Manx Radio and 3FM - listening figures

[La Colombe]

On 10/28/2023 at 8:52 PM, Wake Up Call said:

Manx Radio do a great job advertising what's on at the theatre, the Villa, bus and transport offers/promotions and those great steam train adverts. These commercials must make loads of money for the station.

Indeed. And that's presumably on top of the subvention. 

[woolley]

13 hours ago, Roger Mexico said:

But that's going to be true of nearly all industry surveys (except maybe things like Which).  The only people who are going to be interested enough to spend money to find stuff out are going to be those who have interests.  But what keeps these things honest is the fact that the individual companies represented are in rivalry and so want to know the truth about their opposition[1].  They stuff won't be fiddled because there's no way to make everyone the winner.

It may be that accompanying press releases and the like will present stuff in the best light, but the figures are going to be as accurate as they can make them.

[1]  There's an additional thing about RAJAR, which is that the public only get to see the headline figures and subscribers within the industry see more and participating stations get their full details.  So stations can adjust their programming based on which shows are popular and so on.

As I said, RAJAR is an animal of the industry, and it does make everyone the winner if it portrays reasonably healthy audiences across the board. Advertising spend allocations and budget decisions are made on the basis of its surveys so there is, at the very least, a huge conflict of interest. It is to every station's advantage if radio is projected as a vibrant medium of today rather than a washed up, outmoded basket case. I have no way of knowing if my uneasiness has any basis in fact, but it cannot be denied that a lot is at stake, and the "science" is inexact.

[woolley]

4 hours ago, CrazyDave said:

It may come as a surprise to some other people, that a lot of people these days don’t ever watch or listen to live news as there is no need.

”Alexa, give me my daily summary”

Any time of the day or night and I get my own mix of national and international news tailored around my own interests and favourite sports.

No need for live news at all, and it’s read by a robot from what she gathers online.

Everything else comes from my own news feeds and the internet.

So you get your own mix of news tailored to your tastes and prejudices, and nothing more. This begins to explain the fashion for people believing they can invent their own reality.

[Roger Mexico]

4 hours ago, CrazyDave said:

It may come as a surprise to some other people, that a lot of people these days don’t ever watch or listen to live news as there is no need.

”Alexa, give me my daily summary”

Any time of the day or night and I get my own mix of national and international news tailored around my own interests and favourite sports.

No need for live news at all, and it’s read by a robot from what she gathers online.

Everything else comes from my own news feeds and the internet.

I'm not sure which is more alarming in this.  The fact that you seem perfectly happy to get your view of what is going on in the world from a set of algorithms designed for the benefit of a multinational corporation.  Or the fact you refer to it as "she".

11 minutes ago, woolley said:

So you get your own mix of news tailored to your tastes and prejudices, and nothing more. This begins to explain the fashion for people believing they can invent their own reality.

Though in this particular case you get the impression that they were well capable of that long before someone invented 'smart' speakers.

[woolley]

16 hours ago, CrazyDave said:

These days you can listen to whatever you want, whenever you want without touching a radio.

You do it on your phone, tablet or computer or you ask your smart speaker.

Why would you have a broadcast schedule dictate what you listen to when you can literally listen to whatever you want whenever you want?

It’s the same as TV in 2023.  Nobody watches what is broadcast unless it is live sport or a major event.  You watch what you want when you want.

Of course they do still watch live, but it's certainly a trend to view on demand, and clearly a lot of investment by traditional broadcasters is going into online platforms. I'm sure there will come a tipping point when commercial broadcasters decide that it isn't worth the cost of the playout/ continuity service, and the broadcast licence to transmit through the on air network. Probably a decade away though and a disincentive, going back to the RAJAR issue, might be that it's a lot easier to get accurate consumption data from streaming than it is from a broadcast which might have an audience of 20 million or 20 thousand.

[IOM]

46 minutes ago, Parsley the Lion said:

The current anomaly in the listening figures is due to the massive increase Manx Radio received in listening during the pandemic as would be expected as it was the key source of the Islands information on the ever-changing issues - the BBC experienced the same swell in audience. It is a known fact that that in times of trouble PSB's are what people turn to in order be kept informed as they are licenced as primarily talk based stations whilst stations like 3FM are music stations and do not have the band width in their licences to broadcast the amount of speech required to cover the topics. What we see now is a return to the pre pandemic 'balance' between the stations. 

 

 

 

I agree with a lot of what you say and it’s role as a Public Sector Broadcaster. However the above comment of yours is simply not true . If you google Manx Radio listener figures you will come across a set of helpful charts going back in time . One of the charts shows the ‘reach’ of the station which is defined as the number of people listening. In the graph you will see that the Manx Radio reach around 2015 was circa 46,000 and has been in steady decline ever since to around 26,000 in September of this year . That’s a huge drop and nothing to do with the pandemic at all . The clue to the drop has to go back to what changed in 2015 and that’s what station management should be held accountable for and explain .  

[CrazyDave]

16 minutes ago, woolley said:

So you get your own mix of news tailored to your tastes and prejudices, and nothing more. This begins to explain the fashion for people believing they can invent their own reality.

No, not at all.

Getting my news from BBC is no different to me watching the BBC news.  I just don’t need to tune in at a certain time.

https://www.xda-developers.com/how-to-customize-alexa-flash-briefing/

[Parsley the Lion]

23 minutes ago, IOM said:

I agree with a lot of what you say and it’s role as a Public Sector Broadcaster. However the above comment of yours is simply not true . If you google Manx Radio listener figures you will come across a set of helpful charts going back in time . One of the charts shows the ‘reach’ of the station which is defined as the number of people listening. In the graph you will see that the Manx Radio reach around 2015 was circa 46,000 and has been in steady decline ever since to around 26,000 in September of this year . That’s a huge drop and nothing to do with the pandemic at all . The clue to the drop has to go back to what changed in 2015 and that’s what station management should be held accountable for and explain .  

Yes indeed I all the figures of every station are available on line at rajar.co.uk but it must be remembered that these are only the 'headline figures' and the stations get access to much more detailed information. You are correct in what you say regarding the decline in reach however this is only one factor in a stations listening charactretisics. As a PSB they should be much more interested in their total hours listened as this is a good indicator of the quality of the output. All PSB's experienced an uplift in the hours listened and during covid as would be expected and commercial stations declined. The value of Manx Radio needs assessing on all its merits and not just the total number of listeners during any given rajar sweep. By the way the figures for Radio TT are not included in the general Manx Radio Rajar sweep.  I would argue that it is the quality of the output of the PSB that is of paramount importance to its role in a community. Looking at the headline figures they were attracting 45,000 listeners in September 2015 however previously in September 2009 it was 36000. Lots of things can affect a stations audience numbers which it is why  - especially with a PSB it is wise to take the long view. The main thing that needs to happen for the future is to define what is required of a PSB and a lot of this will come from the 2027 review of the BBC and how it is funded in the future as well as how that requirement is to be funded.

[Nellie]

45 minutes ago, IOM said:

I agree with a lot of what you say and it’s role as a Public Sector Broadcaster. However the above comment of yours is simply not true . If you google Manx Radio listener figures you will come across a set of helpful charts going back in time . One of the charts shows the ‘reach’ of the station which is defined as the number of people listening. In the graph you will see that the Manx Radio reach around 2015 was circa 46,000 and has been in steady decline ever since to around 26,000 in September of this year . That’s a huge drop and nothing to do with the pandemic at all . The clue to the drop has to go back to what changed in 2015 and that’s what station management should be held accountable for and explain .  

Well, Brindley became Controller of Programming and Content in October 2016, so there's quite a close correlation there!

https://www.linkedin.com/in/alex-brindley-70306621/?originalSubdomain=uk

[IOM]

15 minutes ago, Parsley the Lion said:

Yes indeed I all the figures of every station are available on line at rajar.co.uk but it must be remembered that these are only the 'headline figures' and the stations get access to much more detailed information. You are correct in what you say regarding the decline in reach however this is only one factor in a stations listening charactretisics. As a PSB they should be much more interested in their total hours listened as this is a good indicator of the quality of the output. All PSB's experienced an uplift in the hours listened and during covid as would be expected and commercial stations declined. The value of Manx Radio needs assessing on all its merits and not just the total number of listeners during any given rajar sweep. By the way the figures for Radio TT are not included in the general Manx Radio Rajar sweep.  I would argue that it is the quality of the output of the PSB that is of paramount importance to its role in a community. Looking at the headline figures they were attracting 45,000 listeners in September 2015 however previously in September 2009 it was 36000. Lots of things can affect a stations audience numbers which it is why  - especially with a PSB it is wise to take the long view. The main thing that needs to happen for the future is to define what is required of a PSB and a lot of this will come from the 2027 review of the BBC and how it is funded in the future as well as how that requirement is to be funded.

Sorry you keep going back to pandemic but the data does not support your argument. I am happy however to take your suggestion and look at the station over a longer time frame starting in 2004 . This data shows the reach was circa 47,000 then and today it’s 24,000. Hours per listener were 15 and today they are 10 and finally market share was 39% and now it’s circa 20% . Not great reading by any measure . Interestingly there was a drop over a ten year period on these metrics from 2004 ( presumably linked to 3FM starting ) but then Manx Radio grew and peaked again in 2015 so they clearly started to improve the output somehow. 
 

I think it’s become too fashionable for people to find excuses for underperforming metrics when in actual fact it’s often down to the fact that something is fundamentally wrong . I could myself justify some marginal changes in radio audience data due to the rise of digital etc but not a decline of the magnitude there is here . 

[woolley]

https://www.rajar.co.uk/content.php?page=about_key_facts_how

Procedure looks archaic, and to have all the precision of me observing a star in the sky and estimating how far away it is. It's unscientific.

[CrazyDave]

14 minutes ago, woolley said:

https://www.rajar.co.uk/content.php?page=about_key_facts_how

Procedure looks archaic, and to have all the precision of me observing a star in the sky and estimating how far away it is. It's unscientific.

Even more so over here because the sample size is absolutely tiny

I can’t remember exactly, but someone involved once told me that one sample size was only something like 40 people.

[woolley]

15 minutes ago, CrazyDave said:

Even more so over here because the sample size is absolutely tiny

I can’t remember exactly, but someone involved once told me that one sample size was only something like 40 people.

Do they take some sort of account of those who simply don't respond to their approaches - there must be many - or reply that they aren't in the least interested in radio? Or do they persist until they procure the requisite number of individuals sufficiently motivated to take part in the survey, and then extrapolate the results from that cohort to the whole population?

[Roger Mexico]

15 minutes ago, CrazyDave said:

Even more so over here because the sample size is absolutely tiny

I can’t remember exactly, but someone involved once told me that one sample size was only something like 40 people.

It will be more than that because when sampling you boost the sample in small markets rather than just allocate pro-rata across the whole UK+.  Also while there may not be many filling things in in any particular week, remember these are averaged over a whole year, so the number of people involved will be higher in any particular figure.  If they weren't the figures would move about a lot more randomly even than they do at the moment.

[genericUserName]

11 hours ago, IOM said:

What a complete and utter load of nonsense. Maybe ask yourself why on the island over 40,000 people listen to 3FM or Manx Radio or why 13 million listen each week to Radio 2 across .

I tell you what take a trip to the boardrooms of ITV , Bauer Media, Global who are some of the widely respected profitable media groups and tell them nobody listens to or watches their output and their product is not needed and see how long it is before they show you the door ! 

Increasingly it is only the elderly who consume scheduled broadcast TV and radio. Most working age tax payers are streaming their content today. They do not sit down to watch a 'programme' at x o'clock.

This is why I am proposing a timetable for gradually switching off broadcasting. It occupies a huge amount of RF spectrum priced at a legacy discount to service a diminishing market.

The BBC have already announced that they are planning towards online only. So this will happen. Best case scenario they will also be set free from government and the licence fee.

Edited October 30, 2023 by genericUserName