Who Are The Highest Paid Hosts in Radio? Should You Consider Dropping Nielsen? Plus More

 

August 9, 2016

 

Forbes couldn’t resist taking a dig at radio when listing radio’s highest paid hosts in an online story Tuesday. “While the radio industry has been striving to embrace the modern age with new apps and video streaming, today’s highest paid radio stars — all middle-aged white men — highlight how little the industry has actually changed over the years.” So let’s find out how much Forbes says radio’s top hosts are making…

Forbes only lists six hosts and they are:
Howard Stern – $85 million
Rush Limbaugh – $79 million
Ryan Seacrest – $55 million
Sean Hannity – $29 million
Bill O’Reilly – $18.5 million
Glenn Beck – $13 million

Forbes says it estimated pretax income from June 1, 2015 to June 1, 2016 before deducting management and legal fees; figures are based on data from Nielsen, Box Office Mojo, Pollstar and IMDB, and interviews with agents, analysts and industry observers.

Should You Consider Dropping Nielsen?

By Mark Ramsey

 

August 9, 2016

                   

Consultant Mark Ramsey says yes in his latest blog posting, following the recent revelation that one household has 16 panelists. He says that when you’re running a household that contains 16 meters, you’re effectively a Nielsen employee — and his opinion is that’s not good. “I think it’s time for many more broadcasters to drop Nielsen and make their products better.”

Ramsey’s point about the 16 household meters is that listening has become a job, and the panelists have become employees of Nielsen: “And your first priority will be to keep your job with Nielsen, and that means maximizing cooperation and staying on the panel until Nielsen throws you out — if they ever do. That means Nielsen’s bribery, er, compensation will be your end game, not going about your day and remembering to carry your meter(s). Thus, the so-called ‘passive’ nature of measurement becomes a job in and of itself, and anything but passive. The PPM device for such a family becomes a time-card, and Nielsen is waiting to punch it.”

Ramsey writes that this is one of those “shockingly unfair and non-representative elements of PPM that broadcasters overlook far too easily.” He writes, “According to 2015 data, the percentage of U.S. households containing 7 or more persons is a mere 1.39%. The fraction of households containing more than 10 must be tiny. So what is the possible logic in entertaining the made-up threshold of 16? There can be only one: It’s a huge bounty for Nielsen to be able to park a large number of meters in a single household like this. It’s comparatively cheap to install and maintain them, and to any radio station subscriber 16 meters all in one household look just like 16 meters in 16 different households — unless you care about the accuracy of the results, of course. And because these large households are so scarce, where they occur they will represent a HUGE proportion of the installed households in the zips they reside in, if not ALL of them. I challenge you: Go to ANY one household in any one zip code and tell me if you think that accurately represents all households in that zip code. I dare you. Now go to any one 16-person household and tell me if you think that accurately represents anything average or typical.”

Why The RAB Stopped Reporting Revenue

 

August 8, 2016

                 

This is not a totally unexpected decision. In fact it’s been discussed for several years by the RAB’s Board of Directors and President and CEO Erica Farber (pictured here). Over time, since the RAB began reporting revenue numbers, about 20 years ago, they’ve gone from monthly to twice every year. And while some will speculate industry executives might not want to continue to release numbers that are consistently flat, then try to put a happy face on those numbers, the organization says that was not the reason.

There are other companies such as Kantar Media, Miller Kaplan and BIA/Kelsey that release revenue numbers, and with recent staff changes at the RAB, the organization and the RAB Board decided the timing was right to make this change now. Back in July, The RAB’s SVP of Research Andy Rainy left her position with the organization after 23 years.

The next report would have been released around the 15th of August (the RAB changed them from quarterly to semi-annual last year). Radio Advertising Bureau CEO Erica Farber tells Radio Ink the focus will be to push out more specific information about advertisers and categories and the role radio plays in helping businesses succeed. That type of detail was always included in the revenue reports anyway and she says we should start to see more of that type of data from the organization in the next several weeks.

Who Will Provide Radio’s Most Accurate Revenue Figures?

August 9, 2016

 

For the RAB, it had to be a monumental task organizing these revenue reports, not only compiling the revenue data from radio companies, but adding the detail from radio’s largest advertising categories, which were also included in the report. It appears the RAB will continue to focus on providing members with that detailed advertiser information moving forward. But what about the numbers?

It will be interesting to see how radio’s revenue is accurately compiled in the months and years ahead. While there are other organizations reporting radio’s revenue, the RAB report was the most detailed, and quoted as gospel by many groups outside the industry. For example, when Pandora and SiriusXM CEO’s say they are coming after radio’s revenue, which they often do, it’s often that RAB number they quote as the total pie of revenue.
To give you examples of other organizations that report revenue numbers for radio, BIA/Kelsey reported in March that radio revenue for 2015 was $14.9 Billion. It was about $3 Billion off from the RAB report for that year, but that was because the RAB also included network advertising and NTR and BIA/Kelsey only covers over-the-air and digital. Will BIA/Kelsey now include network advertising and NTR? In the last Kantar report we looked over, radio figures only reflect commercial spot sales, and the Kantar radio revenue numbers are thrown into a much larger revenue report for all media.