BY KURT HANSON
Since last December, Arbitron has been releasing webcast ratings reports that seemed intentionally designed to make it difficult to see how many listeners a given webcast actually had.

Now we know the reason: Arbitron tabulated the audience sizes of 389 Internet audio channels during the month of February 2000. Wednesday afternoon, they released audience size numbers on the top 50 of those channels.

And upon doing the math, it looks as if the top station in the entire report, NetRadio's "Hits" channel, apparently had only 339 concurrent listeners at the average moment during the month!

(And how many concurrent listeners (on average) did it take to make the top 50 list? Amazingly, it apparently only took 25 simultaneous listeners.)



In what I'm sure was part of a continuing well-meaning effort to publicize the largest possible numbers for its potential future customers, Arbitron introduced a new statistic this week called "Aggregate Tuning Hours."

("Aggregate Tuning Hours is a commonly used metric in the streaming media space and reporting it will help to promote the awareness and use of this important statistic,” according to Arbitron's press release.)

However, it's not a traditional broadcast metric. The industry standard is "Average Quarter Hour (AQH) audience," which is a convoluted way of saying "average audience," which means the number of people listening at the average moment.

To convert ATH to AQH, you have to divide ATH by the number of hours in a month (in February, that's 672 hours). I've done that below for NetRadio's "Hits" channel:

As you can see, it's a much smaller number. (Obviously, it sounds a lot better for everyone involved to say "227,600" than to say "339.")

And how about the stations at the bottom of the top 50 list? Again, let's do the math: As per Arbitron's chart (here), the station that just made the cut-off, ABC's KMEO/Dallas-Ft.Worth, had 16,600 Aggregate Tuning Hours for the month of February:

In other words, during the average hour -- which, again, is the same thing as saying "at the average moment" -- KMEO had about 24.7 listeners. (If you were serving, on average, 25 streams all month long, you could have made the top 50!)

That's a surprisingly low number. In the world of broadcast radio, in which Arbitron rounds its ratings estimates to the nearest hundred listeners, that number would round to zero listeners.

And if you can make the top 50 stations with numbers this small, imagine what the audience sizes of the stations at the bottom of the list must look like.

In fact, overall, all of these are remarkably low numbers.

Compare these audience sizes to some recent Arbitron estimates of broadcast radio audience sizes. (The reference book I just happen to have on my desk is a little old, but it should make my point.)

I should note that I'm being a little unfair to webcasts, in that the broadcast station audiences estimates are for a 6AM-12MID broadcast day. If those broadcast estimates were for full 24-hour days, they would be perhaps 15-20% lower. (But still.)


I should note, however, that these webcast ratings numbers are, despite what you might think, not impossibly small numbers.

If KQRS can maintain an webcast audience of 134 different people per hour, and if they run 12 spots per hour, and if they're using ad insertion technology to send different spots to different listeners, that means they can send out 1,608 different spots per hour...or 38,592 spots per day...or 14,086,080 spots per year.

At a $50 CPM, that would mean net webcast revenues of over $700,000 (at a 100% sell-out rate). Not bad!

And if Internet radio starts to take off in popularity -- with the advent of Kerbango and Sonicbox and Akoo and perhaps some more effective marketing and promotion of web radio -- perhaps KQRS's webcast audience size will eventually double or triple or quadruple.

And then pretty soon we're talking real money.



We've got a lot of it. And RAIN's new crack team of interns is going through it now, looking for the best questions and most insightful comments.

We'll publish the best later this weekend in RAIN. (Contribute yours using the form below.)

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:

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