From the Arbitron press release: NetRadio, a leading Internet-only streaming audio Web site based in Minneapolis, claimed five out of the six leading slots in Arbitron's February 2000 InfoStream Webcast report.

NetRadio's "Hits channel" and "80's Hits" channel were ranked first and second. International Webcaster, Virgin Radio, a hot adult contemporary station based in the United Kingdom, was ranked number three in the February Webcast rankings. NetRadio's "X" channel, the "Vintage Rock" channel and the "Smooth Jazz" channel were ranked fourth, fifth and sixth respectively.

Notable newcomers in the InfoStream February report were Internet-only channels KNAC.com Pure Rock, which debuted at number 12; eYada.com, an all-talk Internet radio network with live and original programming, which debuted at number 21; and Gaybc, a channel serving the gay and lesbian community, which debuted at number 30.

The top ranked radio station Webcast was ABC Radio Smooth Jazz station WJZW-FM, Washington D.C. at number seven...

The February rankings are based on a new metric for online listening called Aggregate Tuning Hours (ATH), the sum total of all hours that listeners tune to a given channel during the month. Aggregate Tuning Hours captures the total volume of tuning to Webcasts by combining the impact of both the cumulative audience and the time they spent tuning over the course of a month.

For RAIN's list of Arbitron's top 50 stations in ATH, click here.

...

.. I've noted previously in RAIN that by choosing to release cume numbers for some stations and TSL numbers for others -- but hardly ever both statistics for the same webcast -- Arbitron has made it virtually impossible to know the audience size of any of the stations it's measuring. This new "ATH" statistic satisfies, to some extent, that concern. However, I'm unclear as to whether this is actually a standard webcast metric, as Arbitron suggests in its press release. The other key issue to keep in mind is that the top stations in the report are not necessarily the top webcasts in America; they're only the top stations of the 389 that have agreed to be measured by Arbitron. Those stations represent only a fraction of the Internet radio webcasts that are out there. Tomorrow in RAIN, we'll take a look at the actual AQH audience sizes of 50 stations for which Arbitron released data on. However, here's a sneak preview: The leading InfoStream webcast -- NetRadio's "Hits" channel -- received 227,000 hours of listening in February. By contrast, the broadcast signal of a successful New York City radio station might have received about 7,000,000 hours of listening that month. More shortly.

As shown in the chart below, Arbitron did a reasonably fast job of producing its first InfoStream webcast ratings report, releasing it 5-1/2 weeks after the end of the reporting period, making the report a pretty good indicator of what was happening in the world of Internet radio at the time.

Since then, however, they've been taking almost two months to produce each new month's report:

If this pattern were to continue, we wouldn't see results for the current month (July 2000) until May of next year (2001)!



Want to follow the story of the five Arbitron InfoStream webcast ratings reports released to date? These links will take you to most of RAIN's coverage of the topic:

Reprinted from yesterday's issue:

From Radio Ink: "Feed The Monster" and KCBS-AM, the Bay area's only all news station, today announced they have completed and launched the station's ground-breaking site, located at www.kcbs.com.

The site boasts several first class characteristics, including current global news and up-to-the-minute local news, sports scores, business information, a station program schedule and in depth business and financial features on specific industries. To complement its core attributes, the site is highlighted by a number of value-added features, such as real time traffic, current weather conditions and forecasts and stock quotes and lookups.

David Kendrick, president and chief operating officer for FTM Media, commented, "FTM Media is diligently working to provide select major market radio stations with one of the greatest tools available today to increase station brand awareness as well as station revenue..."

Read more in Radio Ink here or visit the KCBS site by clicking the screenshot above. (Note, of course, that despite all the site's bells and whistles, there's no audio feed available to site visitors.)

"As the light changed from red to green to yellow and back to red, I sat there thinking about life. Was it nothing more than a bunch of honking and yelling? Sometimes it seemed that way." Buy this fine item from Amazon here. (RAIN doesn't have an affiliate deal with Amazon or anything. It's just a great book.)

Citadel inks web deal
with Ubrandit.com
From Radio & Records: The B-2-B Internet provider already provides free personalized web pages to a number of Jefferson-Pilot, Midwestern Broadcasting and Clear Channel stations, but this is the first deal that gives the Philadelphia-area company an entire radio group. All 180 of Citadel’s stations will be able to offer Ubrandit.com's million-plus books, music, video and DVDs.

Read more in R&R Online here.

Dotcoms creep up
on 800 numbers in radio ads
From Radio & Records: A just-released Response Marketing Group study of radio advertising found that 29% of radio ads include toll-free phone numbers, while 24% include Internet addresses. Some 44% of ads feature both. The study, which analyzed more than 3,300 advertisements, found the next most frequently used response mechanism in radio spots is a street address (10%), followed by a phone number (9%).

"RAIN: Radio And Interent Newsletter" -- the leading web-based publication devoted specifically to the subject of Internet radio -- is establishing a summer internship program and is now accepting applications.

If you or someone you know is looking for an interesting new opportunity in the exciting dotcom world, this may be just what you're looking for!

To learn more about RAIN's Summer 2000 internship program, click here.

July 13-16	Upper Midwest Conclave, Minneapolis
August 3-5	Morning Show Bootcamp, New Orleans
September 20-23	NAB Radio Show, San Francisco
October 5-7	Billboard/Airplay Monitor Seminar, New York
October 9-12	QuickTime Live! Conference, Beverly Hills (NEW)
November 5-7	NAB European Radio Conference, Berlin
Nov. 28-Dec. 1	Radio Ink Internet Conference, Santa Clara, CA

xxx

Try it out! Explore the wide world of Internet audio by clicking the screenshot above.

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