The perennial question to community radio broadcasters in the UK (and no doubt elsewhere as well) How many listeners do you have?

Of course one of the defining qualities of community radio is that it is not a slave to maximising audience, there is plenty of social gain that can be provided by a good community radio station with only a small quantity of listeners. But….

… advertisers, and agencies like to know numbers and community radio is still in part reliant on advertising income.

A few weeks back the Community Media Association conference in Media City featured a session about RAMS & AIMS (Real Audience Measurement System and Audience Impacts Measurement System) developed by The Local Radio Support Company. Their website has much of the same information presented at the conference.

RAJAR who produce the listener figures for the BBC and Commercial Radio, is a relativity large survey as far as opinion polling goes, would need an even bigger panel to service the small coverage area of community radio stations in a meaningful way – variously either quoting costs outside of community radio budgets or straight out ‘sorry we can’t really help’ responses to stations.

In essence the idea behind RAMS is straightforward – established radio audience research regularly reports on the spilt of listening between FM/AM, Digital and Online.

If you accept a premise that this spilt is broadly the same across listening to all types of station, then you can just ‘multiply up’ your online listener stats to estimate the ‘over the air’ listeners.

In the talk at the CMA conference John Dash talked that in their pilot, stations in RAMS proved a significant number of listeners across the network of stations, on a par with smaller Commercial Digital Radio stations and buy in from DCMS and the UK governments advertising agency OmniGOV.

Is it accurate?

Talk amongst delegates included questioning if the 2.2x multiple of online listeners underestimated the real listeners, especially amongst stations with programming targeted at demographics less likely to listen ‘on-line’.

Having considered this I think there is a very real chance this is true, having access the concurrent listener numbers of several community radio stations, none are going to set the world on fire, barring the odd ‘spike’ when there’s something special happening – often a guest with a wider fanbase outside the FM broadcast area. Other feedback such as phone calls, or other types of local research, certainly suggest this would be an underestimate.

If the output from RAMS report said that the station had 2,000 listeners last month would I be happy to say this is true?

If I was to phrase it as “at least” 2,000 unique listeners and bill a national or regional advertiser network campaign for this number of impressions – Yes for sure. Dropping in that they will in reality be getting a variable number of extra ‘free extra listeners’.

So my conclusion – it’s a good mechanism for giving agencies some real impact figures to sell advertising, but for local sales I’d be looking at something more locally tailored.

The one streaming provider tie in problem

The service as presented has one seemingly ‘small’ issue that I believe is actually a biggie… currently you need to change your audio streaming provider to use the services of their partner RCS REVMA as this is what their software has been developed to work with.

Given RCS’s pedigree I am absolutely certain that their platform is extremely robust – a look through some of their marketing material makes me think “this is pretty impressive.” But changing streaming provider is a “right hassle” updating websites, apps, online directories etc. (been there, done that, got the t-shirt!)

The Local Radio Support company are offering “free” web streaming services to stations, but that free comes with advert insertion/replacement on a ‘Rev Share’ basis for these inserted adverts. This is some more technical “hassle” to set-up, but at least is a better deal than the ‘pre-roll’ adverts inserted by a popular online streaming directory service that stations see no income from.

You also need to ask if say replacing locally sold adverts on FM with a national advert online, and by extension to local listeners on smart speakers, is good for your local sales. (There’s probably some fancy technical solution to do interesting spilt advertising, but that another article entirely!)

Impact on existing streaming providers

Let’s get disclosures out of the way first, I provide technical support services to a number of community radio stations. I currently use both Broadcast Radio and Canstream’s audio streaming services at different stations. I am happy with the service from both of these, there’s tedious historical reasoning behind using both at different stations. In the past I have even run my own servers to stream short term RSL broadcasts. I am writing in a personal capacity not as a spokesperson for any other organisation.

Broadcast Radio’s streaming services, as you’d expect, has tight integration with their playout software and website services.

Canstream is a long standing service provided by The Community Media Association, which they have recently invested in updating and expanding. I also don’t think I am giving away any member secrets in stating that it is a major income source for the CMA. If suddenly there was a mass exodus to a free competitor I think that could leave them in a bit of a “sticky situation”.

Taking an highly unscientific survey of what providers UK community stations are using, by scrolling through the no guarantee of being complete and 100% accurate UK Radio Feeds community radio listings, the main players currently seem to be Canstream, Broadcast Radio and Sharp Stream.

Using streaming stats

All audio streaming providers offer their customers stats of some description and are largely using some variant of established server software such as Icecast and Shoutcast which has raw log files and an API third party software, such as Broadcast Radio’s streaming stats software can access.

So the raw data exists and myself I’ve done “back of a fag packet” multiply up listener numbers estimate of audience ever since John Dash mentioned using this methodology idea a couple of years back.

However what’s to say that my calculation from the stats I’ve saved locally is done the same way as the one the station down the road has done in-house from their local stats?

Independent statistics – can we learn from the Podcast industry?

If you follow podcasting groups online there’s as much controversy over podcast listener stats as there is over RAJAR and their equivalent radio ratings in other countries. While nothing’s perfect there’s a couple of examples that small scale radio broadcasters can learn from.

The IAB (Interactive Advertising Bureau) Podcast Certification has an agreed set of technical standards for processing podcast server logs to generate statistics to an agreed methodology, acceptable to advertisers, that any podcasting service provider can implement as part of their service. You are not tied to one provider to get some numbers that are acceptable to advertising agencies.

The Open Podcast Prefix Project (OP3) is another service that allows podcasters using different service providers to generate statistics to a common methodology with a focus on openness and accountability. In this case the statistics are calculated independently of the podcast hosting provider.

These are two different approaches to a similar aim, calculating figures to a ‘standard methodology’ regardless of hosting company, not being tied to one providers proprietary service.

Beyond the basic getting audio from the studio to a listener, there’s a variety of additional services that web streaming providers can offer to suit different customers needs. One size doesn’t fit all!

The logfiles and APIs exist in audio streaming providers systems that a 3rd party could access to mimic the OP3 model. It is not impossible to create a set of guidelines for calculating stats that providers sign up to to mimic the IAB model. You could even ‘Open Source’ the processing algorithm if we wanted transparency and ease of implementation by providers.

Conclusion

I like the idea behind RAMS very much and it is on my New Years “to do list” to see if it could work in the current form for the stations I work with.

I know there has been some chats within the community radio community on this topic.

I strongly feel that a widespread adoption of something like this across the majority of the UK community radio and small commercial digital radio stations would be very valuable.

The only way to get this wide scale “buy in” I believe is some variation on the “independent body” not tied to one provider coordinating this.

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