BY KURT HANSON
Yesterday Arbitron released its first Arbitron InfoStream findings, documenting the audience size of the 240 station webcasts streamed by ABC Radio Networks, Magnitude Network, BroadcastMusic.com, and La Musica last October.

Although the press's spin on the story was an almost universally positive spin ("Internet Adds 1.3 Million Hours of Radio Listening!"), I believe that the truth of the matter is that when you really look at the numbers that were released, they're incredibly unimpressive! In fact, the InfoStream results almost seem to call into question whether streaming your station's audio is actually worth doing at all.

What may have been a bit confusing about the numbers yesterday is that Arbitron is quoting different types of estimates than we're used to. For example, the primary number quoted in the press release is total hours listened over the course of a month, when we've become used to hearing about the average number of listeners at a given moment. (Similarly, the InfoStream TSL number is in hours per month, whereas we're used to a TSL estimate being in hours per week.)

Arbitron's press release said, "The InfoStream service determined that, for these four streaming content providers, Internet listeners spent over 1.3 million hours listening tuned to Internet audio during the month of October."

Sound pretty impressive, right?

What else is worth a little time on the calculator? Let's try taking a look at TSL. You read yesterday that "the top Internet channel [was the stream of] WJZW-FM, Washington D.C, with eight hours and 26 minutes average time spent tuning."

Hey, not bad!

But, wait. That's not per week, that's per month! That means that webcast listeners to WJZW were listening only about 2 hours and 6 minutes per week.

Let's take a look now at the average station in the report:

You may recall that the lead story yesterday was that there were 900,000 cumers to the measured streams and that they contributed about 1.3 million hours of listening.

Did you do the math? That's only about 1.5 hours per month per person! Furthermore, since the average person may have listened to more than one of the 240 streams, the average TSL per station is probably lower.

And in any case, don't forget that 1.5 hours per month works out to only about 25 minutes per week or, to put it another way, 3 or 4 minutes per day!


KEY QUESTION:


Here's the killer question, I think: How many listeners did webcasting add for the average station being measured?

The math is pretty simple:

And an assumption I used above was generous -- I made an assumption that none of the hours of Web listening occured between 12M and 6AM. If some of those numbers were in overnights (and of course they were), the real AQH per station estimate would be lower.

(Oddly, this finding shouldn't be a big surprise to stations that are streaming. One great thing about the Internet is its accountability -- you can know precisely how many streams you're sending out at any given moment. With their InfoStream product, as I understand it, Arbitron isn't providing estimates at all. Computer reports provide the precise numbers; Arbitron is just auditing and tabulating them.)

(Note: I am going over my math over and over again. I am rereading the Arbitron press release again. I am putting away my calculator and double-checking this with a spreadsheet program. This whole analysis doesn't seem like it can be right! Maybe it's because it's 3AM as I'm writing this and I'm too tired. Can this be possibly right? (Perhaps you should check back here later in the day to see if I post an apology and a correction.)

Even the #1 station in the report, Texas Rebel Radio, seems to be no KIIS-FM
in terms of its AQH audience size.

It's the #1 webcasted station in America (of those Arbitron measured) because of its cume of 83,900 people. But what does that really mean?

Arbitron didn't quote the station's TSL in the press release, because it wasn't in the top 25, but let's be generous and guess it's 2 hours per month. (We know from the press release that it's less than 2:15.) That would give it 167,800 total hours of listening in the month of October.

Using the same math shown in the table above, that would translate into an AQH of 300 people. (If my TSL guess is too high, this AQH number could be significantly lower.)

Now, perhaps by pure coincidence, I have stumbled upon them all before and actually happen to like listening to all three of the top three stations in the report (The Fan, K-Pig, and CD93). But come on -- we're talking about a station here with an AQH (at least via the Web) of 300 people!




Prior to reading this newsletter, what would you have guessed, based on the Internet buzz? That webcasts might have 1% of total radio listening by now?

I know I was thinking along those lines. Maybe higher.

In fact, those four vendors' streams apparently account for less than 1% of 1% of total U.S. radio listening. Add in all the other vendors' streams (those streams that Arbitron InfoStream didn't measure) and webcasts in total still might represent only 5% or 8% of 1% of total radio listening.

But this does not mean that we can say, "Ah, we can ignore the Internet now." That's precisely the wrong conclusion to draw.

Here are some of the issues still worthy of attention:

•   As bandwidth become more available and audio players become more reliable, it's almost certain that more and more people will want to listen to some kind of audio via the Internet.
  
  
•   Perhaps what we're seeing here is evidence of the fact that consumers will prefer to listen to a "pure Internet play" (like NetRadio or Sonicnet or Spinner) over a retransmission of a broadcast signal -- just like they seem to prefer the pure Internet play of an Amazon over, say, a Barnes & Noble.
  
  
•   Maybe that implies that there's an opportunity for broadcasters to create what consumers would perceive as pure Internet plays.
  
  
•   Maybe the introduction of Internet radios (e.g., Kerbango and Sonicbox) will change this entire situation radically.
  
  
•   In any event, there are many opportunites to take advantage of other benefits offered by the Internet without (or in addition to) streaming. (For some ideas, see our "Site of the Week" here.)

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Radio and Internet Newsletter is a daily compilation of news (plus essays, commentary, and resources) designed to help you better understand the Internet and its potential impact on radio -- both the dangers it presents and the opportunities it offers. We hope you find it valuable.

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