Just watched a presentation at the EBU from Michael Read, VP, ComScore Europe. These are quick notes.

ComScore collect statistics on websites. He boasts about a 90% renew-rate for their customers (people like ad agencies). Wow, that’s a business to have. Their panel is 2 million people, globally (171 companies globally, but they report on 36 countries). And here’s some of the information he gave in his stat-heavy presentation.

There are 75 million more internet users today than this time last year. The Asia Pacific region grew by 14%; Europe by 6%. Russia is up by 24%!!

29.8 million adults are online in the UK. That’s 60% of the UK.

Interestingly, 80% of Google and Microsoft’s traffic is non-US.

Pages viewed and time spent is growing at a faster rate than unique visitors. EU grew 12% in “minutes spent per Unique User”; but only 4% in Unique Users themselves.

The average user spends 23.4 hours online per month
Visits 42 web domains every month
Views 2,331 page impressions a month.

So - what does this mean for radio?

Radio’s outperforming total internet growth: there was a 34% growth for radio in US in the last year; and 31% growth for radio in EU.

The total marketplace (I think these are global figures) were:
Radio: 58,584,000 unique visitors in January 2008
TV: 97,601,000 UU in January 2008

Interestingly, in December 2007 (before the iPlayer had started in earnest), 43% of all video streams in the UK are from YouTube. Broadcasters only delivered 3.9% of all streaming video in UK.

Crikey. User-generated content is it, apparently…

Photo uploaded today by Niek R. Used under licence.

Executive Producer Mobile, Audio & Music Interactive, BBC
A good-looking job within the BBC if you do mobile and you do radio. You do? Excellent. You’ve got just ten days to get your application in.

Digg: We’re Fixing The Annoying Ads
Digg removes auto-playing audio ads from their website. Another example why I think jackfm.co.uk shouldn’t auto-play on visiting their website… (though I guess it’s a little different)

Twitter killed the Status Star
The excellent Mike Butcher posts about Twitter. I think he won’t like my status updates then. Oh dear…

Twitter / jamescridland
It’s me, on Twitter. Suddenly really got into Twitter, since it’s updating my Facebook status automatically now, and also is full of surprisingly interesting people. If you’re on, please FOLLOW JAMESCRIDLAND, I’d like that

Why DAB Stations Closing Down is Good News
Core closing… Life closing… and OneWord closing. Anyone would think this is… good news? A cogent and quite splendid piece by Matt Deegan.

New Capital 95.8 Website
Another post from Matt Deegan, including the gem: “GCap have done a good job with the latest roll-out of sites … I think they they clearly lead radio’s online presence”. I think you’re talking bollocks there, Matt.

Listening to internet radio while on the move
“I’ve been taking advantage of my spiffy new EV-DO net connection.” Man (or woman) listens to radio via the internet in the car. Likes it.

Robert Scoble is furious. Techcrunch US is drawing parallels with China. They’re angry because Australia has announced plans to censor the internet.

Except it hasn’t.

Australia used to offer a free copy of Net Nanny to any citizen that asked for it. This made sense: some parents might choose to offer a sanitised version of the internet to their family. There’s undeniably a lot of unpleasant things on the web (hello, goatse!), and a version of the internet without that stuff does nothing other than encourage use of the internet by those that are sensitive to this kind of thing.

Net Nanny has a few problems.
- It’s Windows only; so users with an Apple Mac, or an Ubuntu box, can’t use it. For those that want a ‘clean’ feed, this may be a deterrent to go with a non-Windows setup. And it won’t help your kid’s PSP, iPod Touch, or other internet-enabled devices.
- It’s easy to get round. There are plenty of sites that help you hack the software; and plenty of proxy sites which can bypass the software too.
- It’s made by one US manufacturer, and using it cedes an awful lot of control to one commercial company. Might they censor anti-NetNanny material? Might they be pro-Bush? Might they be pro-Howard, or pro-Rudd?

Instead, the Australian government is planning to replace the on request copy of Net Nanny, with, instead, an on request cleaned feed. It’s not hackable by your average computer user, it works on every type of operating system including the kids’ PSP or DS Lite. And it’s not run by a commercial company; whether you consider it being run by the government as more insidious is probably up to you, but at the end of the day, the magic words are on request, so you actively have to opt-in to it.

The chances are that you, the reader of this blog, already have a form of censorship on your internet connection: if you’re using Firefox, or you use Google to search, you’re using a connection which actively stops you from going to phishing or malware sites.

I go one further. I use Open DNS for my internet connection at home, which, by request, blocks those sorts of sites and also, by request, blocks pornographic or adult content. It could even block sites like MySpace if I wanted it to. It’s a fine, fine service: works on anything (including my iPod Touch) and is highly recommended, even if you don’t turn the content restrictions on. But it takes a certain type of geek to know about it, much less to configure your home router to use it.

In short, the Australian government are mandating internet companies to make a clean feed available to any of its citizens on request. Parents, and others, can request this service to be activated on their machines - or not, as the case may be.

If (and this is a big if) the service continues to be opt-in - to be “on request” - then for all the reasons given above, I think Kevin Rudd has done a great thing for Australia, not a bad thing; and that he should be congratulated.

(If the service turns into an opt-out service, then we should fight it with all our might.)

– UPDATE –

There’s confusion as to whether it’s opt-in (good), or opt-out (bad); in spite of Scoble’s instant reply. And worth pointing out that I’m not alone - Bobbie Johnson is all for it, even if it’s opt-out (which I’m much less happy about).

Photo by “Dusk Rude Boy” at Flickr

RAJAR, the organisation that produces the UK’s radio audience figures, did something pretty good this time round: asked people on which platform they listened. We’ve learnt a whole lot about how people listen to the radio as a result.

I discover this evening that Virgin Radio’s figure for digital listening is a new high - “my” last figures, and, as outgoing Digital Media Director (with a partial mandate to get more listeners to more platforms), I feel pleased about that. Can’t quote the figures, because RAJAR rules tell me not to, though I suspect Virgin will probably go public with those figures soon enough. (You’re allowed to mention your own figures - but not other broadcasters; and since this is not an official blog from my employer, I can’t quote any figures). Someone at Virgin quoted them to me, by the way - I have less access to the full figures than you’d think.

What’s also interesting is the breakdown, per platform, of radio stations. Thanks to someone else, I can quote that the most popular radio station in London on the internet is “Any other station”, the RAJAR catch-all that incorporates all non-RAJAR stations: everything from last.fm to Pandora to any number of other internet stations. You should know that ‘listen-again’ stuff isn’t included, so the large amount of listening via the BBC’s Radio Player doesn’t appear on RAJAR; but even so, that’s an interesting figure, pointing to a potential threat by internet radio to the established radio broadcasters. However, internet radio accounts 1.9% of all radio listening in the UK. It’s not that much of a threat - DAB and DTV beats the internet hands-down. As I’ve said; internet radio listening is not as large as you might think.

Probably more concerning is that 21% of people had no bloody idea how they were listening, and this figure, for some stations, increases to over 60%. There’s one station which is DAB-only that gets a 30% “dunno what platform” score; another similar station, which mentions “DAB Digital Radio” every link, gets a similarly concerningly high figure. This is a worry, since the margin of error is unacceptably high for these stations; but a pleasant confirmation of the truth that nobody cares about technology, all they care about is content, which I think I’ve banged on about here often enough.

Finally, from the ‘all platforms’ survey (which we -can- quote from, and which you’ll find on www.mediauk.com in the radio directory), I learn that not only have Virgin Radio’s figures increased, but that Virgin’s digital-only stations have all posted record figures. Given my involvement in the stations over this survey period, I’m delighted about this; I believe that my old team worked hard at ensuring that we promoted these stations hard and to the benefit of the main brand, and I’m delighted that we delivered on that promise. To see the full rosy picture, visit any Virgin station at www.mediauk.com/radio/starting-with/v and hit the audience figures link. Well done, chaps.

–Later–

You should read Matt Deegan’s post on this subject too, for more interesting information.

I’m quite a fan of John C Dvorak. I was first made aware of him through the podcast “TWiT”, and his Cranky Geeks show now proudly adorns my iPod. I’m even prepared to forgive him the fact that his blog looks as if it’s yet to escape 1997.

Dvorak has a clever plan when he writes articles for PC Magazine and Marketwatch - to think of something insanely stupid, and then write a cogent argument about it, thus ensuring howls of outrage from the blogosphere and lots of links back to his articles, thus making him even more indispensable to a publisher (as well as giving us poor readers something good to read).

His recent column about internet radio is possibly a case in point; a straw man argument, waiting for people who write about radio and its place in the new media space to write huffy pieces claiming how wrong Dvorak is, and to link to his piece, thus ensuring that he continues to gain new readers. And I’m falling for it, clearly.

He claims ‘traditional radio is doomed’, and says there are three reasons for this. “Reach” (since internet radio has no boundaries), and “on demand” (for example, the BBC Radio Player). His third reason, though, he reckons is the death blow:

LOW COST The death blow, though, always comes down to money. The expense of streaming over the Internet is a fraction of what transmitter-based broadcasting costs. There is no big antenna, no transmitters, no special studios. Nothing within reason can change this metric.

…except reason itself.

Internet radio is, by and large, cheaper to broadcast than transmitters: because, by and large, few people listen. Live 365 offers broadcasters services to broadcast on the internet - and the most popular package offers a whopping great 30 simultaneous listeners - 30 people who are listening to your broadcast at the same time. That’s not particularly great, really.

So, traditional radio, which has rather more than 30 listeners, is doomed? Let’s compare BBC Radio 1, a UK national station on FM (for youth) here in the UK. To be charitable, we’ll take the network’s live and on-demand hours online; and compare this with what RAJAR says are the overall figures. (As a wealth warning - it’s not entirely correct to compare these figures in this way).

BBC Radio 1 - monthly total listening hours
Listening online: 5,973,049 hours (June 2007)
Total listening, all platforms: 466,519,000 hours (Q1 07)

So, for BBC Radio 1, only 1% of listening is done online.

Now, you could claim these figures are meaningless. After all, doesn’t Radio 1 have access to a fine FM network across the UK, so why would people listen, after all, online? Virgin Radio is hard on Radio 1’s heels in the online space, and they don’t have the benefit of an FM frequency across the UK. They don’t publish their online listening figures, but if you give them the same live online listening hours as Radio 1 (which I suspect is being rather generous), then their online listening could be 6% of the total. Which, while a good figure for advertisers, is still not the amazing figure you might think.

So, at least 95%-ish of the traditional radio audience is not listening online.

A visit to Shoutcast shows that many of the top-rated stations have a maximum simultaneous listener limit of less than 5,000. Internet stations serving more than 20,000 simultaneous listeners are a rarity, not a norm.

Live 365’s custom solution, used by some large broadcasters apparently, is $84 a month for 100 simultaneous, with $2 per every additional simultaneous listener you want above that. For 100,000 simultaneous listeners (the average for a large local-market station’s breakfast show), you’re looking at a monthly bill of $199,884.

And that’s the big problem that Dvorak has ignored; that for every new listener on internet radio, there’s a new cost. The penalty of popularity isn’t even as simple as that - as you continue to grow and chew up more bandwidth, you also need additional servers to cope with the load. And before long, you also need to upgrade your bandwidth itself; buy more space in a colocation facility, start discussing peering deals, etc.

There are two truths about internet radio that Dvorak ignores:
- if you want to reach the level of listening that traditional radio has, the costs can be way higher than a transmitter network
- but nobody has reached the level of internet radio listening that traditional radio has yet

That’s one reason why DAB, satellite, and all these other platforms are more exciting. And why those that breathlessly claim traditional radio’s death are ever so slightly premature.

BBC News reported:

From Thursday 3 May, Pandora will check a listener’s country of origin by looking at their computer’s IP address - the unique number which will identify the country in which the PC has connected to the net. Mounting pressure from record labels has forced the company to stop streaming music to countries where licensing deals have not been agreed.

Techcrunch reported:

If you live outside of the U.S. and enjoy listening to customized radio stations on Pandora, brace yourself for some bad news. The site will be shutting you out starting Thursday evening. Registered users who access the service from outside the U.S. received a warning email yesterday letting them know that this will be happening.

It seemed that Pandora was dead for those of us outside the land of the “free”. Pandora says at the bottom of every page that it’s “currently for US listening only”, and links to the FAQ saying so. The UK appears not to be a special case.

Which is why I find it a little odd that I can listen at work (an IP address that comes out of Glasgow or London, depending on when I log on), and at home (an IP address which comes out of London). I’m not using any silly proxies; just connecting as normal. I’ve been listening recently to it for six or seven hours a day - without any problem.

In April last year, most commercial radio stations were forced by PPL to stop broadcasting outside of the UK. Phil Riley from Chrysalis Radio spoke for many of us when he said, at the Radio 3.0 event a few weeks ago, that if his stations were “playing by the rules”*, he found it slightly irritating that non-UK stations were also available, unfettered, into the UK.

Do you have access to Pandora? I’d be really interested to know. Of course, you need a US zip code to sign up, which is where you need to remember that high-school soap from the 1980s called, cough, Beverley Hills 902… well, I’ll not give it all away.

.

* As an aside, PPL’s website defines PPL as “a music industry organisation collecting and distributing airplay and public performance royalties in the UK”. In the UK. Not anywhere else. So, while they have full rights to levy fees on non-UK internet broadcasters who are audible in the UK, they have no rights, whatsoever, to control any music user’s use of music outside of the UK. So, if you want to broadcast worldwide, you have no need to fear PPL… just every single equivalent of PPL in every single territory worldwide.