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BY KURT HANSON
Those small-market station webcasts that looked so great in the first couple of Arbitron InfoStream webcast ratings reports seem to be declining in Monthly Cume at the rate of about 20% per month, according to the data released by Arbitron last week.

Meanwhile, the few major-market stations that have been consistently in the top 25 Monthly Cumes report seem to be growing slowly but steadily, adding about 10% per month to their cume.

"This first InfoStream Report...clearly indicates that small market broadcast stations are getting a big boost in audience thanks to streaming their programming on the Internet," said an Arbitron spokesperson in its first press release.

However, a mathematical calculation in RAIN last December revealed that this "big boost in audience" actually, in terms of AQH audience size, only consisted of adding, at most, a few dozen listeners to their audiences. And now it looks like even that advantage is beginning to disappear.

The following chart shows Monthly Cume trends for selected stations that seem to be trending downward. (Click here for a chart showing Monthly Cume trends for all of December's top 25 stations.)

Cume: Short for "cumulative audience." Counting everybody once, no matter how long they listen. Monthly cume: Total number of different people (or, technically, in the case of InfoStream webcast ratings, I believe, different audio player ID #s) who listened at least once during the month for at least a moment. Time Spent Tuning: How many total hours during the month the average person in a webcast's monthly cume spent listening to that webcast. Average persons: (Also known as "AQH persons" or "Average Quarter Hour persons.") How many people are listening at the average moment. (Thus, if you run one commercial or song at a random/average moment, this statistic tells you about how many people will hear that commercial or song.)

Thanks very much to everyone who helped spread the word about RAIN in Week #1 of the RAIN Viral Marketing Contest. However, we didn't have a winner (see details here), so we're adding another prize to the RAIN Viral Marketing Contest Prize Package and trying again!

This week, you could win both the Sony Music Clip digital music player (pictured below)

and a gorgeous Nextel i1000plus Internet-ready cell phone (pictured at left)!

It's totally packed with features -- including the ability to give you wireless Internet access when Nextel begins that service in some markets next month (see full specs sheet here)...but the best part, in my opinion, is this: It's got an integrated speakerphone.

That means you can use it holding it halfway at arm's length -- exactly like Kirk, Spock, and McCoy used to hold their communicators!   ("Scotty, I need warp power in ten minutes or we'll all dead.")

Here are the rules: You're invited to recommend RAIN to your friends and colleagues. If RAIN gets 100 new "subscribers" this week (i.e., new readers who fill out the "Enjoying reading RAIN?" form below), we'll give away the entire prize package to one lucky winner (chosen randomly from everyone who has sent out an e-mail recommendation to date).  If not, we'll roll over all the entries, add something more to the prize package, and try again next week.

If you've already recommended RAIN to your colleagues (see list HERE to make sure we've got your name), you really don't have to recommend it to more people, because your name is already in the hat. However, it would be nice if you did. The deal on the cell phone is that when you buy it (and sign up for service), we'll reimburse you for the cost of the phone (which should be about $200). Or if you don't want to do that, we'll buy you some other cool electronic item in that price range instead. And the 100 new subscribers have to be legitimate industry-related people. (No stuffing the ballot box with 40 kids from your daughter's 5th grade class! Thank you.)

If you're a new reader to RAIN, we encourage you to fill out the quick, easy-to-fill-out form immediately below:

More coming soon! Contribute your suggestions here. (Suggestions already in the hopper include CableMusic.com, RadioWoodstock.com, Nerve Radio, Radio Gogaga, and HotCountryHits.)

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If you'd like an easy-to-read set of tables of the Arbitron InfoStream December 1999 results, they're now available for your viewing here in RAIN. Click here for...

           Top 25 stations in Monthly Cume
           Top 25 stations in Time Spent Tuning
           Side-by-side comparison of the above two lists

           Monthly Cume trends
           Time Spent Tuning trends

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