November 19, 2009

What Reaches 92 Million More People In A Week Than Google Reaches In A Month?

Media knuckleheads, hysterics, and hustlers love to produce junk pieces about the "death" of this and the "end" of that.

On several occasions I have written about the fictional death of television.

Now it's time to pay some attention to another supposedly dead medium -- radio.

The first time radio died was 1952 when Billboard magazine declared, "Radio is dead..with The Lone Ranger and Jack Benny gone to TV, bye-bye radio."

The second time it died was in 2005 when Wired magazine proclaimed "The End Of Radio."

Of course, we are quite used to digital maniacs declaring the death of everything they can't click on. But when are we going to make these idiots pay for their mistakes? When are they going to be held accountable for the nonsense they engender?

Let's take a look at how dead radio is.
  • Since 2005, when the arrogant dicks at Wired declared radio dead, it has added 6 million listeners. I wonder how many readers Wired has added since then? 
  • If you think iPods and other MP3 players have replaced radio you're wrong. Radio has more than six times the amount of listeners that iPod and all other MP3 players have combined.*
  • The average iPod user listens to radio more than 90 minutes a day.* 
  • In LA, almost twice as many working adults listen to radio as watch prime time TV.
  • Free local radio is kicking the shit out of satellite radio -- which has only 4% of the total radio listenership.
  • And like my headline says, almost 100 million more people are reached by radio in a week than are reached by Google in a month.
Sound dead to you?

*Source: Nielsen, Council for Research Excellence, Ball State University, November, 2009. 
Special thanks to David Field

Recommended Reading...
Chain Store Advertising by George Tannenbaum over at Ad Aged.

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