"David Eduardo" wrote:


your whole point is very confusing. And no Denver FM covers down
to New Mexico.

Raton Pass. Look it up. I know my state, sir.

Picky.

Absolutely. All generalizations are false, including this one. Those
listeners along I-25 are transients traveling to and from cities like
Denver. Pueblo does diddly along there, but Denver booms in.

No Denver FM has a city grade signal (70 dbu) that gets south of
Larkspur.

70dBu is a pretty serious signal. While that might be the ideal, you
might find that even today's receivers can do well with less.

None has a 60 dbu that gets more than 2 to 3 miles to the north of
Monument. None even has a 54 (protected) contour that gets to Colorado
Springs.

Monument Hill casts a great big shadow over the Springs, but you
continue south for another 50 miles and there's Denver again.

Just like I can occasionally DX on inversions San Diego FM stations
in Burbank or get a couple of Phoenix stations on FM in Prescott, there are
no Denver FMs that get anywhere close to NM except on rare and occasional
skip... in fact, all the Denver frequencies are duplicated with closer
operations than Denver at nearly any frequency. At minimum they have
powerful adjacents very close by.

My personal experience differs. But that's okay -- next time I'm down
that way, I'll just tell myself I'm hallucinating the entire time, or
that it's amazing that there's some tropo happening *every time I'm in
that area.*



In other words, what they do doesn't reflect reality. Your "listener
or tow [sic]" is probably more like 10 here, 20 here, 5 there, adding
up to the hundreds to thousands.

First, there are only a few stations that even get, consistently, outside
their own markets.

By your filtered numbers. Which I simply do not accept as an accurate
reflection of reality. Use them all you want for your narrow view,
but I believe your methodology is *fundamentally* flawed.


It doesn't even necessarily have to be night listening, and I do not
view the listener of MW BCB who does so purely for the program content
as "DX." Especially when it doesn't have to be that far. Growing up
in Cleveland, my parents' station was WJR, Detroit and mine was CKLW,
Detroit/Windsor.

The CKLW ratings were, for a while, good in Cleveland because the CHR
stations there were on 1420 and 1260, both horrible AMs in suburban
coverage, both to the east (neither night covers well even to Lyndhurst) and
to the West as well. And in the time CKLW was a factor, FM was not. As soon
as the FCC forced FM to develop, CKLW died in Cleveland, Sandusky, Toledo,
etc.

CKLW was not "Detroit / Windsor" It was a Windsor station always, and used
"The Motor City" as a euphemistic ID point.

It was a Windsor station, but it always announced as Detroit /
Windsor. You may want to visit some of the many historical pages on
CKLW before you make any claims as to what it did when.

As for WHK and WIXY, they had their listeners. WHK targeted a
different market -- country -- and WIXY wasn't as polished as CKLW but
was vaguely similar in playlist-type. FM was certainly a factor at
that time -- mid 70s -- but the target audience of CKLW and WIXY
didn't have the money for FM receivers to get WMMS, WGCL, and WWWM.
(At that time, WCLV was transmitting in quadrophonic and WWWM used
Dolby FM. FM was a player, but for an entirely different level of
income.)


You can go through the Arbitron diaries for east
Overshoe (every US county is rated at least once a year) and you will not
find that WLW gets ratings.

Because the listener count doesn't cross a certain threshold.

The threshold is intended to make the results reliable statistically. One or
two mentions could be form someone who vacationed a day or two out of town.

No. Brenda Ann shared her experiences; I've described mine. Even you
talk about having to discourage on-air talent from acknowledging
someone from out of *your* definition of the market.

Arbitron looks for a pattern of consistent, measurable listening within the
market. If you add up the "outside groundwave" mentions you get nothing.

"We've adjusted the model to not show any listeners in low-density
regions, and now it tells us definitively that no one is there,
anyway." Nice.


And nearly every East Overshoe has local stations.

Sure. This East Overshoe has one station that broadcasts the local
church services; that one broadcasts the farm report info; the other
is run as a labor of love.

But they have no useful information. The East Overshoe *I* live in
has no local stations. None. Nada. The previous owners of my house,
non-techies by any measure, had some substantial FM antennas on the
house to get their stations. The neighbors do, too.


So, statistically, it is not a factor even if in
reality one or tow people listen occasionally.

Statistically, your odds of winning the Lottery are 0. The odds of
someone winning the lottery, however, are quite high. But you are
saying that because the odds of any individual winning is 0, the odds
of someone winning must also be 0. It's a statistical fallacy.

The metrics for ad buys are based on real listening in the home market. the
software makes no compensation for out of market coverage.

You can argue in a circle for hours, but you'll still be where you
started. "The market is defined as *here*, and any sales outside of
it don't count. We count 0 sales out of our defined market, so
there's no out-of-market sales."

This is just not
going to happen, and introducing a fluctuating variable hurts radio overall
as it makes people doubt the medium.

I'm sure that AM radio is truly mysterious and frightening technology
to your advertisers. At least, it is after *you* are done with
them...

Perhaps -- that's a believable explanation. However, CKLW, targeting
the American audience, had to contend with PJB being a flamethrower on
that same frequency ALSO targeting an American audience.

Actually, TWR on 800 was directional at South America at night. In fact,
form 10 PM to 4 AM EST it was in Portuguese for Brazil. It did not aim at
the USA at all. I have been there and owned a station on 805 in Ecuador that
got hit every night by the directional beam of TWR.

Usually
CKLW won out in the northern states, but I recall one evening of freak
atmospherics where CKLW was overwhelmed by PJB in Cleveland.

I remember a 10 kw Venezuelan overriding WKYC on 1100 in Shaker Heights one
night. Atmospherics do this on occasion. It is not normal.

Of course not. That was my point. CKLW's target was the northern
U.S. They covered it, well and consistently.

WABC seemed to have an antenna pattern change that put their coverage
west and south for evening/night broadcasting. They were as reliable
as sunrise.


And CKLW when it had ratings was in an era when AM was bought differently

....and the "new, improved" method you espouse is soo much better,
right?


I have no idea what they were surveying, but it could have been anything. If
they want a service satisfaction survey, they will do it. If they want to
ask about interest in a new service, they will not ask about existing ones
or about satisfaction.

IIRC, it was after Qwest bought US-west and found out that they
inherited all the record fines and customer dissatisfaction. I don't
know for sure. But the questions were irrelevent, truly. I took the
survey and laughed about it for a long time.


(sigh) here we go again. You don't sell ads to a local Riverside /
San Bernardino location; you sell (and track) information regarding an
LA business which may also be of practical use outside of LA. Not to
Riverside, but *anyone* outside of LA. The example I come up with
again and again would be J&R advertising on WABC. J&R is a New York
City store with a national clientele. You should make use of that
fact. (J&R isn't the only one in the known universe with these
features.)

Again, advertisers with an interest outside of the local market buy
advertising in the other markets they care about locally. They do not use
shadow stations to do this, as that is hit and miss, especially on
geography. It is just the way buyers do business, and radio can not change
this. Since it benefits so few stations, there is no incentive.

So J&R got where they are by advertising in every market across the
country, right?


For a while, we subscribed to the IE ratings, and tried to use the add on
bonus numbers to sell with to make our stations more attractive. No way. All
we got was a couple of hundred thousand in extra cost for the book, and no
added sales. "We do not buy Riverside as part of LA for Radio... we buy it
separately." It was not even good as a tie breaker to get an edge on a
station with less than our Riverside delivery.

In other words, the radio industry has trained its regular advertisers
well, so you're not only thinking inside the box, you managed to nail
it shut from the inside. Congrats.


That's why listeners hold Clear Channel in such high esteem? I recall
reading late last year how people have been flocking in droves to NPR,
looking for something -- *anything* -- worth listening to. When
you've chased your listener base to NPR, you've accomplished
something.

Actually, NPR ratings are downtrending. And most listeners have no idea of
what Clear Channel is... they either like or dislike a specific station.

Over what time interval? three weeks? three months? one year?
three years?


--
Eric F. Richards

"This book reads like a headache on paper."
http://www.cnn.com/2001/CAREER/readi...one/index.html