BY KURT HANSON
Having recently traveled to Silicon Valley, Denver (for the RAB), Tokyo, and Los Angeles on behalf of RAIN, the next logical direction to travel, I felt, was east -- so yesterday I flew to the Baltimore and Washington DC area to visit Arbitron headquarters (pictured at right) and XM Satellite Radio.

I'll write about XM later this week, but today, let me share with you some of the findings I learned from my meetings with the Arbitron executives.

Over the course of the day, I met with Arbitron Internet Information Services VP Bill Rose, Arbitron Internet Information Services Director of Marketing Joan FitzGerald, VP/Research Standards & Practices Bob Patchen, Vice President/Communications Thom Mocarsky, Manager of Client Services Pat Duggan, Arbitron EVP/General Manager Pierre Bouvard, and various other members of the InfoStream production team.

And thanks to e-mails from numerous alert RAIN readers (here), I came well-equipped with questions for them.

Here's some of what I learned:

Does Arbitron believe that a tabulation
of server logs is the best approach
to measuring webcast size?

"Log files may not be ideal," FitzGerald explained, "and we have some ideas for the future that may be better. But they're easy to explain, relatively easy to grab, and we thought it would be a good way to start."

Rose and FitzGerald pointed out that there are some problems in using log files to measure web pages, since many ISPs (including, most famously, AOL) cache web pages. (What that means is that AOL may pull a web page from a server once, store it on their own server, and then feed that copy to dozens of their subscribers. From the original server's point of view, that looks like the page had a single reader.) They explained that the log files approach works much better for streamed audio, in that they are unaware of any ISPs that are caching audio streams.

We all agreed that using a panel approach to measure the audience size of the thousands of webcasts that are out there would be virtually impossible, due to sample size issues. (All of us were familiar with an analogy involving marbles in a swimming pool.)


How can Arbitron possibly
identify unique users (i.e., cumers)
based on IP addresses?

They can't and they don't. (What are IP addresses? They identify an Internet access location -- e.g., 405.243.33.1701 -- but they don't work to uniquely identify people logging in from large corporations or from AOL.)

Instead, I learned, Arbitron is basing their "unique listeners" statistic on the unique ID number (or "GUID") associated with each copy of RealPlayer or Windows Media Player.

What this means, though, it seems to me, is that Arbitron may be double- or triple-counting some people in their Monthly Cume numbers. For example, if you listen to WLUP both at home and at work (on separate computers), you'd be counted as two different people in the tabulation of WLUP's Monthly Cume. Worse yet -- although I would agree this is unlikely -- if you were to listen to both their RealAudio stream and their Windows Media stream at each location over the course of a month, you'd be counted as four people.

I asked them if Arbitron explained this distinction anywhere -- that the Monthly Cume referes to audio players, not people -- as it isn't made clear in their monthly press release. They assured me it's in the "Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)" section of their website. (However, I've spent several minutes searching for an FAQ section today and I can't find one. Look for yourself here.)


Why is InfoStream releasing different
statistics than traditional Arbitron
radio statistics?

This is an interesting question. Arbitron's pitch is that they're offering familiar broadcast metrics. Yet "Monthly Cume" and "Time Spent Tuning" (expressed in hours/month) are new statistics that we don't use in the world of broadcast radio. (We use "Weekly Cume" and "Time Spent Listening" (expressed in hours/week).)

Rose noted, however, that "monthly is the paradigm of website measurement."

And Bouvard added the observation, "'Weekly' is simply an artifact of how long someone is willing to keep a diary."

Both are good points. It's also true, of course, that using a monthly time frame allows Arbitron to publicize larger numbers than if they were quoting weekly numbers.


How much is subscribing to
InfoStream going to eventually cost?

Rose explained that right now, their plans are to provide results for free until their systems are completely set up and tested and their HTML-based results presentation software is ready for release. Until then, they're using a "free sample" approach to generate awareness and interest. "We're building industry knowledge now, before we ask clients to pay," Rose noted.

So...how much will it eventually cost? "We're not going to talk about that right now."

More coming tomorrow in RAIN.




From the Nando Times: "NBC Internet, the television network's year-old online company, replaced its chief executive Monday with a former executive at NBC's corporate parent General Electric.

"The appointment of Will Lansing, who had also been chairman of Fingerhut, a catalog and Internet division of retailer Federated Department Stores, signals a greater push by NBC Internet into electronic retailing.

"It also puts a veteran corporate executive in charge of the young Internet company. Lansing, 41, had been the top business development officer at General Electric, reporting directly to GE chairman Jack Welch. He had also been the chief operating officer of Prodigy, an Internet service provider..."

Read the full story in the Nando Times here.

Reprinted from Monday's edition:


BY KURT HANSON
Although the top-line findings of the most recent Arbitron InfoStream webcast ratings report are not painting a particularly pretty growth story for Internet audio, the problem may be in part due to a fairly-common statistical phenomenon called "regression to the mean."

Read the full piece from yesterday's RAIN here.

Presented as part of the NAB's MultiMedia World Conference, the Southern California-based Internet Professionals Network is putting on two days of Internet Weekend Workshops immediately preceeding the upcoming NAB convention in Las Vegas.

The first of the two days -- the April 8th workshop -- is about building and maintaining a website. (See description here.)

More to the point, the following day is devoted to "Streaming Media: The New Wave in Broadcasting."

Here's how the event is described: "This workshop examines the various uses for streaming media broadcasts over the Internet. Panelists will explain how broadcasters, web professionals and marketers can use this technology to tie in with current breaking news, events and meetings. Panelists will provide insight into the cost involved in streaming media and what is needed to make it happen. Come and see examples of web broadcasting by companies who are successfully doing it right now!"

Moderator: Scott Salter, Intervu, San Diego, CA

Panelists: Chad R. Badiyan, Badiyan, Inc., Evanston, IL; Curtis Palmer, Sonic Foundry, Inc., Madison, WI; Linda Thurman, New Media Prime, Inc., Los Angeles, CA; John Brier, BroadcastAMERICA.com, Portland, ME; Philip Fracassi, House of Blues Digital, Inc., Hollywood, CA; Stephen L. Felisan, House of Blues Digital, Inc., Hollywood, CA; Mike Rick, FastBroadcast.com

10-10:05 - Introduction - Scott Salter
10:05-11:05 - How to Use Streaming With Breaking News, Events and Meetings - Chad R. Badiyan
11:15-12:15 - What’s Out There and How You Can Use It? - Chad R. Badiyan 1:15-2:15 - What Does It Cost? - Linda Thurman
2:15-3:15 - What’s the Future of Broadcasting on the Internet? - Curtis Palmer
3:30-5:00 - Case Study: Example of Successful Webcasts - John Brier; Mike Rick; Stephen L. Felisan; Philip Fracassi

It appears that this conference is included in the price of full registration for the NAB event. For more details, click here.




Tell some of your industry colleagues about RAIN this week and you could win a fabulous prize package consisting of a amazingly stylish Sony Music Clip digital music player (pictured at right, below) plus a gorgeous Nextel i1000plus Internet-ready cell phone (pictured at left)!

The cell phone, this week's addition to the RAIN Viral Marketing Contest prize package, is 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 about the Nextel unit, in my opinion, is this: It's got an integrated speakerphone. That means you don't have to hold it up to your ear like one of those old-fashioned telephones. Instead, you can talk into it holding it halfway at arm's length -- exactly like Kirk, Spock, and McCoy used to talk into their communicators in "Star Trek: The Original Series!"

Here's how to win it: 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 above), 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. (Three more paragraphs of fine print here.)

So think of a few people you know who would benefit from knowing about RAIN -- co-workers, subordinates, friendly competitors, clients, vendors, college friends -- and tell them about this fine Web-based daily newsletter. And win!

(Want to write an e-mail to a couple of colleagues right now, but need help composing the e-mail? Click here for some suggested language.)

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

Miss an issue?
Visit the RAIN News Archives here.



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

We're still tabulating Sunday and Monday's e-mail, but it looks as if new "subscriber" sign-up continues at Friday's rate, we'll be giving away the RAIN Viral Marketing Contest prize package this week for sure.

If you can think of a couple of more industry friends who might like to read RAIN, it wouldn't hurt to drop them a line today or tomorrow. (Click here for sample copy.)

Thanks...and good luck!

You can easily click through previous issues of RAIN by using the blue arrows next to the issue date at the top of the page. (This navigation element has been added retroactively to all of March's issues.)