Should Nielsen Create a Low-Cost Ratings Service for Small Radio Markets?

Bowling Green, Kentucky, has been condemned to death. As a resident, I can tell you it’s a wonderful place to live. We have great tourist attractions, including the National Corvette Museum and track. Mammoth Cave National Park is in the metro. We have a good school, Western Kentucky University, which, as I’ve noted here before, has a wonderful student radio station, WWHR-FM, Revolution 91.7. I always promote the station, so please download our app. And BG is an hour’s drive from one of America’s most fun cities, Nashville.

No matter. The word from Nielsen Audio is “you’re dead to us.” We hear the Stones’ version of “It’s All Over Now” in our heads. The Fall 2026 Presurvey Bulletin delivered the news that the Bowling Green, Kentucky, market has been canceled, effective immediately. Those of us who live and work here could see it coming. The loss of subscribers and the lack of interest in Nielsen’s product on the part of new ownerships helped doom Bowling Green.

We blame Nielsen for a lot of things, especially in its current version, but Nielsen is a business. Conducting surveys with almost no revenue is not conducive to longevity or to keeping the company’s private equity owners happy. But does market 161, albeit no longer ranked, matter in the grand scheme of things?

Bowling Green Joins a Growing List of Lost Markets

Bowling Green isn’t the first to go. Our metro joins a long list of former markets, among them Burlington-Plattsburgh, Greenville-New Bern-Jacksonville, Lakeland-Winter Haven, Texarkana, and, coming next year, Puerto Rico. No, with the exception of Puerto Rico, these aren’t big markets, though some argued that the island should never have been ranked with U.S. mainland markets.

This is one more sign of negative change in the U.S. commercial radio business. There was a time when Arbitron measured over 300 markets. In my time at the company, small-market subscribers could make money with Arbitron and later Nielsen data. That time appears to have passed. The consistent flow of layoffs, along with the shutdowns of numerous stations, mostly on the AM band, has been the public face of decline. Add the Nielsen market shutdowns to the picture.

Could Nielsen Offer a Low-Cost Option for Small Markets?

For smaller metros to continue using syndicated ratings data, there must be a less expensive alternative. Some markets may go with Eastlan, which costs far less. My column of December 5, 2025, covered a change in Switzerland, where the cost to operators was expected to be halved.

In its current fight with Nielsen, Cumulus is using alternative measures of audience, including DTS AutoStage, Eastlan, and The Media Audit. Of course, less money means less data.

I’m not privy to anything Nielsen may be planning, but is it time for the company to consider a low-cost option for small markets? The change to two-book averaging some years back was a move to smooth out data without adding costs.

But do programmers in smaller markets need quarter-hour-by-quarter-hour data for Men 25-34?

What a Small-Market Survey Might Look Like

Let’s spitball a small-market Nielsen survey and its implications for a moment. For all the griping about the service, whether about the current company or Arbitron before it, it’s been the “standard” for around six decades. I hesitate to use the word “gold” with “standard” here. The periodic table brings other elements to mind, perhaps carbon, tin, or helium. You may opt for boron or neon. Niobium standard, anyone?

I think we can agree that we’d want a cume number to measure reach. We’d want some idea of average audience across a daypart, along with some standard dayparts. We’d also want some broad demo breaks but would forgo the “drill down.”

Could Nielsen use a one-shot survey with modeling, à la the old Birch method? Could PPM data (all markets rolled up) be part of a model? Nielsen has more data on U.S. radio listening than any company in history, and while individual stations move around, format shares move slowly. Country may go up a bit, then drop based on the latest songs. News/talk may move up or down depending upon who gets elected. The changes are slow, and that data can feed a model.

The Metro Tombstones Keep Multiplying

The goal should be something cheap and useful, returning to the proposition that paying Nielsen for data results in greater revenue for the subscriber. The monetary return on the data collection and the subscription must be sufficiently positive for both Nielsen and the cluster. And no, I’m not holding my breath waiting for a product like this to be announced.

Until this happens, if ever, the number of metro tombstones will keep increasing. Today, Bowling Green, Kentucky. Tomorrow, Puerto Rico. Maybe your small market is next. And if it happens, will you care?

Let’s meet again next week.

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