Today is a tale of
two noncom news stations in two cities where each station owns the NPR News
franchise. WBEZ is the sole provider of NPR News in Chicago and WAMU does the
same in Washington, DC. WAMU’s estimated weekly cumulative listeners keep
rising but WBEZ’s weekly listeners have declined 152,000 in seven months.
Earlier this month we
reported [link] on the decline of NPR News stations between March 2016 and September
2016 according to Nielsen Audio PPM estimates. We found this pattern at several
big NPR News stations. WBEZ had some of the biggest losses. We used a six-month comparison to keep the
analysis within election season. Theoretically NPR News stations have increased
listening during hot news cycles. Apparently not all of them abide by this
notion.
I feel that weekly
cume is an important metric because it shows the overall circulation of a
station. Station programmers tend to watch metrics derived from Average Quarter
Hour (AQH) listening estimates. AQH is important. However, a pattern of
fewer weekly listeners means fewer people are entering a station's “listener pool.” This can't be good news in the long run.
On the left is a
chart showing WBEZ’s weekly cumulative listeners for the months of March
through October 2016. I sent a copy of
this chart to the programming and press folks at WBEZ for comment. We have not received a reply. If/when we hear
from WBEZ we will update this post.
Earlier this month
we attempted several times to get a comment from WBEZ and no one replied. It is hard to believe that (1.) WBEZ doesn’t
know about this trend, and (2.) WBEZ isn’t concerned about it.
Here are the
October 2016 numbers for all subscribing noncom stations in Chicago, plus one-month
trends.
WAMU REACHES TOP SPOTS IN WASHINGTON, DC
RATINGS
Good news keeps
coming for WAMU from Nielsen Audio. In
the October estimates WAMU had 861,400 weekly cumulative listeners, up 3% from
the prior month. Perhaps the biggest news was WAMU’s AQH share: 9.6%, up from
9.0% in September.
Hubbard
Broadcasting’s WTOP had a 9.2% AQH share and a weekly cume of 1,186,600.
Folks should be
aware that Nielsen and RRC discourages noncom stations from celebrating “wins”
over commercial stations. Commercial broadcasters pay much more for the data
than noncoms. Too much “we’re number one” lingo might raise concerns with
commercial broadcasters such as Ginny Morris, the CEO of Hubbard.
Here are the
October 2016 numbers for all subscribing noncom stations in DC, plus one-month
trends. Note the nice up book for Classical WETA. Meanwhile CCM WGTS keeps
losing cume.
I've listened to NPR for over 20 years - much of it through WBEZ.
ReplyDeleteI've stopped listening this year because the stations editorial policy believes that is must prescribe self flagellation to me - constantly, over and over, in the majority of it programming. No thank you.
I've switched to Audible.com NPR used to fulfil this role before it took on it's new role.