According to the InfoStream webcast ratings released recently by Arbitron, the average radio station webcast streamed in October by BroadcastMusic.com (now BroadcastAMERICA.com) seems to have had an AQH audience size, based on a 24-hour broadcast day and rounded to the nearest person, of zero persons.

The Arbitron InfoStream report seems to suggest that the 140 stations streamed by BroadcastMusic.com received an average of 9 hours of listening per station per day each. Divided by a 24-hour day, that means each had about .4 listeners at the average moment.

The webcasts of other three streaming providers that Arbitron measured -- ABC Radio Networks, La Musica, and Magnitude Network -- had average AQH audiences that were not all that much higher. Rounded to the nearest person, their stations' average AQHs were 33, 12, and 10 persons, respectively.

The chart below shows how we calculated the average number of listeners per station for each of the four streaming providers. The first two lines of the chart were provided by Arbitorn; the other lines are derived:

To put a slightly better spin on it, you can assume all webcast listening occured between 6AM-12M and look at the traditional 18-hour broadcast day. The table below revises the last three lines of the table above and shows that switching to an 18-hour day would give the average BroadcastMusic.com station an AQH of just over .5 listeners (which would round upwards to one person).

Of course, the difference in audience size between the four vendors is no doubt primarily a function of the size of the markets served by each vendor. (ABC's 33 client stations tend to be in larger markets than, say, Magnitude's 59 client stations or BroadcastMusic.com's 140 client stations.)

And a recent press release from BroadcastAMERICA.com suggests
that these figures may already be outdated. Their December 3rd press release announced that more than one million people listened to or watched video programming on its Web site during November, 1999, and pointed out that "the number of BroadcastAmerica.com visitors who access audio or video programming on the site has continued to grow exponentially since April 1999, when the site had only 13 visitors."

Read that press release here.




BY KURT HANSON
Clearly, the actual audience sizes of streamed radio station webcasts, as revealed in this newsletter, are lower than most of us would have expected.

(Click here and here and here to read the original stories.)

Does this mean that we can stand down from red alert -- that the Internet is going to have no effect on radio and that we can safely just ignore it? Au contraire. (I think.)

Here are some of the possible interpretations of the InfoStream results:

Perhaps this will just take more time.
Right now, WPLJ/New York may have 500 people listening to its webcast during peak periods. As more people get higher-speed modem connections and more-reliable audio players, I imagine that number could grow by a factor of ten before too long. 5,000 new webcast listeners would mean a 5% increase in WPLJ's midday audience...which could be worth significant money to advertisers! (Especially if those listeners are being fed visuals to compliment the station's spots.)

Broadcast.com may have all the listeners.
Mark Cuban's firm (now Yahoo! Broadcast) chose not to participate in the InfoStream report. Maybe that's where most Internet users are going to find webcasts. (Maybe you were smart to sign up with Broadcast.com!)

On the other hand, maybe they know otherwise and that's why they didn't participate. At the moment, we simply don't know.

Or maybe broadcast radio is in BIG TROUBLE.
For all we know right now, maybe no one is listening to streamed broadcast signals because the vast majority of Internet radio listeners are listening to the "pure plays" of Spinner, NetRadio, SonicNet, Radio DAER, and so on.

Some of these operators offer incredibly fine distinctions in genres ("So you like pop standards: Would you prefer jazz-oriented vocalists, artists with a strong Sinatra influence, more of a Hoagy Carmichael bent, or perhaps a slightly more pop version?"). Most of them offer easy button-punching from format to format. Some of them let you design a customized sound of your own -- or skip past songs you don't like.

And all of them offer extremely low spot loads. Maybe any sane Internet radio listener would prefer their version of Internet radio to ours.

Maybe radio stations aren't promoting their webcasts properly.
Perhaps it's simply a matter of giving more mentions per hour. Or giving listeners a stronger reason to listen to the webcast. Or promoting the webcasts to Internet users who are not current listeners of the broadcast signal.

Or the problem may be in the accompanying station websites.
It seems to me that there are synergistic effects between the webcast (the audio stream) and the station website that accompanies it. Perhaps station sites need better design and/or more compelling content than they currently have. (Maybe jock photos and "What's Playing" and a community calendar and trivia contests and a request form and a CD store aren't enough.)

Maybe there's profit on the Web, but it's not in streaming.
Maybe it's in providing a website that serves as a useful accompaniment to people who are listening to your station on their stereos. (Some CBS stations are taking this approach.) You tell them what song is playing now, have contests going on, give them visuals for your spots and links to your advertisers, let them chat with your on-air talent, and so on.

Maybe there's profit in streaming, but not your broadcast signal.
Some radio stations, like WRIF in Detroit and Star 100.7 in San Diego, are streaming variations of their main formats. Maybe that's the way to add 10% or 20% to your audience size -- and protect yourself from encroaching competitors in the process.

Aggregation may be necessary.
Maybe streaming a single station doesn't cut it when you're competing with a operation like Spinner that allows listeners to set 21 presets (out of dozens and dozens of alternatives) for easy "punching around."

Might it make sense to offer listeners a single website where they can punch around between all of the AMFM-owned stations in their market? Or maybe, to go horizontally rather than vertically, where they can punch around between all of the CBS/Infinity rock stations across America? Or perhaps -- and I think this is Emmis's concept -- where they can punch around between all of the radio stations in their market (as an alternative to the market's newspaper's website)?

Perhaps national radio stations now make sense.
The Internet is most specifically not a local medium -- remember, it's the World Wide Web! Maybe the traditional broadcast model (live disk jockeys, a tight playlist, good promos, and a reasonably-high spot load) would work on the Internet if it were positioned as a big, national or world-wide station.

(National radio stations have seldom been attempted in the U.S. in the past -- ABC and Rick Sklar's "SuperRadio" got aborted at the last moment, John Tyler and Lee Abrams tried it with "Z-Rock"... I can't think of many other examples of 24-hour stations that specifically tried to sound national).

Or maybe the big play is in spot sales.
I'm thinking here that, in reality, radio is the best possible medium to drive people to the dotcom advertisers, since it's the only medium that people use simultaneously with using the Internet. Maybe we need to figure out how radio can do a better job of accomplishing this task. Then promote it.

Then, assuming the dotcom advertisers are actually going to be around for a while as American business transforms itself, maybe radio could eventually get 30% or 40% or 50% of the dotcom dollars. That would be signficant in itself...and it would apply upwards pressure on spot rates in general, too!

Hopefully that's some food for thought. More next week.



Your comments on this article are invited.
Which interpretation above makes the most sense to you? Or is there an #11 you'd like to add? Click here.

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Season's greetings! Talk to you next week.

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