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A Brave New World

January 9, 2025

Welcome to the first day of the rest of your radio life. As of January 9th everything in the ratings universe for PPM markets has changed – forever.

The new Nielsen three-minute rule is not the ratings law of the land. This grand change opens up a brave new world of possibilities for our industry.

What will it all mean?

To paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld: there are known knowns but there are also known unknowns (let’s not forget the unknown unknowns…but I digress).

Based on the early data from Nielsen’s testing, we are certain your market AQH will increase significantly. This also means your station(s) will see a similar increase.

We know this will primarily be the result of increased Time Spent Listening (OK, Average Weekly Time Exposed…whatever).

We are fairly certain that any increase in cume will come from light listeners to your stations.

We can also be certain that the advertising community – especially the agency segment – will want to use this as a cudgel to decrease spending on our medium. (For more on this see our recent post in our column The Power of Radio.)

What don’t we know? The short answer – a lot.

Which formats will garner the most benefit? What about dayparts? Specific hours in the day? Will there be a gender gap?

We will get some answers to the “unknowns” when the January data starts rolling out at the end of February. This will be the time to not only compare year-over-year results, but also look at how January fared versus the previous fall.

This will be the time for savvy programmers to start mulling the possibilities presented by this paradigm shift. Will what we see be more of the same, only bigger? Or will it be something completely different?

One thing we, ahem, know, is that one book does not make a trend. January will start the process but until we have about three months’ worth of data, it would be premature to draw any hard conclusions.

Remember, the audience you have on January 9th is very similar to that of January 8th. Nielsen is not creating new listeners; they are simply doing a better job of measuring what has always been there.

Are you ready? We are. Research Director, Inc. has the proprietary tools to examine the changes at a granular level. We have been doing this for years and have seen hundreds of examples. We have the knowledge and the experience to help you navigate this brave new world.

-Steve Allan, Programming Research Consultant

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