The Magic Millions
The latest for all U.K. radio stations are published this morning. You can guarantee that every station manager in the country will use mathematical wizardry to find something positive to say about them...and I'm no exception. So, let's do the sums:
In the first three months of 2008 ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Radio Scotland had more than a million listeners a week. That's up by 65,000 on the previous three months, but not quite as high as the eight-year-high figure we peaked at twelve months ago. Still, in such a competitive market we're very pleased and a big thank you to every one of you. Our share of the audience (9.6%) is also up compared to both last quarter and the previous year and, indeed, the figures are very good for most ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ radio stations available in Scotland.
So it's very good news for us and allows me to be candid in my reaction. If the figures were going in the other direction you might suspect that I was trying to lessen the importance of a bad set of results. You see, the trouble with these figures is that they are a pretty blunt instrument when it comes to making future plans. They gives us a snapshot of what was happening three months ago. The truth is we can really only make educated guesses as to why the audience has grown and we always have to do further research to discover anything useful. A programme with a smaller number of listeners might also be one that is highly valued by that audience. For a public service broacaster that kind of information is vital. It just doesn't make for very sexy headlines.
For commercial radio, the figures are crucial. They determine how much they can charge for advertising and, in some cases, they can influence the share price of an entire company and lead to takeover bids. That's scary.
For me the interesting figures these days are coming from our own online server logs and they tell us how many people are listening via the internet. They tell us which programmes are most popular and allow us to map trends on a day to day basis. We can also tell how many of those online listeners live in the U.K. - licence fee payers - compared to those logging on around the world. The level of detail available is incredible...at least compared with the quarterly Rajar figures.
I could probably pinpoint the exact listening habits of one particular female listener in Scottsdale, Arizona...but frankly, Nancy, that's none of my business.
I can tell you that this website - ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Radio Scotland, not just this page - now gets well over a million page impressions a month and that doesn't include the millions more for our news and sport pages. In those areas we've seen growth of about 44% a year.
So...a million a week for the radio station...a million a month for the website. I wonder how long it will be before those figures are the same. Gosh, I wish I'd stuck in at maths.
