Inspired by my public radio’s frequent pledge drives, I started wondering what my “fair share” is.
A commercial station makes money by airing commercials. The cost to the advertiser would be related to the number of listeners or viewers, right? A popular program with more viewers would cost more to advertise on than a late-night, poorly viewed one.
As a listener/viewer then, I have a certain dollar-per-hour value to the broadcaster. If I were to try to translate this value to my donation to public radio, what should be my “fair-share” dollar-per-hour donation?
If it makes a difference, I listen during my commuting hours, probably an hour per day.
And not just the number of listeners/viewers, but their demographics. Advertisers want, not just viewers, but viewers with lots of disposable income that they can be persuaded to spend on their product. I guess that, ideally, you’d have to take this into account in an answer to your question.
I think you could get a rough idea of this pretty easily. The Neilsen ratings for shows are publicly available, probably a demographic slice also. There are also frequently news articles stating how much advertising on popular shows goes for, there may be more formal sources. Figure out how many ads are aired for a half-hour show and their cost, divide by the number of viewers in your demographic, and that should be a good rough estimate.
Approx. 12 years ago one of the talking points at our PBS station during pledge was that the average TV viewer was worth a little over $61 to the average commercial TV station.
I have no idea how they got that number. I’ll assume they took the total number of viewers and worked in the advertising cost.