PPM Realities Could Threaten Niche/Passion Formats
01:54:28 pm | Radio Ratings, Media Research, Public Radio, Miscellaneous | Larry Johnson
There’s a shockwave resonating among Public Radio stations as the Portable People Meter (PPM) ratings roll in. The dynamics of this shockwave may reverberate to any station that traditionally has relied on a loyal, passionate audience that registers long Time Spent Listening (TSL) to overcome a relatively smaller Cume base.
The dynamics of PPM Ratings results can be crudely summarized as Cume doubles but TSL/Average Quarter Hour (AQH) is chopped in half. Public stations have not enjoyed the Cume increase of their commercial brethren. Many Public as well as commercial “niche”/passion formatted radio station’s ratings have seen their Rankers drop precipitously.
PPM accurately captures real-time listening; a.k.a. behavior…definitely a good thing. However, with PPM, the diarykeeper who reported listening to NPR’s “Car Talk” from 10 to 11 a.m. on Saturday morning may have actually listened from 10:25 to 10:38…oops there goes the TSL! Public Radio can financially sustain this Ratings hit based on lower TSL because membership contributions remain the same with PPM measurement.
The situation is quite different for commercial stations that live and die by the ratings, especially if commercial stations don’t benefit from a sharp PPM upturn in their Cume. Stations that traditionally have relied on a loyal, smaller Cume base that depend on high Quarter Hours may take a hit in Arbitron’s smaller sample of different respondents if the smaller sampling net doesn’t catch their cume listeners. Even if a niche station hits a vein of its loyal listeners in PPM sampling, that station’s TSL will be roughly 50% of what it was in the diary methodology. Heads you lose, tails you lose. With PPM, gone are the days of a diarykeeper “voting” for their station by drawing a line down the hours in their diary. One commercial Triple A format that has avoided this trap is Chicago’s WXRT, which continually feeds the Cume pipeline with events like massive community concerts.
Danger lurks for commercial passion/niche formats. Let’s hope that stations that have depended on low Cume/high Quarter Hour audience dynamics aren’t forced into a race to the bottom with mass appeal formats being the only ones that succeed commercially in a PPM environment.
Site by:
“Addressing The Long Tail: HD2s and HD3s for Profit”
“Analog AM/FM cannot address The Long Tail. HD Radio™ technology can help. Few business concepts have gained such quick and widespread acceptance as The Long Tail, put forth by Chris Anderson of Wired… You simply cannot program niche formats on analog stations and make the numbers work… RIFF2 with its edgy Detroit flavor… Clear Channel’s Pride Radio… Bonneville’s iChannel… Our friends at Arbitron say that HD2s are beginning to show up in PPM data… Put HD2s and HD3s on air, keep them on… Bob Struble”
http://tinyurl.com/66jb9s
“Harvard Business Review: Should You Invest in the Long Tail?”
“Chris Anderson, editor of Wired magazine, argues that the sudden availability of niche offerings more closely tailored to their tastes will lure consumers away from homogenized hits. The ‘tail’ of the sales distribution curve, he says, will become longer, fatter, and more profitable. Elberse, a professor at Harvard Business School, set out to investigate whether Anderson’s long-tail theory is actually playing out in today’s markets. She focused on the music and home-video industries — two markets that Anderson and others frequently hold up as examples of the long tail in action — reviewing sales data from Nielsen SoundScan, Nielsen VideoScan, the online music service Rhapsody, and the Australian DVD-by-mail service Quickflix. What she found may surprise you: Blockbusters are capturing even more of the market than they used to, and consumers in the tail don’t really like niche products much.”
http://www.citeulike.org/user/mmkurth/article/2984768
What was Bob Struble saying?
PocketRadio | 02/15/10 03:25:04 pm