BY KURT HANSON
For the past several decades, it's been the convention in the radio industry that the "top-rated" station in a market is the one with the largest AQH audience size. (Yes, ratings are often quoted in terms of a 12+ share, but shares are derived from AQH estimates.)

Despite this convention, Arbitron, in the recent press release of its InfoStream webcast ratings, chose not to mention AQH estimates at all. Instead, they published two different "Top 25 Webcasts" lists -- one showing the top 25 based on Monthly Cume and the other showing the top 25 based on a statistic called "Time Spent Tuning (TST)."

For any station that appeared on both lists, however, it is possible to calculate the webcast's AQH. One has enough information to do so.

Based on the information provided in its press release, it appears that the #1 webcast of the 240 streams measured by Arbitron in October was WPLJ/New York City, run by Mitch Dolan and programmed by Tom Cuddy and Scott Shannon.

The chart below shows the AQH calculations for what seem to be the top three webcasts in the report. The first two lines represent the data from the InfoStream press release; the other lines are derived from them:

If one assumes that essentially all webcast listening took place during the traditional "broadcast day" of 6A-12M, that could lead to the following, higher AQH estimates (which would be more comparable to typical broadcast AQH estimates):

Even with this more generous interpretation, the number of webcast listeners still pales against each station's broadcast audience (which in WPLJ's case is, I believe, around 70,000 persons).

The two other stations that appeared on both of the "Top 25" lists, and thus for which AQH estimates can be calculated, were KQRS/Minneapolis and WSKQ-FM/New York, with AQH audiences (6A-12M) of 92 and 63 persons, respectively.

It's mathematically possible that several other stations, most probably WJZW/Washington DC and WRQX/Washington DC, could also have had an AQH audience size high enough to make the top five. (This is based on the fact that WJZW and WRXQ were high TST stations in large markets.) However, without knowing their monthly cume (neither station's was in the Top 25), it's impossible to calculate their AQH.

Based on the information that Arbitron has formally released, WPLJ seems to be the winner.

From the WSJ Internactive Edition: "As holiday shoppers flock online in record numbers, one newly minted Internet billionaire just set a record of his own. Mark Cuban, co-founder of Broadcast.com, last week purchased a Gulfstream business jet over the Internet for more than $40 million, in what the company says is the largest sale ever conducted online...

"According to a recent survey by Forbes ASAP magazine, Cuban is worth more than $1.2 billion as a result of selling Dallas-based Broadcast.com to Yahoo! Inc. last April...

If you signed a deal with Broadcast.com to stream your station's audio, you in a sense helped pay for Mark's jet, seeing as Cuban sold his firm to Yahoo for a price equivilent to several million dollars for every radio station he had under contract.

Click link for the full story in the WSJ Interactive Edition (subscription required) or as excerpted in ZDNet and eRadio.

From MediaCentral: "MTV Networks, the music and entertainment
cable television and Internet company, said on Monday it would split its online business into two groups as a prelude to a possible initial public offering...

"MTV Networks Online will be divided into the MTVi Group, which includes websites VH1.com, MTV.com and SonicNet.com, and Nickelodeon Online, which includes nick.com, nickjr.com, tvland.com, nick-at-nigt.com, gas.nick.com, teachers.nic.com and redrocket.com...

The full story is in MediaCentral here.




From PC Magazine: "Compaq is up and running with a new Web
site that lets you search and retrieve audio files, joining a growing number of solutions designed to facilitate searchable streaming media...

"SpeechBot indexes over 2,000 hours of audio available for searching on the site. Compaq has archived radio programs from the Motley Fool personal finance site, National Public Radio's Fresh Air and Talk of the Nation, and other regular programs...

As a test, I did a search of "The Ed Tyll Show" over the past month for occurences of the phrase "Regis Philbin." In about a second, the site searched several dozen hours of programming and found that on December 10, Ed (or a guest or caller) said, "... on a deal as I suspect called fidelity top all of us honestly stick ball and in that neighborhood and regis philbin and I played stickball in front of the same..."

Okay, speech recognition is not perfected yet, but it's still kind of amazing that it found it at all! And of course it will get better over time.

There may be implications here worthy of your consideration. Dr. Laura Schlessinger, Charlie Rose, Dr. Toni Grant, Jim Rome, and Art Bell are also archived. Click here to read the news story or here to visit the site.

We're going to use the holiday period to add resources to this site that we hope you'll find valuable. Here are a couple of examples:

One of the most challenging things about understanding the Internet-related issues affecting the radio industy is figuring out who does what. To help clarify the answer to that question, we're in the process of developing a RAIN Vendor Guide. Click here to see our preliminary list of key vendors; click here to see a sample page on either Magnitude Network (a "full service" vendor) or WarpRadio (a company that provides streaming in exchange for avails). Click here to see our preliminary version of a presentation of various interesting station websites. (Like the look of a website? Click on the screenshot to go there!) A guide to participants in the Internet radio world starts here, with pictures of the various audio players. (Or feel free to wait a few days; we'll add more editorial content to the page.)

News archives
To review last week's action involving radio and the Internet, click the "News Archives" option, either at top left or here.

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