BY KURT HANSON
Although it's a statistic not reported by Arbitron in yesterday's release of its InfoStream Webcast ratings, the true #1 Webcast in the report is ABC Radio Networks' "Tom Joyner Morning Show," followed by WJZW/Washington DC, WPLJ/New York City, 93X/St. Louis, and KQRS/Minneapolis.

The probable reason that Arbitron chooses not to reveal the AQH audience sizes of the Webcasts it rates is the size of the audiences: The four radio station Webcasts listed above had AQH audience sizes, generously assuming a 6AM-12MID broadcast day, of 175, 157, 147, and 124 persons, respectively. (Note that there should not be a "00" behind those numbers, as is the typographic convention in a printed Arbitron ratings report. We're really talking about 175 people.)

Joyner's program, which is archived daily and thus can be listened to at any time, has an AQH of 200 persons if you assume that listening is distributed throughout the 6AM-12MID broadcast day. On the other hand, if you assume that all its listening occurs during the four hours each weekday that the program is live, the show's Webcast would have an AQH of 1226 persons.


The following chart shows how these calculations were derived: I took each Webcast's monthly cume and multiplied it by that station's Time Spent Tuning to get the total number of hours of listening it received. I then divided that figure by the 540 hours in the month of November (generously assuming only 18 hours per day) to get each Webcast's AQH audience size.

To read RAIN's coverage of the release of the October 1999 InfoStream report, select from any of the following stories:

More to follow. Any comments or analysis you'd care to offer? Click here.

BY KURT HANSON
Satellite-delivered radio took another step closer to reality today as XM Satellite Radio announced its first "Charter Advertisers" and a deal for Clear Channel-owned Premiere Radio Networks to be its advertising sales representative.

Some time in the first half of 2001, XM Radio is scheduled to begin beaming 100 channels of digital-quality music and talk programming from its two satellites to car, home and portable XM-Ready radios for a monthly subscription fee of $9.95.

The "Charter Advertisers" announced by XM's VP/Advertising Sales, former radio group head Joe Dorton, include agencies (including Grey, JWT, and Ogilvy), buying services (Zenith, The Media Edge) and clients (AT&T, Discovery Networks, Looksmart.com, and Allstate Insurance, among others).

XM also announced today that it has signed an advertising sales representative with Premiere -- and that its current advertising sales staff will be folded into Premiere's national sales force.

Yesterday, the company completed offerings which raised an additional $228 million in capital, bringing the total it has raised up to about $660 million of the approximately $1 billion it plans to raise before the launch of the service. XM is the sattelite radio service owned by General Motors, DIRECTV and Clear Channel Communications, with studios in Washington, D.C., and programmed by Lee Abrams and Dave Logan.

If you have friends and colleagues that you think might like to know about this newsletter, click here for some text you can use to send them an e-mail telling them about us.

Day-trade