'Invisible' audience hits survey

Johannesburg - Although a number of 2010 FIFA World Cup broadcasts achieved record audience ratings, overall measured audiences did not rise significantly on either television or radio during the event.

Undoubtedly a factor in this must be the invisible audiences watching the games on screen in clubs, pubs and fan parks - out-of-home viewing occasions which are not recorded by the Television Audience Measurement System.

So there probably was an increase in viewers, which would benefit advertisers on screen, even though the results were not measureable.

The August Radio Audience Measurement System (Rams) results were released last week, and yet again they don't make good reading for the radio broadcasting industry.

August listening levels are comparable to June's, and remain lower than they were last year. This fourth release of Rams for 2010 shows broad-ranging declines on a station-by-station basis, with 15 stations down and six up over the same period of 2009.

The total radio audience is down significantly, in a continuation of what has clearly become a trend. Comparing August 2009 and 2010, the average audience, Monday to Friday, is down from 74% to 69%. Those having listened at all over the past seven days are down from 91% to 87%.

Radio listeners have shaved off two minutes of radio listening from their daily schedules, compared with June. Daily average listening is now three hours and 45 minutes.
 
The effect on weekly listening is a decline of 12 minutes, from 26 hours and 30 minutes in June to 26 hours and 18 minutes. This is a 23 minute decline on the weekly listening times seen in Rams of August 2009.

The situation looks less bleak when comparing the numbers with the previous (June) period of this year. Many stations show stable audiences over the period, but have yet to return to the higher levels of a year ago. The year-on-year comparison is the more valuable one as it eliminates seasonal variations.

The fifth Rams release of 2010, which will use the new small urban/rural sample taken from AMPS 2010A, is scheduled for October 26.

"This will make prediction even harder," says Michelle Boehme, technical manager at the SA Advertising Research Foundation (Saarf). "This is because statistical changes could be because of events, or because of different habits in the new sample."

 - Fin24.com