How do they get their ratings? Is there a definite way to know how many people are listening at any given time?
Elfs.
(I’m going from memory here.)
Listeners are selected randomly from a set of demographics in a radio market and are provided with log books. Those being surveyed agree to record their listening habits in 15 minute increments. Periodically, these log books are submitted to the company conducting the survey where they are compiled. Trends are analyzed and advertising rates are set based on the results. Arbitron and Nielsen come to mind. Check out their websites.
I actually did one of these once.
Don’t ask me why, but I did- maybe it was that five bucks they sent me.
In the end, I fear I did what others do- I wrote in my journal the programs I liked and wanted to stay on the air, not necessarily those that I actually listened to in that week.
Why these guys (Along with the Neilson people) believe in these things is beyond me.
Thank you for the replies. I’d still be very surprised if they got accurate ratings this way.I have about 10 stations programmed on my radio. I listen mainly to about 4, but I constantly surf during commercials or crappy songs. It would be a major pain in the butt to record every time I switch the dial.
I don’t have much of a cite for this, but I heard a story on NPR about five years ago that described a new system which could identify what people were listening to as they passed a certain point. The story was mainly about the inevitable privacy concern arising from such a system, but it recall that it was beyond the experimental stage. Does anyone else know anything about this?
Are you talking about MobilTrak? This technology has been around for years and I recall a company in Shreveport using this method in the mid-80’s.
The problem here is you get a readout of what folks in the cars are tuned to but you can’t get the data that advertising agencies live and die for…age and sex.
Yep, mobiletrak sounds like what I was talking about. It seems as though the demographic information would be pretty easy to get with a video camera, monkey, and bungee cord…but I’ll leave that to the technical types.
I think companies like arbitron also use focus groups and individual market research. One of the big reasons that new songs with a lot of sampling get so much radio play is that they manage to cut across multiple demographics - those who scan for familiarity and those who scan for novelty.
Why am I suddenly thinking about William Wegman?
And most radio stations are gambling on the fact that you won’t, and that you’ll only record the ones that really stick on your mind. Call letters, frequencies, and slogans all count as accurate mentions of a station, so if for example you were in Cleveland, you could write down either “100.7,” “WMMS” or “the Buzzard” and any of them would count in your log book as a listener for WMMS in that quarter hour. That’s why most stations now try to come up with catchy identifiers and drop them (seemingly) in between every other song. If you remember theirs but not the other guy’s, so much the better for them.