Friday, February 20, 2009

40,000 people can be wrong: George Lamb's audience figures

Rajar, the audience counting people, have released some figures breaking down digital listening hour-by-hour. This reveals that George Lamb is the most-listened to 6Music show on weekdays, but his peak comes in at just 40,000; he's bested by Adam and Joe at weekends.

The numbers themselves are a little dodgy - the RAJAR sample is so teeny, and its methodology so creaky, you could assume that those 40,000 are anywhere between 5,000 and a third of a million - but what they tell about the patterns of audience for digital stations is interesting.

Old radio peaks at breakfast. Digital doesn't. BBC Radio 7 peaks after 7pm at night - which hasn't been prime time for radio since Grace Archer went back in to help the horses. Planet Rock is at its busiest at lunchtime - as is Heat. And nobody at all listens to Absolute Radio Extreme (previously known as nobody at all listens to one of Virgin's digital networks) - it's biggest audience is 8,000, which must be bloody near immeasurable.

What's missing from all these figures, though, is online, overseas and on demand listening. So we know that Gideon Coe has 12,000 listeners in the UK when the show comes on at 9pm, but not how many people will be tuned in elsewhere, or listening to the programme the following morning. Perhaps while George Lamb is on.


3 comments:

PeterD said...

The thing is, and truly I despise George Lamb and the sooner this idiot is carted off to Radio 1 where no doubt the Moyles loving masses will embrace him, but the thing is, the figures say that this fella is the most listened to and its easy to question that, but if the result had been what we wanted and they had said that no one listens, would we have given the figures more credence?
For what its worth, I listen to 6 but switch off when Lamb comes on and so does my wife, and she is supposedly his target audience.

Simon Hayes Budgen said...

To be honest, 40,000 listeners isn't really all that bad.

It's a niche station that isn't available on the AM or FM.

I don't think the specific numbers mean much as the sample is so poor, but I don't doubt they're right when they say he's the most listened-to programme on the network during weekdays.

Olive said...

the RAJAR sample is so teeny, and its methodology so creaky

What's the sample size, and why is the methodology dodgy (other than the small sample size)?

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