News/Talk is the most listened to format on radio

http://www.nielsen.com/us/en/insights/news/2015/radio-formats-fall-into-familiar-trends-in-september.html

Nielsen has really crossed the line trying to steer the boat rather than tracking the boat. You would never let a baseball coach be the umpire.

Nielsen frames the big news for September that Urban Contemporary has zoomed from 3.6 to 3.7% among 6+ listeners.

What this is measuring is “AQH share” – AQH (Average Quarter Hour) is the raw metric of “a person listened to a radio station for a significant portion of time”. The share is measured from 6 AM to midnight 7 days a week. AQH share is unrelated to day parts – so at certain times of day (morning drive?) the type of radio people are consuming might be quite different. Note that “share” is still obfuscating whether over the air radio is listened to by a growing or shrinking audience. Another deficiency of the statistic is it measures station format, not programming format. It also is adding up only the 45 biggest markets, which skew more black and Hispanic than the United States as a whole.

Slightly related, Cumulus Media “flipped” another radio station to Classic HipHop, this time in Las Vegas, NV

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8 Responses to News/Talk is the most listened to format on radio

  1. You’d never let a baseball coach be the umpire, except if you’re ABC News, who lets Steffi Stephanopoulous of Clinton White House fame moderate a GOP debate.

    • CC1s121LrBGT says:

      Would you let entertainment companies control the agenda of economic, military and political decisions? If you do, you might have an exciting horse race with and uninformed gamblers shouting out thoughtful discussion and decision making.

      • Art Stone says:

        Wars make for great ratings. Pulitzer and Hearst were the Fox News of their time.

        The Journal Corporation (as in Milwaukee Journal) ceased to own newspapers – the newspapers have been transferred to Gannett

  2. briand75 says:

    This is the “new” media. We don’t have reporting anymore, we have spin.

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