Yes, if you compare oranges to oranges
Is radio audience growing
fast enough to meet system goal?
Maybe, maybe not. First, a bright spot found by Tom Thomas and Terry Clifford of the Station Resource Group. In a just-released follow-up to SRG's "Grow the Audience" report for CPB last year, they compared pubradio's average audience for fall 2009 and fall 2010, covering only 30 big markets that together contain more than half of the U.S. population.
By that measure, the average audience grew from 531,400 to 559,100, a gain of 5.2 percent, exceeding the 3.6 percent rate needed for the system to hit the Grow the Audience goal of a 50 percent gain in 10 years. Nearly half of the growth came from the addition of three new stations in those markets.
The new report and other Grow the Audience materials are posted on SRG’s website at www.srg.org/gta.html.
By looking only at these 30 metro areas, SRG believes, it has removed a major factor that would otherwise muddle the picture: These are markets where Arbitron used portable people meters to sample audiences during both years. The downside is that this new ear-counting method has typically subtracted double-digit percentages from radio ratings compared to data from Arbitron diaries.
Indeed, if you compare 2008 ratings from diaries in all markets with 2010 ratings based on the new meter technology, pubradio's average audience declined a big 18.2 percent.
Weekly cume audiences often broaden with the advent of PPM measurement, and public radio's did grow slightly faster than the 6 percent two-year "Grow the Audience" target rate.
Meanwhile, pubradio's black audience was down from 7.2 to 6.3 percent, while its Hispanic audience was up from 4.4 percent to 4.9 percent. SRG found that 60 percent of the loss of black listeners came from five jazz/contemporary music stations but didn't offer a theory to explain it.
All of these figures include only broadcast audiences, so pubradio may be adding online listeners that Arbitron doesn't count. For instance, SRG observed, NPR.org added 1.7 million users a month between fall 2008 and spring 2010, and four-fifths of those web users weren't radio listeners. They can be included in pubradio's audience gain.
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