"David" wrote in message
...
On Wed, 14 Mar 2007 20:46:13 -0700, "David Eduardo"
wrote:



This is the best response you have ever posted.



And, while the average listening per person in the US is around 19 hours a
week, our listeners use about 24 hours of radio a week. And the time spent
with our stations is as much as 50% higher than the time spent listening
to
general market stations.

Anyone who has a brain knows that ratings are not real.

And this would explain why the ad industry uses them to place about $21
billion dollars in radio advertising a year.

Given the amount of money that can be spent on sales research (Arbitron,
Tapscan, Scarborough, etc) the samples are sufficient to quite accurately
detedrmine the number of listeners per station, per time period, etc.

The test of any research is whether it can be replicated (the same results
with a different sample of the same characteristics) and MRC supervised
tests have shown Arbitron data has a high degree of replicability.

People are creatures of habit.. they tend to leave the TV on the same
channel most of the time, ditto the radio.. for most, radio is just
background noise, something to keep the silence from making them
crazy(ier).

Of couse, this is not true. The average person listens to about 5 to 6
different stations a week, and knows which ones satisfy different needs or
moods.

Not all of us out here listen to your top 2 stations in a market. Have
Arbitron send me or any of my friends (even the ones that are in major
metros) a diary.. and you'll see that there is a significant portion of
the public with very much different listening habits than your
hand-picked
and sorted ratings group.

Actually, diaries are placed using a technique based on random digit
dialers, with strict geographic controls within each market's metro.
Participants are recruited based on quotas for age, sex, ethnicity, etc.
based on Claritas quantifications of each market using root Census data
and
annual updates. In today's world, this is as close as you can get to a
true
random probability sample where there is no recruitment bias.

There is nothing "hand picked" about the sample. Stations can not ask to
have diaries sent to anyone. It's all random.

And the diary method is going away, as the People Meter rolls out over the
next few years. It's already in Philly and Houston, and does full
electronic
measurement of a perfectly balanced sample.