Arbitron: Younger Men Respond To Sports Talk On FM

From Jenny Tsoa, Arbitron, Programming & OperationsManager:

Spoken-word formats moving to FM is one of the major storylines recently in the radio industry. It seems that every week we open the trades to find another broadcaster launching an FM simulcast or replacing an underperforming music format with news, talk, or sports programming. 

Today I’ll share with you some interesting stats I discovered in the upcoming 2012 report about sports on FM: 

Between Fall 2010 and Fall 2011 (which compose Radio Today 2012), the All-Sports format added 15 new stations, going from 693 stations to 708. 

That may not seem like a big number, until you consider that 14 of the 15 were FM. There were119 FM sports stations in Fall 2010 and 133 in Fall 2011. 

Moving spoken-word programming and sports broadcasts onto the FM band has many upsides such as better signal coverage and more potential audience. But does it fundamentally change the way listeners consume the station? Does it lead to more tune-ins and improved P1 engagement or a higher percentage of female audience? 

To answer these questions, I recently dug into the PPM markets and examined 45 sports formats, splitting them into two groups: AM stations and FM standalone or FM simulcast stations. 

The data come from the first quarter of 2012 (Jan-Feb-Mar average) using a Monday-Friday 6AM-7PM daypart.

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