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Oct 01 2006

Gotta love the Howie Math…

Posted at 4:04 pm under Interesting

Sirius does some Howie math to dispute claims that his numbers ain’t all that great on Sirius:

Scott Greenstein, president-entertainment and sports at Sirius, said Sirius has hired a third-party research company to get audience data on “certain things our advertisers would need.” The third-party data, culled from the unnamed research company, shows that 58% of subscribers listen to Howard Stern during the week.

That means there’s about 5 million Stern listeners according to this data. Take 4.7 million Sirius subscribers multiplied by an estimated 2 listeners per subscription, equals 9.4 million total Sirius listeners. Multiplied by 58% and you’ve got Stern’s audience of about 5 million people.

Well… Let’s do a little Howie Math for XM. Eric Logan has said on numerous occasions that Opie and Anthony are one of the most popular shows on XM, so let’s say that out of 6.5 million XM subscribers, half listen to O&A at some point during the week (notice, the Sirius study doesn’t say the people listening listen to the whole show or that the same person listens every day), so that’s 3.3 million listeners. Let’s multiply it by two now (since that seems to be the MO; two people at a time), so we’re right back to 6.6 million people listening to O&A.

More people.

Now let’s add in the 19 markets they’re in.

The King of All Media has a very small fiefdom these days, no doubt.

Also interesting was that Sirius didn’t name the “research company” that came up with these results. I wonder why that is? I mean, it’s kinda like the Cingular commercials that are running in New York. Everyone in New York knows Cingular’s service is crapola, but their commercials say they have the fewest dropped calls according to the “leading independent research organization.”

I don’t know about that. After all, companies like JD Power and Consumer Reports have no problem with their name being used when repeating one of their claims. Why not this time?

Sorry folks. Unless you show the name of the researcher, the anonymous claims they make mean nothing.

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2 Responses to “Gotta love the Howie Math…”

  1. James Says:
    October 1st, 2006 at 5:38 pm

    I’ve got no dog in this argument, but just want to clear up that Consumer Reports has a huge problem with people using them for ad purposes like this. They basically disallow it in all cases. When you hear an ad that says a “leading consumer magazine says…”, they are talking about Consumer Reports. You are probably thinking of Consumer Digest which does allow their name to be used in adverts.

    To keep this on topic, I will say I’ve had both and XM > Sirius (except for college football!)

  2. Vinny Says:
    October 1st, 2006 at 5:46 pm

    You may actually be right. I’ll cede the point knowing I have nothing but my own informal observations to back up my point :-)

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