Nielsen change shows positive results for radio listening, but ‘it’s still early’
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Public radio programmers say they’re cautiously optimistic about a shift in Nielsen’s measurement of radio listening that could raise audience numbers and in turn boost sponsorship income.
Nielsen introduced the new methodology during its January PPM survey period, which began Jan. 9 and ended Feb. 5. It now counts a listener who tunes in for a minimum of three minutes within a quarter-hour instead of five, which affects metrics such as cume, average quarter-hour and time spent listening. According to a Nielsen explainer about the change, 45% of listening occasions are shorter than five minutes.
Jim McGuinn, acting PD at WXPN in Philadelphia, said he expects the change will be a greater benefit to stations with lower time spent listening, such as commercial Top 40 stations, than to public radio. But “at least in this market, in the one month of data we’ve seen, that’s not the case,” he said.
“XPN did really well, as did WHYY, looking at the January month,” he said. “So it’s only one month, but I hope that that continues.”
“I love anything that recognizes real-life behavior,” McGuinn added. “And part of the real-life behavior is that … when ratings got started, people would listen to half-hour or hourlong shows, like variety shows, on radio. We are in such a different time, and there’s such a volume of media and consumption choices.”
An analysis by the Radio Research Consortium found that only one of 45 PPM markets didn’t see an increase in either AQH Persons or weekly time spent listening in January 2025 versus 2024, according to Dave Sullivan, RRC’s manager of PPM client services, in a webinar this month. Seven markets saw post-pandemic highs for AQH and TSL and 13 saw highs for one of the two metrics. Radio stations have struggled to return to pre-pandemic listening levels.
“That’s impressive when seven markets are seeing that in one single survey,” Sullivan said. He added that January is historically a lower month for listening, which tends to pick up in the spring.
In an interview before the release of the first batch of data, Sullivan warned stations not to make too much of early results. He said station leaders should ask what their station did that could have affected the results and also examine what happened in the market and among competitors. “And then ultimately it comes back to people’s lifestyles,” he said.
Sullivan said he expects to have a better sense of the impacts of the change after about six months of data.
“Ratings don’t define stations,” he said. “Stations define themselves.”
Meeting expectations
Nielsen bolstered expectations that the new three-minute rule would result in increased listening data, saying that “initial impact data” showed a 24% increase in average AQH, according to its explainer.
Jon Miller, Nielsen’s VP of audience insights, said in an interview during a March 13 Radio Rendezvous webinar that the actual increase was 14% from the January 2024 book to January 2025.
He said a lower number was to be expected because “there probably was 8 or 9% attrition that happened over the course of the year, of people leaving the medium. … We are pleased and we are seeing what we expected to see in the data.”
For advertisers, “we are now capturing more impressions,” Miller said. “That was one of the biggest reasons why we did this. Measurable ad impressions are going to increase.”
Nielsen has seen “growth in all dayparts and all demos” in the January data, Miller said, with drive times and weekends seeing the biggest jumps. He added that all-news stations saw the biggest increase, with the caveat that the survey period included a lot of major news events.
“While this is a huge change, and it’s a big influence, it’s not the only thing moving the numbers,” Miller said. “There’s all the other factors of life that move radio listening around: weather and news and sports and traffic and holidays. … That’s all still happening. We’ve just changed the rule in the background.”
“The old saying at Nielsen is, one month does not make a trend,” Miller said. “We need a couple months to really wrap our heads around it.”
‘I don’t want to get too excited’
Public radio programmers tell Current that they haven’t made changes in anticipation of the Nielsen update.
At KUOW, Arvid Hokanson, the station’s director of audience, is considering more short-term forward promotion. For instance, the station currently forward promotes stories after the half-hour during breaks at 19 minutes past the hour. Hokanson said he’s considering promoting four or five minutes before a story airs to try to take advantage of the reduced time needed to count for AQH.
But Hokanson said he first wants to see more data from February and March. He’ll focus on whether Nielsen is capturing more listening among 35- to 54-year-olds.
“Do we see any changes in average occasion?” he asks. “Do we see any changes in the AQH composition, particularly 35-54? And then from there is this measurement actually, even without changing promotions, making a difference? Or if it’s not making much of a difference, then maybe we should consider some changes to how we promote.”
Boosting AQH numbers could boost sponsorship, he said. “We had a very good 2024,” Hokanson said. “We finished number one overall. But our audience has gotten older. So that’s the challenge. What our business sponsorship folks say is agencies want that younger relative audience. And so if there are ways that we can help with that, I think it’s definitely worth the discussion.”
“Given the climate we’re in, especially with stations seeing either declines in overall underwriting or declines in rate, and what they can charge, I think we have to be cognizant of how we can work together to give your underwriting team better tools,” he said.
In the Philadelphia market, McGuinn said he calculated that total cume among all stations was flat but that overall AQH increased about 22% in January over the last three months of 2024. The biggest daypart jump came in morning drive, which saw a 33% increase.
The station has seen a cume increase of about 20% in January and an additional 25% in the first two weeks of February, according to McGuinn.
“What we can’t quite figure out yet is how much of this growth is because we’re awesome and how much of it is because the rules are changed,” he said.
“I don’t want to get too excited, because I’m not sure that listener behavior has necessarily changed,” he said. “It’s just what’s being reported as listener behavior has changed.”
More importantly, WXPN’s share in January exceeded historical averages. WXPN’s share was 2.9 in January compared to a monthly average of 2.2 in 2024.
“If a format like noncomm Triple A or public radio news sees better share numbers under this new system, it helps reset the whole market in terms of underwriting,” he said. “It makes us more attractive, I think, and hopefully it does a better job of identifying listening that’s always been there but that we up until now hadn’t gotten the credit for.”
WXPN didn’t make any preemptive changes to its programming because of the Nielsen updates. That wouldn’t be “prudent,” McGuinn said, considering that “so much of our revenue is based on membership.”
Moving forward, he said, “we’ll look at the data and maybe if that holds true and we see this 30% increase of average quarter-hour to morning drive, maybe it means down the road we run more promos to listen to the morning show. At this time, there’s nothing that this data tells me that we need to change tactics or strategy around.”
Classical California, which is operated by USC Radio Group and runs KUSC in Los Angeles and KDFC in San Francisco, isn’t drawing conclusions from the first month of numbers because “there’s so many variables,” said Bill Lueth, president of KDFC and VP of marketing and sponsorships for USC Radio Group.
Even so, Lueth said he doesn’t expect the updates will make a major difference to the organization’s bottom line.
“We’re built on membership, primarily,” he said. “For underwriters, yeah, we want to be able to tell them who and how many we’re reaching. But I don’t expect that to take a significant change.”
Classical California’s stations tend to draw an older audience, and even if the new methodology surfaces more younger listeners, other stations will likely see a similar bump. Lueth’s stations will still be in “the same general rank position,” he said. Meanwhile, Classical California underwriters such as arts groups tend to put “less importance on competitive or comparative ratings,” he said.
Jeff Penfield, PD of KERA News, told Current that he didn’t notice major differences in ratings among KERA’s Triple A, classical or news stations in the first month of data after Nielsen made the change.
“It pretty much matched my expectations in terms of we’ll get a little boost with AQH, we’ll get a little boost with time spent listening, cume probably won’t shift around that much, and everything has kind of fallen into place so far with that,” he said. “I haven’t seen really any evidence that anyone has gotten a huge advantage out of it quite yet outside of everybody with higher AQH numbers.”
But “it’s still early,” he said.
“… Because there’s only one month of data, it’s just not clear where opportunities are going to lead right now,” Penfield said. “… Six months, a year from now, there may be some more clarity, but I think everyone’s still kind of figuring it out.”
By definition, since the ratings numbers are now derived from a different methodology than they were before, ALL of the numbers from the previous methodology are invalid in comparison to numbers from the new methodology.
In other words, you can compare numbers from Holiday 2024 and earlier against each other, but that’s it. You cannot compare any numbers from January 2025 onward to ANYTHING from before that changeover. This puts all radio stations in the unpleasant situation of having nothing to do but wait for a year. Because ratings…for most stations, not all but most…are so heavily influenced by outside factors specific to the time period they are collected in? Ratings from January have little relevance in comparison to ratings from July. Not until we get to January 2026 can we start having meaningful analysis of ratings trends using year-over-year data.
Mind you, this is not to say that month-to-month ratings data cannot be used right now for the one and one actual purpose that Nielsen radio ratings are actually useful for: helping your sales teams sell more underwriting. Because, for the most part, if the sponsors care about ratings at all? Then all they care about is that ratings numbers are above some specific threshold they want. *Why* they’re above that threshold is largely irrelevant to them.