"David Eduardo" wrote:
"Eric F. Richards" wrote in message
...
"David Eduardo" wrote:
We are looking for listening in our home market. I am with a station that
is
#1 in LA, and is top 5 in Riverside. Riverside is a separate market, and
we
do not make a cent off it.
I'm sure that if you cared to track it, you would find that you made
quite a bit of money there. But you don't because your model tells
you that the world ends at the edge of LA.
We make no money and never have. The Inland Empire is bought as a separate
market.
I'm sure that your advertisers, if they measure where their customers
come from, would find that the world doesn't end at LA.
By the way, we have had at least 2 staitons in the top 3 25-54 (the sales
demo) in LA for the last 11 years, and currently have three of the top 5.
We get no money from fringe markets, never have, never will.
Sure, if you don't sell to advertisers who ignore their customer base
outside of LA. All those ignorant yokels out in the boonies, though,
they might want to buy things too, and if those ignorant yokels happen
to have quite a bit of money, they might want the finer things that LA
can offer but the local stores don't.
I guarantee you that within a 10 mile radius of where I live, the
median and mean incomes are far, FAR above the Denver metro area,
where advertisers following your model will target.
For that matter, I guarantee you that if you swept a ring 10 miles
wide with its inner edge 50 miles outside of Denver around denver,
that median and mean income collection would also be higher than the
Metro area.
In any case, we are discussing distant MW reception, and the main reason the
Hallicrafters and Hammarlunds and Drakes and Galaxys of the US left the
market is that there is low demand... partly because there is limited
interest in distant MW reception compared with the 50's and 60's.
Disagree. I think in fact your view is utterly inaccurate. The
market for inexpensive MW reception will go on until you kill it, and
you appear to be working very hard at it.
Your view of your listening community will do more to destroy american
radio than anything else. You and Peter can insist that "that's the
way it is," but the truth is "that's the way your model sees it."
The biggest fact you are ignoring, among many, is that radio listening in
daytime is on average about 22% of all people at any given time. In
evenings, after 7 PM, it drops by 11 PM to about 2%. Advertisers
specifically exclude nights and overnights from ad buys. So out of market
coverage is irrelevant. Most Ams do not have any our of market coverage, as
they are daytimers or directional or lower powered and on congested
channels.
After 11 PM, yes, to 2%. What's your 7-9 PM numbers?
Yet you still manage to sell ads at night. I've never heard a station
that went consistently commercial-free from 11 PM to 6 AM.
The few AMs that do have fairly borad night signals do not get listening in
enough quantity out of market to make anything of.
Again, if you don't sell to advertisers who can 1) utilize that market
and 2) measure it, I think you'd find differently.
But, you'll never know if Arbitron throws away any numbers that don't
fit the market. Hell, even the local NPR outlet knows better, based
in Greeley, CO and pitching themselves from Wyoming to Denver. I
wonder what their pledge numbers look like -- they certainly don't
throw away pledges from outside of their coverage area. (As an
aside, I wonder what Arbitron does with their numbers?)
Advertisers do not buy at
night,
None? Never? I'll just ignore the ads I hear at night, then.
and stations generally have no ratings outside of the groundwave
area.
Hmmm. I'll have to go read up on the Minn. Twins debacle to see about
that. It was covered in this thread... someone went by the numbers
(and the dollars they believed they had) and killed off their market.
Fine. Ignore your real customers. Insult them even and tell them
they don't exist. It's *your* career path, not mine. Enjoy the ride
all the way into the ground.
My ride is just fine, based on localism. Having 3 of the top 5 in the
largest ad market in America is hardly riding into the ground. And we are
doing fine in our other 16 markets, too, with the same model. And we have a
number of 50 kw AMs. They serve the local community, well, and only.
There are really only a couple reasons to listen to AM radio today.
1) low cost of receivers. 2) long-range reception for whatever
reason that listener may have. 3) talk radio -- AM is never going to
challenge FM on fidelity, IBOC or not. I wonder how many classical
and jazz AMs there are out there? That's an answer I'd trust you to
have.
But I think your ride is going into the ground. In fact, this thread
has depressed me into thinking that XM and/or Sirius may just succeed,
because they aren't foolish enough to accept an arbitrary boundary on
their footprint. (okay, national boundaries, but things get really
complicated on that one.) Their coverage area is the continental U.S.
and they'll go ahead and sell their ads to anyone willing to put them
on the air. (Commercial free? ha. I doubt one channel of the
satellite services will be commercial free in 10 years.)
It would be very, very interesting to see the raw, unmassaged data
that Arbitron (and the other one) collect and see what happens when
they start putting together demographics and quantity (but NOT
geography) of all the out-of-market listeners. Obviously that's
closely held, but probably someone like you or Peter could have seen
it in some job somewhere along the line.
--
Eric F. Richards
"Nature abhors a vacuum tube." -- Myron Glass,
often attributed to J. R. Pierce, Bell Labs, c. 1940