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'Infinite Dial' Study Shows Weekly Online Radio Audience Up
NEW YORK -- April 9, 2008: The weekly online radio audience bumped up to 13 percent of Americans 12+ in the new "Infinite Dial: Radio's Digital Platforms" study from Arbitron and Edison Media Research. That's about 33 million people, up from 11 percent (about 29 million) in 2007. And the weekly number for 25-54s is higher: Online radio reaches 15 percent of that demo each week.
Forty-six percent of Americans have ever listened to online radio, the survey found, while 21 percent have listened in the last month. But Arbitron President/Sales & Marketing Pierre Bouvard said, 'We tend to focus on that last-week figure because that represents habituation -- the people who listen week after week after week."
Not surprisingly, people who use a lot of online audio tend to be fans of online video as well. Half of monthly online audio listeners have also watched video online over the same period.
And online radio fans also tend to be big users of social networking sites. Forty-one percent of weekly online radio listeners have a profile on at least one social network site like MySpace or Facebook, compared to 25 percent of Americans overall. Almost 40 percent of the online listeners who have profiles visit them at least once a day, and another 27 percent visit a few times a week.
But Edison VP Tom Webster said that doesn't necessarily mean that radio should try to replicate social-networking sites. MySpace and Facebook are among the most visited sites on the Internet, he noted, and with so many listeners having invested time in them, "it might be a bit much" to ask the to replicate that on a dedicated radio site.
But Webster does think radio can get in on social networking in other ways. Some stations, he said, essentially "outsource" their social networking by linking to profiles on networking sites, but he believes there is a "middle ground that makes sense for a radio station" between doing that and building a ground-up network. A station could, he said, "start some kind of a wiki, perhaps, with local bands, local clubs, and get all those people who are passionate about those bands" and get them contributing content to the website.
Additionally, Bouvard said plans for local Internet-radio ratings for station simulcasts are in the works (Arbitron partners with comScore on national 'Net-radio ratings.) Beginning in July, he said, AM and FM stations whose streams meet the minimum reporting standards will begin encoding for the Portable People Meter, and their PPM results will be reported by Arbitron. The results will be reported separately from the stations' broadcast numbers except in the rare cases when the webcast is a 100 percent simulcast of the over-the-air signal.
For the "Infinite Dial" study, Arbitron and Edison interviewed 1,857 people between January 18 and February 15. Most respondents were chosen at random from a national sample of Arbitron fall 2007 diarykeepers, with a supplemental sample from random-digit dialing.
The complete study presentation is available at www.arbitron.com.
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