Arbitron failing

I haven't been on stationratings.com for sometime until just a few minutes ago. I used to really enjoy the site but it seems that most station owners have abandoned the ratings company. Checked out ratings for Trenton, NJ and saw two stations listed WKXW and WPST. WPST had an 8.2 rating for spring2012. It's a nice station but I truly doubt those numbers are at all accurate. When you're only one of two stations paying to be rated you're going to get nice numbers. What are your thoughts?

If Arbitron ever gets "caught" favoring stations that subscribe, they would lose their agency business which is more important that what stations pay them.

secondchoice said:

If Arbitron ever gets "caught" favoring stations that subscribe, they would lose their agency business which is more important that what stations pay them.

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Agencies pay next to nothing for Arbitron data, but acceptance by agencies and advertisers is the principal reason stations subscribe.

In fact, it is commonly acknowledged that older ratings services like Hooper and Pulse went out of business because Arbitron aggressively sold the value of their services at the client level. Stations that bought Pulse and Hooper found that agencies were buying from Arbitron, and they gradually switched to become Arbitron clients.

New services in the 70's and beyond, such as Birch, Burke, etc., had trouble breaking the dominance of Arbitron usage at agencies. Because Arbitron covered so many markets, a start-up had trouble achieving the critical mass needed to be the accepted service.

josh said:

I haven't been on stationratings.com for sometime until just a few minutes ago. I used to really enjoy the site but it seems that most station owners have abandoned the ratings company. Checked out ratings for Trenton, NJ and saw two stations listed WKXW and WPST. WPST had an 8.2 rating for spring2012. It's a nice station but I truly doubt those numbers are at all accurate. When you're only one of two stations paying to be rated you're going to get nice numbers. What are your thoughts?

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Arbitron is audited annually by the MRC, which extends accreditation to the survey methodology and to each market if its standards are met.

WPST has been as high as a 9.7 and as low as a 4.5 in the Trenton book over the last 7 years. An 8.2 is well within its normal range. It is traditionally #1 or #2 in all the important segments inside the 25-54 sales demo.

WPST is also one of the very rare stations that is at the same sales level now as it was pre-recession, despite the industry as a whole being off, still, about 30%. That would indicate that WPST not only has good ratings, but gets good sales results... as the Trenton market derives about 75% of its revenue from local accounts.

When you're one of only two stations paying to be rated, you're in extreme danger of no longer being rated. If that happens, it would probably drop WPST from "flat since '07" to "down 20% since '07"

PTBoardOp94 said:

When you're one of only two stations paying to be rated, you're in extreme danger of no longer being rated. If that happens, it would probably drop WPST from "flat since '07" to "down 20% since '07"

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Why would the current clients of Arbitron be in "extreme danger of no longer being rated"?

Those two clients in Trenton find that the expense of the ratings is compensated for by the income they derive from transactional accounts. As long as they find the ratings subscription to be a profitable relationship, they will keep paying for it. No danger.

And there is no evidence that unsubscribed stations are treated any differently than subscribed ones. Of course, the MRC audits make sure of that, but there are countless business reasons why Arbitron would not punish non-subscribers.

Remember, subscribers see the full data for all stations. It's just the valueless 6+ or 12+ data given to the press that excludes stations that are not subscribed.