Your Nielsen Rated radio station!

I often get asked, especially by our underwriters, if we know how many listeners we have.  The short answer is no.  It is very difficult to track who is listening to the radio at any given moment.  But companies like Nielsen attempt to do exactly that.  They do it in a variety of ways and have been tracking radio listeners and TV viewers since the 1950’s.

A while back, I received an interesting phone call.  It was an employee of the Nielsen company asking to verify WWER.  It seems we were not in their database of radio stations before, but now we were showing up in their ratings and they wanted to verify who we are.  It doesn’t sound like much, but the very idea that a little radio station like ours actually shows up in the ratings at all is amazing!  I was so pleased.  It means we are making a measurable impact!

But I still don’t know how many listeners we have.  Nielsen charges for “the book” and it’s very expensive.  We have more important things to spend our money on, but just knowing that we are in it is gratifying!

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Ted Tait

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