"Eric F. Richards" wrote in message
...
"David Eduardo" wrote:

Fewer and fewer each year.

There are 13,500 radio stations in the US and some 3,500 owners. Most are
small.

1) Your statement doesn't address the trend towards fewer and fewer
stations each year. How many owners were there 10 years ago? 20
years ago?

Actually, there are more stations every year. There were 10,197 in 1995 and
10,731 at the end of 2005 per M Street Directory. There have only been a
dozen or so stations going permanently off the air in any average year, and
many of these are rural daytimers that got an FM and no longer want the AM
or stations that lost licenses in a legal issue or stations that lost a land
lease and can not get permits for a new site or AMs that have been bought
and deleted to allow another station to improve coverage.

Since the number of stations has increased, even with consolidation, there
are nearly as many owners now as in the past. It is just that there are more
stations. If you went back to pre-Docket 80-90, there were over 1200 less
stations in the late 80's than in 1995.

2) 3500 is much less than half of 13,500, implying that the majority
of owners own more than one station. "Most" are small? NO.

A lot have always been small, even with multiple owners. The owner of an
AM/FM in 1965 in Independence, Iowa is still a small owner, then or now.

A good example of a small owner from 1960: Les Biederman's Paul Bunyan
Network out of WTCM in Traverse City, MI. Class IV AMs (250 watts) in
Traverse City, another Class IV in Petosky, another in Alpena and one, I
think, in Cadillac. This is hardly "big" as these are tiny markets and tiny
stations. There are and always have been thousands of AM and FM combos that
count as multiple ownership, and many hundreds of tiny groups with two,
three, four stations in a rural section of a state. This goes back to the
40's in fact.

I deal in the Census, proprietary data and talking with listeners. Market
research is simply speaking, one by one, with real listeners. Your
contentions are simply stuff you blow out of your butt.

Tell it to the WSJ.

I have no idea what you are talking about here. The WSJ is about
investments, not about the local market operation of radio stations.

Don't try to tell a statistician about the infallibility of
statistics. You have improper assumptions about your listener market,
your station reach, and how to measure the power of that reach. You
don't even consider much of your listener base to even exist. You,
sir, are full of ****.

We know we have listeners outside our markets. We know we can not monetize
it. So we ignore that listener base, as it can neither be served due to
distance and existence of local stations nor can any revenue be generated
from it.

The numbers are are fact. Even a poll is "fact" as the user knows the
margin
of error and accepts the consequences.

No, the numbers are not are not fact! The numbers are a massaged
sample of polling data gathered in ways to support sales of your
services, nothing more.

Who says they are "massaged?" You? Radio stations which operate commercially
try to get themost accurate data on thier listeners and competiton possible.
They do not massage it.


Advertisers support over 11 thousand US stations. they demand a
quantification of thier investment, based on the cost per listener
reached.
Otherwise, there is no way to quantify the effectiveness of the
investment.


What they get is a skewed model pretending to represent all listeners.
They *could* get more accurate figures, but they don't want to pay for
them, so they hire someone like you, and you take advantage of them.

The syndicated ratings data is good enough to use for the sale of
advertising. For anything else, stations do internal research that is
proprietary. It is all that is necessary... and the costs have to be limited
to the dimensions of the total radio ad dollars available and which would
not expand if more or bigger research were done.