INTERNET STREAMING: THERE’S GOLD IN THOSE HILLS! Jeffrey Yorke – Radio and Records People are going on the Internet and listening to terrestrial radio streams in droves. It’s hot, it’s happening and it’s now. And if you think that’s coming from some radio company-hired flack, think again.
The analysts at JP Morgan on Friday (Aug. 17) morning report that “Terrestrial operators drive year-to-year growth for total unique visitors. With growth of close to 27% year over year, the terrestrial group more than offset an 8% decline for the Internet pure plays (driven by tough comps) to drive a 4% year-to-year increase for all of internet radio.”
In their 10-page “Internet Radio Scorecard” for June 2007, analysts John Blackledge and Aaron Chew say, “Internet radio has experienced solid gains in unique visitors since 2006, up over 2% per month, with terrestrial operators up 5% per month during that time period.”
“Unique visitors to Internet radio increased 4% in June 2006, both sequentially and on a year-over-year basis,” reports the duo. “Though the terrestrial operators experienced 1% sequential growth from May's levels, the improvement was largely driven by a 7% sequential growth for the Internet pure plays.”
But it doesn’t happen on the cheap. The report notes that “these gains were driven in part by the terrestrial operators investing more capital into their digital/online operations. While it is difficult to quantify among the capital expenditures for the terrestrial radio operators into their Internet operations, we believe the operators are investing in and developing their Web sites and adding rich content and webstreaming functionality to attract more users in order to drive advertising revenue.”
Clear Channel claims the largest total Internet audience with about 17% of an estimated audience of 27 million unique users. “We believe Clear Channel’s growth is instrumental in driving growth for terrestrial operators as a whole,” say Blackledge and Chew, who arrived at their conclusions using data from CommSource Media Matrix and making JPMorgan calculations. But Clear Channel Internet sites saw a 3% decline in June which “likely restrained growth for the terrestrial group as a whole.” NPR didn’t help either with a 19% slip, CBS declined 6%, and, according to the report, traffic at the Greater Media sites in Detroit and Philadelphia fell almost 30%.
So who made up the difference?
"The two bright spots for the terrestrial group during the quarter were at Citadel, where unique visitors increased close to ninefold to 1.2 million as its Internet initiatives began to take hold,” finds the report. Also growing at a brisk pace was “Last FM (recently acquired by CBS), where unique visitors grew 9% to 2.5 million; and at Radio Disney (still owned by DIS), which was up close to 16%.” |