Absolute Radio in online listenership measurement first

by Jennifer Whitehead, Brand Republic 23-Oct-09, 09:10

LONDON - Absolute Radio has become the first commercial radio station to release internet listening figures, following in the footsteps of BBC radio.

The year-old company has published monthly live listening hours for February to September and plans to "provide greater insight into how our listeners hear our output online" over the coming months.

The figures show that hours on Absoluteradio.co.uk varied between 3.6m in June and 6.3m in September.

Absolute has worked closely with the BBC to come up with its statistics, in an attempt to present them in a similar format and create consistency across the industry.

The figures are for live listening only, and do not include those using the 'listen again' function or people downloading shows in podcast form. Absolute says its statistics also attempt to strip out 'listening' by robots sent out by search engines.

At the moment only monthly listening figures will be released, published on the One Golden Square blog.

Writing on the blog, Adam Bowie, head of strategy and planning at Absolute, said: "In time we're hoping to release more data at a more granular level. We also hope that other stations will also release data." He adds that the figures are not meant to replace the Rajar radio ratings system.

Absolute Radio presenters include Christian O'Connell, who hosts the breakfast show, and comedian Dave Gorman, who presents a Sunday morning show with co-hosts Martin White, the world's second-most famous comedy accordion star, and the writer and stand-up Danielle Ward.

Comments

TNR Communications - 23/10/2009

As a Communications Consutlancy who produces numerous Radio Days and whose success is measured not only by the number of Radio interviews we achieve but also the size of the listenership of those programmes, we welcome any new and innovative way of measuring that data.