[cma-l] The DAB issue

[James Cridland]

On Wed, Sep 9, 2015 at 10:05 AM Alan Coote <alan.coote at 5digital.co.uk>
wrote:

> And RAJAR excludes half of all UK broadcast stations and all online only
> stations. It’s methodology was conceived before the birth of the Internet,
> Smartphones and Community Radio. It relies on the human memory for it’s
> accuracy, and to be on the survey you have to pay!
> Just thinking… there must be a better solution?
>

Actually, RAJAR doesn't exclude anyone - you appear under "Other Radio",
which includes online-only radio as well as non-RAJAR stations. I doubt
it's half; I could run that stat for you if you'd be interested.

It is a memory test. And to run the survey it costs lots of money - they
interview around 100,000 people a year. (BARB, for telly, have 8,000
households, for comparison).

A better solution? Yep, there must be.
- There's the PPM, which is in use in some markets in the US and Canada, as
well as Norway and Switzerland. It's much more expensive, and because of
that the sample size is significantly cut down. It has had a lot of issues
over the past year - my newsletter has talked about Voltair a lot, and you
should google that term.
- There's telephone research, which is in use in other markets, and mainly
relies on people being at home and answering the landline. It's really bad
at getting under 30s participating, because they don't answer the landline
phone.
- There's street corner research, which is also really bad at a
self-selecting demographic. I never talk to those people.
- Then, there's server stats. Those aren't accurate either: at least, they
measure devices, not people, and wildly over-estimate actual *people*
listening. Or wildly under-estimate them. There's a paper on the RAJAR
website about this -
http://www.rajar.co.uk/docs/news/Diffs_btwn_audio_stream_and_RAJAR_listeners.pdf
-
and before you scoff, it's quite a balanced paper, and worth reading.
(Disclaimer: I would say that, because I wrote it).

There must be a better way. But actually... there isn't. Ask almost any US
radio professional, and they look wistfully at the UK system. But any
proposals you have would be really splendid! :)

//j

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