Nielsen recently announced the release of The Record, described as “a quarterly look at how U.S. audiences spend their time with radio”. The Record is a joint production of Nielsen and Edison Research, utilizing Edison’s Share of Ear® studies to give the report more substance. This will be appreciated by the industry.
Nielsen’s release states that “The Record will offer a unique view of time spent with ad-supported content” (italics theirs). As always, I’ll find a fly in the ointment.
In the first release, Nielsen notes that news/talk has a 10.8% share of persons 18+ on a total week (Monday-Sunday, 6 AM-Midnight) basis. Well, yes and no. It comes down to an asterisk.
That asterisk next to news/talk states “includes both commercial and non-commercial stations”, in other words, this is not a view of ad-supported content when it comes to the news/talk format. It’s everyone and in terms of understanding how the news/talk format is performing, well, you won’t find any conclusive answers here because commercial news/talk and non-commercial news/talk (public radio stations) are combined.
Why? The reason is nothing more than laziness. Nielsen currently offers 63, yes 63 different format descriptors that a radio station can choose. Even with 63 format options, commercial news/talk and public news/talk are lumped together. I’ve asked Nielsen for a long time to offer a second news/talk format description, call it “public news/talk”, “non-commercial news/talk” or whatever, but allow the public news/talk stations to distinguish themselves from the commercial versions.
To put it in context and to show you how long I’ve complained about it, my standard line was “How much audience sharing do you think goes on between Rush Limbaugh and All Things Considered?” Rush died over three years ago.
Here are some of the format choices Nielsen offers today:
- Children’s Radio (Radio Disney no longer exists on broadcast)
- World Ethnic
- Family Hits
- Comedy
- Blues
There are 13 possible formats for Spanish language including Spanish news/talk. There is also a “talk/personality” option and a few news/talk stations use that but it doesn’t help matters at all.
This is not to denigrate a station running any of those formats listed above, but there are far fewer of them than the number of public radio stations registered as news/talk. How hard would it be for Nielsen to add another format and inform the public radio community about the option?
Beyond that, there are likely other errors in the release. Some college radio stations list their formats as “alternative” and some are “classic rock”. A handful are in the system as “top 40”. The difference in the resulting audience numbers is far smaller than the news/talk number, but I’d bet a cup of coffee that some non-advertiser-supported audience exists in Nielsen’s ad-supported estimates (italics mine).
Can the numbers be presented the right way in the current system? Yes, and I know that because I used to do it at Cumulus.
In Nielsen’s National Regional Database (NRD) which can be accessed via Tapscan if you subscribe to NRD, you simply eliminate any station in the non-commercial FM band (88.1-91.9 MHz) and then take out the public news/talk AMs and the handful of public news/talk stations that are in the commercial FM band, for example, WNYC-FM in New York and WDET in Detroit.
And while you’re at it, be sure to eliminate the Canadian news/talk stations that are on the list. While those are valid stations, not many people in the US news/talk radio audience care about how Justin Trudeau is polling against Pierre Poilievre ahead of whenever Canada has their next national election. It takes some extra work, but you can produce a legitimate ad-supported news/talk share using Nielsen data.
This is a disservice to the industry. Both the commercial news/talk stations, in other words, the readers of Barrett News Media, and the public news/talk stations should be calling and emailing their Nielsen reps or Rich Tunkel, Nielsen Audio’s managing director and a good guy, asking for this change. This is not a big ask by any stretch and if you get an answer like “we don’t have any more formats available”, ask how many stations are currently registered as “Children’s Radio” or “Comedy”.
Already, Radio Ink quoted the news/talk data last Tuesday without noting the “includes non-commercial” aspect. Don’t blame Radio Ink for missing a footnote in the data tables but blame Nielsen for their unwillingness to add one lousy format option used by many stations.
In conclusion, let’s update my earlier question:
How much audience sharing do you think goes on between Clay Travis and Buck Sexton and All Things Considered? Is there much audience sharing between Ben Shapiro and Morning Edition? How about Chris Plante and Fresh Air with Terry Gross?
Should be a lot…as far as Nielsen is concerned, they’re the same format. No different than sharing you’d expect between two CHRs or two Hot AC stations, right?
Maybe Nielsen will go ahead and make the change…they need to go on The Record.
Let’s meet again next week.
