Arbitron Finds Online Listening Up 14%
The weekly
audience for online radio rose from 29 million in January 2007 to 33
million in January 2008, according to the most recent Infinite Dial
report from Arbitron and Edison Media Research, which will release
the survey in April.
The 2008 figure
represents 13% of the American population over the age of 12, and
17.5% of the total online population (188 million) in 2007,
according to separate figures from eMarketer.
In addition to
metrics documenting growth in the overall audience, the latest round
of research from Arbitron and Edison focused on the substantial
overlap between online radio listeners and social network users.
Among the
findings released by the research partners, 63% of online listeners
maintain a profile on sites like MySpace, Facebook, or Linked-In,
compared with 24% of all Americans 12 or older. Of online listeners,
28% have a MySpace profile and 24% a profile on Linked-In. What’s
more, they’re heavy users of these sites, one-third of the
overlapping cohorts visit the sites nearly every day, if not several
times a day.
The Arbitron/Edison
report comes amid a flurry of online radio deals. In January,
TargetSpot (an online radio ad service developed by CBS Radio and
venture capitalists) signed up six new partners, including inTune.fm,
a popular audio application on Facebook.
Last week, CBS
and AOL struck a deal that will make a broad array of content
available to AOL users, including over 150 music, news, talk and
sports stations. In addition to providing content, CBS is assuming
responsibility for ad sales for all of AOL’s online stations, which
number over 200, as well as the 150 stations it brings to the table
Shortly
afterwards, Cox Radio said it will provide program information from
all its nationwide stations to RadioTime, which allows web users to
browse, search and listen to online radio from terrestrial stations
with its RadioGuide interface. The station IDs and other information
will appear on RadioGuide alongside the streaming audio. Cox joins
about 100 other radio networks and a total of about 100,000 programs
on the RadioTime site.
