5 Years Later: P1s In The PPM World

From Jon Miller, Director of Arbitron Programming Services

By definition, P1s are listeners who spend more time with your station than any other; you’re their “first choice” on the dial.

 We’ve known for years that in the Diary methodology, P1s make up 33% of the Cume and 70% of the AQH ratings on average. When PPM was first being introduced to the Houston market in 2007, Arbitron published a study that found the ratio had changed slightly—20% of the Cume now accounted for 63% of the ratings.
 Five years have passed since then, and we’ve learned a lot about radio listening under the new PPM methodology. So we recently dug into 45 of our PPM markets* and examined the makeup of the top 10 stations among adults aged 18-34 and 25-54 over the first half of 2012. For those of you keeping score at home, that’s 450 stations’ worth of data.
 Here’s what we found:

About a third of the audience that stays with the station on a daily basis accounts for half of the ratings.
 If you’re re-reading that sentence, you probably had the same reaction that I did when I pulled the data: I thought the AQH contributions would have been higher! These ARE the top listeners to the station after all.
 Well, take a look at the differences that emerge when you break this out by the top-ranked stations compared to those ranked tenth in the market:

The disparities that emerge between the #1s and #10s— a 20% gap in AQH composition for the 18-34 demo—is even more notable. The takeaway is that your position on the ranker dictates strategy.

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