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Diving Into The Shallow End

March 13, 2025

Now that the first tranche of three-minute qualifier data is in your hands, what should you be looking at?

Let’s begin by saying that whatever you unearth is just a first pass. We would not recommend making any changes or assumptions on such a small sample size.

Second, while national results are interesting you should focus on your market and stations. We saw a great variance in increases from market to market.

We recommend that you look at changes from the Holiday 2024 survey to January 2025 first. Be aware that this will likely yield the biggest increases as the Holiday survey tends to have the lowest market PUMM of the year.

Then, compare January 2024 to January 2025. You are looking for percentage increases in the following areas from survey to survey:

Cume – this is not going to change much. There is generally a natural lift from Holiday to January but any new cume you receive could be from very light listeners.

AQH – this is the one to watch. You want to see if your AQH increases at least match what happened in your market. Remember, your shares are based on this.

AWTE (TSL) – you’ll likely see the biggest bump in this metric.

We suggest you look at the market totals for each of these categories. Then, compare the percentage increases for the market to those of your station(s). You hope that you are pacing the market.

Look at the major day parts, as well. We have seen a large AQH increase in Morning AQH across the PPM markets. This could be seasonal or a result of the new recording rules.

Finally, break down the discrete demos. What is driving the AQH rise in A25-54 or A18-49? Are the men outperforming women? How are the younger cells skewing? And don’t forget to look at any ethnic splits in your market.

While it’s easy to chalk up any changes to your station’s ratings to the new three-minute qualifier, there are always other factors at play. For example, how did the panel change from Holiday to January? Did your heavy listeners get heavier? What about your hot zips?

This is a lot of data analysis. We can save you that time by digging into the numbers for you. Let us show you how that works.

Also, in case you missed our Radio Ink webinar with Mike McVay on the three-minute rule, you can watch it here.

-Steve Allan, Programming Research Consultant

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