voltair. It is no big deal, just another way to game PPM.

"What about engagement, what about passion?" is asked, as if these things somehow make up for a flawed technology potentially undercounting radio listenership.

Suggesting that radio is too obsessed with accurate listening estimates proves that one has no concept of the role that ratings play in today’s multi-media environment and tomorrow’s programmatic marketplace.

Only a person who has never sold radio time, never tried to explain PPM’s 30% lower AQH ratings, or had to make a sales budget makes that argument.

Voltair is a canary in the coal mine, a warning that something is amiss with PPM. It is a warning with broad implications regarding radio sales and radio revenue.

A rough "back of the envelope" calculation illustrates the magnitude of the problem.

Last year US spot radio revenue totaled $13.6 billion with nearly three-quarters of the total coming from PPM markets.

How much of the revenue was ratings driven is anyone’s guess, but large market managers tell me it can be 70%+ of total spot revenue. Even in smaller PPM markets the percentage can be 50% and higher.

We’ll use the lower 50% number, knowing that it probably understates the actual average across all PPM markets.

Let’s call it $6 billion in spot sales driven by ratings.

Let’s also assume that rating sensitive sales are tied to cost-per-point. In other words, the higher a station’s AQH rating, the higher the rates it can charge.

Now for our last assumption let’s say that PPM is under-reporting AQH ratings by 30%. Remember Arbitron’s "70 is the new 100" campaign? That was an admission that AQH ratings are about 30% lower when measured by PPM.

Given those assumptions, spot radio revenues should be north of $16 billion instead of less than $14 billion.

If these assumptions are in the ballpark, PPM is costing radio a little more than $2 billion in lost revenue every year.

Let that sink in. Two billion dollars of lost revenue. Every year.

What if a higher percentage of spot sales is driven by ratings?

What if lost listening is higher than Nielsen’s estimate? We’ve seen ratings jumps over 50% at some stations after installing Voltair. (Your mileage may vary!)

It is not inconceivable that ratings driven sales revenue could double. That would put total spot radio close to $20 billion.

And if programmatic sales really do take off, you can kiss good by all those warm fuzzy reasons to buy radio. Spot sales deals will all be driven by ratings.

That’s really what the fuss is all about with Voltair.

If Voltair is helping PPM meters more consistently log radio listening, it confirms that PPM based estimates are low, that listening levels are higher than we thought, and we ought to be charging more for our spots.

If a flawed ratings system is conceivably costing radio $2 billion a year in lost revenue, that’s worth fussing over.

Next up, we’ll take a closer look at the "70 is the new 100" campaign that Arbitron hatched in 2009 as a way to explain the drop in listenership with PPM.

 

Nielsen's PPM, Ethics, and Voltair

It had to happen.

Now an ethical debate is brewing over Voltair, and whether it is right to tinker with the PPM encoding process.

One pundit even likened Voltair to steroids, suggesting that using the box was not playing by the rules!

Even if there were some validity bringing ethics into the debate, accusing Voltair of the sin is misguided.

Every broadcaster who writes a fat check to Nielsen every month deserves to get accurate rating estimates of station listensership. Everyone.

Now we have concrete evidence that Nielsen is not giving you accurate estimates. Maybe you’re getting 70%, maybe you’re getting 90%, but in all likelihood, you’re not getting 100%.

Voltair gets you closer to the goal of 100%. That’s all it does.

If you are going to get morally indignant, direct your indignation at Nielsen, not Voltair.

As I pointed out recently, everyone who has tested Voltair has kept it. That’s more than 300 stations.

Are the 300 stations using Voltair not playing fair because they want the ratings to reflect 100% of their listening?

It seems to us that it is fiduciarily irresponsible to accept estimates that fall well short of 100% accuracy once you have reason to believe that Nielsen is under-reporting your numbers.

That’s particularly true if other stations in your market are using something that gets them closer to 100%.

Invoking fairness, playing by the rules, and steroids is a straw-man argument made by people who don’t understand PPM, don’t understand its shortcomings, and don’t understand Voltair.

Can you think of any sport that hasn’t gotten better through innovation over the last decade? Do you think that every innovation was cheating?

Are you still using typewriters to write copy? Still using carts for commercials because you think digital gives an unfair advantage?

Are you still using the same audio processing that you used a decade ago?

We believe that Nielsen should bear the cost of fixing a flawed technology that is potentially costing radio billions of dollars. They should integrate Voltair technology into a new generation of encoder, a device that is essentially unchanged from the 1990s.

However, in the meantime you have two options:

Either buy into the fairness argument, don’t buy the box, and watch other stations in your market move past you in the rankers, or bite the bullet, buy the box, and hope that one day Nielsen will reimburse you for the expense.

The choice is yours.

If you’re just getting up to speed on the Voltair debate, or maybe don’t even know what it is, here are links to previous posts that will bring you up to date. The order is latest to oldest:

The creator of Votair explains watermarking (PPM) and its shortcomings.

Nielsen prays and delays by bringing in the Media Rating Council.

25-Seven officially introduces the mystery box at NAB.

Nielsen officially declares that it still doesn’t know what to do about Voltair.

The possibility that PPM is measuring a lot of things that have nothing to do with listenership.

 As we have noted in the past, we have no financial incentive in this matter or business relationship with 25-Seven. The column at the right of the blog explains our philosophy, and we believe bringing these issues to light is consistent with our philosophy. 

Nielsen's Narrative Hurts Radio

It’s no secret that Nielsen N.V. is trying to get into the business of measuring online listening. Word has it that the company will reveal its streaming product later this year.

How is it then, that Nielsen can seemingly pretend that streaming metrics don’t matter? How is it that Nielsen ignores streaming in its estimates?

Look at any Nielsen ranker and you’ll find pages of blank numbers next to the streams of top ranked stations.

Can it really be true that top ranked stations have no streaming listeners?

Theoretically, the stream listenership of a station ought to show up in PPM. Streams are uniquely encoded so PPM should be able to detect streaming listenership, yet only a handful of streaming stations show up on PPM rankers with tenths of shares, and only occasionally.

Either no one is listening to the streams of top ranked stations, or PPM has a serious technological or methodological flaw. Maybe in years past it didn’t matter that much. Not that many people listened to local streams then.

Today however, a majority of listeners are willing and able to listen to streams. If Nielsen really is radio’s rating currency, then failing to include streaming in listening estimates is a serious problem for radio.

To our knowledge, Nielsen has never addressed the absence of any significant stream numbers in the ratings. Not a word.

If we accept the likelihood that an unknown amount of broadcast listening is migrating to the streams of broadcast stations--and that it is probably growing, Nielsen’s estimates become more and more suspect.

Nielsen just released its latest State of the Media: Audio Today, subtitled "How America Listens."

It is fifteen pages of radio listening data without a single word about broadcast streaming. Not a word.

Nielsen claims that radio’s reach declined 0.6% last year, but the figure counts only reach that Nielsen can measure.

It isn’t accurate. It isn’t useful because it only includes broadcast radio as measured by Nielsen.

 Twenty years ago counting only over-the-air broadcast listening it might have reflected the state of the medium, but today it is out of touch with what’s really going on with radio.

Why is Nielsen’s head in the sand regarding streaming?

The reason is obvious: Nielsen does not yet measure streaming (at least not in a manner that captures what’s really happening). Why draw attention to a service that Nielsen measures poorly?

So radio is portrayed by Nielsen as a medium pretty much unchanged since Marconi.

It might be the right business decision for Nielsen, but a bad decision for its radio clients.

　

Admitting Internet Radio's Failure

After nearly a decade of declaring broadcast radio near death, a touch of reality is beginning to seep into the internet radio discussion.

Digital pundits now admit that local radio is far from dead. And you won’t believe what they think will save internet radio.

Writing at Engadget.com, Brad Hill, former VP of AOL, admits that American use of local AM/FM radio hardly budged between 2001 and 2011:

So it’s evident that people are dipping their toes into various forms of internet radio without abandoning their terrestrial stations.

Dipping their toes?

Mr. Hill is way too kind to internet radio.

As we have repeatedly shown here at Radio Insights, large numbers of people have sampled various streaming services, but the numbers are tiny compared to American consumption of local radio.

But in the digital world, hope springs eternal.

In the digital world, pundits believe a major disruption is always just around the corner, just one gadget, one line of code, one algorithm short of a major breakthrough.

The latest digital straw pundits are grasping at is Apple’s iRadio.

While admitting that internet radio hadn’t hurt local radio much yet, he notes that Michael Robertson CEO of DAR.fm, feels that Apple’s recently announced iTunes radio service will accelerate consumer adoption of internet radio:

There’s no question that it will change from 10/90 (digital/analog) to 90/10 because FM cannot compete with the benefits of internet-delivered music.

What’s odd about quoting Robertson is that DAR.fm is a broadcast radio time-shifter. According to the website:

DAR.fm is a service that lets you record radio stations and shows so you can listen whenever you like. Please browse the site to find some radio to record.

The home page lists suggestions that include Rush Limbaugh, Rachel Maddow, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, Stephanie Miller, and many other broadcast talk shows.

Noticeably absent are internet originated shows.

Apparently Robertson hasn’t found any internet content worth recording, so he has built a business model around recording AM and FM shows.

After declaring Internet radio flawed, flailing, and failing, Hill finally gets around to the point of his piece. Internet radio can succeed only if it has compelling content!

Yes, Internet radio needs content!

After a decade of watching Internet radio sputter and stall, at least one digital pundit has finally admitted the problem: Internet radio doesn’t have compelling original content! Local radio continues to succeed because of it does.

And Hill has a solution:

It is up to Apple, or Google, or Rhapsody, or Spotify, or Pandora, or Amazon, or another internet player to break down the perceptual walls within which internet radio is trapped, developing content or importing stars that will compel users to commit more of their attention to the platform.

Well that’s simple enough.

Of course, internet radio is now twenty years old. Internet radio isn’t new. It’s not novel any longer.

If any major internet company knew how to create compelling content, it would have already tried.

Remember how Google was going to create original content for YouTube? How’s that going?

Hill’s alma mater, AOL, has been trying to create compelling product for years. So has Yahoo.

Internet companies are brilliant at creating new technologies to steal and repurpose content created by others (like DAR.fm), but they are really lousy at creating original content.

Amazon create original content? Not likely. Apple? Forget about it. iRadio is about selling more tunes on iTunes, not creating original content.

Hill reveals the depth of his naivete when he closes with this:

Technology alone might not be enough to disrupt the nearly 100-year-old technology of terrestrial radio. But technology plus killer content can do it.

Technology has nothing to do with success. It's all about content.

The continuing success of local radio proves that compelling content  trumps technology.

The danger is that local radio is starting to pay more attention to delivery systems than content. Radio is distracted and somewhat intimidated by digital competitors, and is responding in the wrong way.

Too much energy and attention is focusing on platforms. Meanwhile, product innovation is lagging. Radio hasn’t created a new format in decades.

In that sense, Hill has a point. If local radio stops innovating and creating compelling programming, it opens the door for internet radio.

If local radio falls into this trap, broadcast will have lost a tremendous advantage.

Humpty Dumpty & the Meaning of Local Radio

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean--neither more nor less.”

With that attitude, Humpty Dumpty might have been the first new-media pundit. Like Humpty Dumpty, new-media types take delight in twisting the meanings of words to illustrate their more evolved view of the world.

An example is the word local as in local radio.

Three years ago one pundit proclaimed:

There is no longer any such thing as "local" as we traditionally use the term....The definition of "local" is both expanding and shrinking at the same time.

At the time we declared it new-media rubbish.

Now Seth Godin has essentially rewritten the piece, writing:

We're discovering that when given the chance, people are a lot more interested in what they're interested in, as opposed to what their physical neighbors are doing. Going forward, then, the real kings of media will be local in a totally different sense.

Humpty Dumpty would be proud.

Godin first fabricates a past, and then declares that the future will be different from this fabricated past. And finally he redefines the word local based on this fiction.

Seth has essentially doubled-down on the original new-media rubbish about local changing, not only redefining local radio, but also distorting the notion of community.

Both the original and this copy-cat post are committing the biggest mistake that new media pundits make.

They believe that delivery systems are more important than content. They then compound the mistake by believing that new delivery systems will change what people want and value.

None of the new-media delivery systems have replaced local radio because local radio is local because of its content, not the location of its transmitter.
 
Yes, today it is primarily delivered through local broadcast facilities, but that is because broadcast is the means by which the majority of local media consumers want it delivered.

One day a majority of listeners may want it delivered a different way, and local radio will have to change the way its content is delivered.

Radio critics keep claiming that the latest new media product whether Twitter, Pandora, Facebook, Craig’s List, or some other new product will make local radio less relevant and ultimately render local radio obsolete.

Yet radio keeps hanging in there defying a decade’s worth of new-media death notices.

And local radio will continue to defy the critics’ predictions as long as it ignores these self-serving criticisms.

The only way that local radio could become less relevant is if radio lets it happen.

Those within the radio business who advocate homogenized centralized voice-tracked radio in the belief that local no longer matters will pay a price as long as there remains broadcasters who understand the value of real local radio.

This latest Godin effort only serves to illustrate how little new-media pundits understand about traditional media’s strengths.

But then again, why should we be surprised? He doesn’t even understand his own business.

 

Will iHeartRadio Kill Radio?

Is iHeartRadio an apocalyptic doomsday machine that will ultimately destroy broadcast radio as we know it?

Or is iHeartRadio a gateway to radio’s salvation, radio’s best chance to remain relevant in a digital world?

The rate at which Clear Channel is signing up new radio groups suggests that many believe the latter.

But is iHeartRadio really the answer?

Broadcast radio’s greatest strength is a station's strong link to its community.

Radio’s local link is the medium’s most potent weapon in the battle for a listener’s heart and soul.

That  personal connection between a listener and her radio station is something that national radio (both digital and analog) fails to understand, and can’t duplicate.

Yet iHeartRadio’s very essence diminishes radio’s local roots.

The service neuters local radio, homogenizing radio into interchangeable undifferentiated lumps of similarly formatted radio stations.

Don’t want to listen to New York’s Z100? We’ve got another dozen stations just like it a click away.

Were these choices really different, it might mean something, but the service offers choice without distinction.

Too often one hears the same national playlists, and the same national personalities talking about the same national contests with the same national promos.

The growing interchangeability of stations across the country is all that more apparent with the convenience of iHeartRadio. A listener is just a couple clicks away from hearing the same thing on dozens of stations.

The message of iHeartRadio is that unique local radio is dead. All local radio stations are interchangeable.

The impact of iHeartRadio is to take local radio’s insurmountable advantage, its local connection, and destroy it.

The message to listeners is that local radio is no better than anonymous generic national radio dispensed by an algorithmic driven computer.

In an effort to demonstrate that an aggregation of local stations is just as good as a national service, iHeartRadio inadvertently proves that local radio is just as bad as a national service.

Why else offer a Pandora look-a-like?

Yes, Pandora is the darling of new-media pundits, those people who can’t understand why anyone still listens to local radio.

Yes, Pandora has been growing exponentially armed with an endless array of metrics that suggest seemingly unstoppable momentum.

But the truth is that Pandora is losing money, and shows signs that it might be incapable of making money.

Last year Pandora proudly generated $240 million is sales. Broadcast radio stations generated over $400 million--in digital sales alone.

Why would a leader in an industry currently billing nearly twice the digital revenue of Pandora want to promote a Pandora-like feature, and do it on local broadcast stations at saturation levels?

iHeartRadio is just one of a number of industry actions that claim to be an effort to save radio, but instead may have the opposite effect.

Radio Insights believes this is an important issue that potentially impacts every radio station, and ultimately how local radio is viewed.

We question the wisdom of radio’s obsessive rush to focus on digital platforms, especially when they emulate trendy but failed and failing business models.

The growth of iHeartRadio could metastasize into something quite deadly for broadcast, a possibility that every broadcaster should understand.

That’s why we’ll have more on iHeartRadio and what it says about radio in the coming weeks.

Stay tuned.

Dance With the One That Brung Ya

If you ran a company that produced two products, one that delivered more than 95% of your revenue, and a second that delivered less than 5%, which would you give more attention to?

Probably the one that produced nearly all the company’s revenue. Right?

And which product would you invest in more heavily? The one that makes all the money, or the one that doesn’t?

You’d want to invest in the product that makes 95% of your revenue, wouldn’t you?

Then why is radio cutting broadcast budgets to finance its digital follies? Why is the cash cow being sacrificed to compete with digital services that make no money and probably never will?

Revenue figures for the first half of 2012 are in and they look pretty much like the hypothetical company we’ve described. The graph below shows first half revenue.

Broadcast spot revenue came in at $6.8 billion, while digital, that tiny orange sliver on the graph, totaled less than $400 million.

In other words, running broadcast spots generated nineteen times the money radio got from digital.

(And rumors persist that groups are fudging the digital numbers to make streaming look more successful than it is.)

On top of that, digital growth has slowed. Digital only increased an anemic $22 million over the same period in 2011, an increase of only 4.7%.

At this growth rate, digital won’t surpass broadcast spot revenue until well into the 22nd century!

Compare those number to the darling of digital radio, Pandora.

Pandora closed its 2012 fiscal year proudly bragging about its advertising revenue of $240 million. Last year broadcast radio stations generated $709 million in digital sales, nearly three times as much.

Broadcast radio continues to be a huge financial success, generating margins that the NAB’s former president David Rehr once declared obscene.

Pandora, the focus of digital boosters, the subject of countless new-media success stories, has yet to make a profit, and admits it may never make a profit.

Yet broadcast radio is obsessed with growing digital dollars to prove it is just as good as Pandora.

And radio is financing this Don Quixote-worthy effort by diverting dollars that should be invested in the local broadcast product.

Yes, radio may ultimately become a product primarily delivered via computer and smartphone, but if its product is debased in a rush to be just as good as Pandora, then no one will listen to it no matter how it is delivered.

Dance with the one that brung ya is a reminder that no matter how tempting a new alternative might look, one shouldn’t forget the thing that got you there in the first place.

Radio makes those obscene profits by delivering a local product that meets the wants and needs of listeners who live in the same community.

If radio starts to ignore its local roots and historical connection to the communities it serves, then it may succeed in equaling Pandora-–as a failure.

Does Radio Group Size Help or Hurt Ratings?

Are you more likely to hit the bull’s eye throwing one dart or a thousand?

A thousand, of course. The more times you try something, the more likely you’ll succeed.

You’d think it would be the case with ratings success, but it's not always true.

Harker Research looked at winner’s in Arbitron’s PPM markets and found that companies that own a lot of stations do win often, but not as often as you might expect.

Clear Channel is the largest radio group with over two hundred stations in PPM measured markets.

CBS, the second largest group in PPM markets, has half as many stations as Clear Channel. Cumulus is the third largest group with less than a third of Clear Channel’s count.

What impact does this size difference have on the number of each group’s successes?

Clear Channel has a total of 47 stations that rank first, second, or third--more than any other company.

CBS has 18, while Cumulus has only 5.

The graph at left illustrates this. It shows the number of stations ranked first, second, or third in PPM markets for eleven groups who compete in at least two PPM markets and have at least one winner.

If stations were radio darts, we would expect Clear Channel to have more winners than any other group because they have more stations. However, as it turns out, the dart analogy isn’t completely accurate for radio.

While size does matter, a few smaller groups outperform their larger competitors.

The second graph below shows how well the groups perform when we take into account the size of each group. It shows the number of winners expressed as a percentage of stations each company has in PPM markets.

Note that Clear Channel falls from first in absolute terms to third when we take into account the size of the group.

CBS falls even further, ending up 6th. Cumulus, though third in the number of stations in PPM markets, ranks sixth in absolute terms, and falls to dead last in its percentage of winners.

The two stand-out groups are Hubbard and Cox. Each group is considerably smaller than Clear Channel, CBS, or Cumulus, yet each has a better “hit rate” than their larger competitors.

Four smaller groups out-perform CBS, and eight smaller groups out-perform Cumulus.

The success of these smaller groups competing against much larger groups suggests that when it comes to local radio, smaller groups may have an under-appreciated advantage–-a topic that we’ll explore in a follow-up post.

Note: The analysis is based on the June 2012 full week total person results in 44 PPM markets using Arbitron’s publicly released data. We’ve excluded embedded markets and those with substantial out-of-market listening. Station counts are based on number of in-market stations only.

Arbitron’s Scorched Earth Strategy Reaches Market #190

In an effort to extract even more money from radio broadcasters, Arbitron has followed through with its threat to banish non-subscribers from publicly available rankers.

Now pay Arbitron or you don’t exist.

But Arbitron’s scorched earth strategy has another more ominous component: terrorizing small broadcasters.

An Arbitron lawsuit filed last year against a Dothan, Alabama station illustrates the company’s increasingly aggressive effort.

Dothan is a small southern Alabama town near the Florida panhandle border. Arbitron ranks the metro number 190 out of the 300 markets the company measures.

The town’s most prominent landmark is a giant golden peanut in front of the chamber of commerce.

Serving a population of little more than 200,000 people, you’d think WKMX, the town’s CHR, wouldn’t find itself in the cross-hairs of Arbitron’s lawyers.

Think again.

In a lawsuit winding its way through Gotham City’s courts, Arbitron is suing the station for $350,000 alleging copyright violations and breach of contract.

What transgressions did WKMX commit to warrant Arbitron’s wrath and a potential six figure penalty?

Apparently a radio trade story on Program Director Billy Sexauer’s morning show success caught the attention of Arbitron’s legal vultures eagles.

It is alleged that said PD mentioned taking the morning show from 7th to 1st in women 18-49.

Not only that, the station had the chutzpah to brag on the air that it was the most listened to station in Wiregrass! (Wiregrass is a reference to the area.)

Apparently, a station can’t shout “We’re Number One!” without paying Arbitron.

Apparently a Program Director can’t brag about his/her station’s success without first checking to see if the Arbitron bill has been paid.

You see, you don’t own your numbers. You rent them. It’s like that beer joke.

Arbitron rents them to you, controls how you use them, and controls when you use them.

And if you stop paying Arb, you lose the right to even mention the ratings that you’ve already paid for.

Actions like delisting non-subscribers and suing small market ex-clients are all about intimidation, making stations think twice about cancelling Arbitron.

Radio's growth is slowing. Budgets continue to tighten.

Growing numbers of broadcasters are questioning the value of Arbitron ratings, particularly when Arbitron's revenues are growing faster than radio's.

Broadcasters are turning their backs on Arbitron's carrots, and the company has responded with sticks.

Last year Bill Kerr, Arbitron’s CEO, declared that Arbitron wanted to be an advocate for radio, a friend of the medium.

Apparently his friendship was short-lived.