For fifty years, who lives or dies on the radio has been decided by a panel — a few thousand metered households, extrapolated to a whole country, sold back to the stations for a fortune. This book throws the panel out. It counts the actual ears. Every listen is a real session. The numbers below are census, not sample.
This isn't an accusation — it's Nielsen's own arithmetic. They disclose the panel (~80,000 installed meters, ~65,000 people contributing on an average day). We took the real market populations straight from Nielsen's public Radio Market Survey Red Book. Put them together and the whole racket falls out of the numbers.
| # | Market | Population (12+) | Nielsen meters (est) | 1 meter = |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| pulling the real populations… | ||||
Meters per market are Nielsen's disclosed daily panel allocated by each market's real population. Then a single published rating — one station, one daypart, one demographic — rests on only the sliver of those meters that fit all three at once: routinely dozens of people, sometimes single digits. That is the number sold back to stations for a fortune, and called the truth.
| # | Station | Market | AQH persons | Cume | TSL (min) | Share |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| building the book from real sessions… | ||||||
Nielsen's actual monthly PPM ratings — 6+ AQH share, station by station — get republished in the open, month after month. So we took them. This is the history they sell, rebuilt from public toplines: real share trends, real cume, format and owner — for every metered market, subscription to no one.
| Station | Format | Owner | Share trend | Latest | Cume |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| pick a market… | |||||
Source: RadioInsight's public monthly Nielsen PPM 6+ AQH toplines. If a market is empty, its toplines haven't been ingested yet. The trend is that station's last several books — the same series Nielsen charges for.
Their monthly number is mostly momentum, and momentum is predictable. From the public history we forecast next month's share, per station, before Nielsen publishes it — stamped, on the record. When their book lands, two things show: how often we already called it, and where their number lurches in ways the trend can't explain. That gap is the game.
| Station | Market | Our call (next book) | From |
|---|---|---|---|
| pick a market above to see our standing calls… | |||
Forecast: recency-weighted damped trend on the public topline history, holiday spikes excluded. Accuracy is measured on books already revealed — our predicted share vs Nielsen's actual, on the record.
AM is the medium the panel forgets. But an AM signal's reach isn't an opinion — it's RF physics. Enter a call sign: we pull its actual licensed power from the FCC and model its groundwave coverage (Norton, over average ground) — the city-grade, primary, and fringe contours the FCC itself uses.