David Eduardo wrote:
"mpd" wrote in message
oups.com...
or even for tv for that matter.

AM/FM/Shortwave (can any ratings system cover SW?) or even HD...some
say that any new technology will fail or old technology would die.

With something like digital cable on tv you can get direct results for
advertising since it reports back...radios don't

To the best of my knowledge, unless you are ordering a pay per view or on
demand program, digital cable does not report back anything.

TV and cable ratings are based on placing ratings devices in a sample of
homes that mirrors the total population on every important characteristic,
and collecting data on what is viewed by whom.

On the same note you have a radio...who knows if it's 10-20 people in
the room hearing it...what if it's a warehouse and you have two radios
on the same station? would that count as two?

Radio is measured by a personal diary and, starting this year in a roll out,
personal people meters. In each case, whatever each person who participates
in the ratings listens to is recorded individually. While it is hard to
envision 4000 persons representing a city like NY with 16 million "ratable"
population, the science of statistics can produce a sample that mirrors the
whole population within the degree of accuracy that advertisers can accept.

Even without ratings, advertisers quickly pick up on which stations have
listeners and thus produce results, and which do not. Ratings just
quantifies this so pricing can be set.

If there's no advertising that means it either has to be listener
supported (public radio), religious (waaay too many to list) or
government supported (VOA).

That is what happens when a station can not make money... some of the small
AMs in big markets that are daytimers, or top of the dial, or very
directional can not get listeners and either don't show in ratings or just
don't get results for advertisers. So they sell time to ministers or
different ethnic groups... and there is more and more of it.

I really don't get how something that is mostly OTA can realistically
provide the numbers of listeners. I'm not debating as to what is and
isn't popular but the magnitude.


It's a good question. We sometimes jokingly say that statistics is the only
science where "error" is not a dirty word. When we do ratings, we define how
accurate we need the results to be for the data to be useful to the
advertisers. Then we see how many people we have to survey to get that
degree of accuracy, and that is the cost of the ratings.

Ratings are nearly 100% paid for by radio and used by advertisers to
quantify buys (as in "a station with 10,000 average listeners should be half
the cost as one with 20,000") and to pick the right stations for the age and
sex and ethnicity and such that the product appeals to.

The People Meter detects what station a person is listening to, and for how
long, and feeds this data to the ratings company every day... it literally
knows second by second what has been listened to all day.

Actually, nevermind....I was replying to some other post and my text
appeared here for some reason.