Rajar's released at Midnight.

All the radio stations that subscribe to RAJAR will have recieved their Q1 2012 figures today, and the public figures get released at Midnight tonight.

For me here at Viewpoint, this means that I will be paying especially close attention to the figures for Atlantic FM.  And no, I do not mean Heart Cornwall, as that did not start until May 7th, so well into Q2.  These figures will be the last set of figures for Atlantic FM, as it was.  The figures in Q2 will be transitional between Atlantic FM and Heart Cornwall, so we won't get an idea how Heart Cornwall is really doing until Q3.  Even then, because RAJAR use a year's worth of listening figures to determine the final numbers for Atlantic FM / Heart Cornwall, it won't be until the Q2 2013 figures are released before we get a clear set of Heart Cornwall figures as opposed to a combination of Atlantic FM and Heart Cornwall.

There are three sets of figures that you should pay close attention to. 

Average Hours Per Listener: This is quite simple.  The average number of hours that a listener listens to the station per week.  The lower the number, the less time is spent listening to the station.  For example, 7 hours per listener would indicate an average of an hour per day.  Less than this is considered bad performance.  Above 10 hours a week would be considered good performance.

Listening Share in TSA: This requires a little bit of explanation.  TSA means Total Survey Area, the area which is used to measure the audience.  The population figure on the results give you the size of the population in that TSA aged 15 or older.  The total number of hours that the station accrues, is divided by the total number of hours spent by listeners listening to the radio as a whole, and that gives you your share of listening.  The higher the number, the better the performance.  Below 5% share in considered bad performance, whilst above 10% is regarded as good performance.  Very few stations achieve over a 20% share.

Weekly Reach: This is quite simple.  It's how many people listen to a station for at least 5 minutes a week.  This is measured against the 15+ population (people aged 15 or older) and a percentage is taken.  Generally the higher the percentage, the better the performance, but there are many more factors in here when it comes to judging this.  In London, there are a large number of local radio stations broadcasting on AM, FM and DAB, as well as the national ones.  Whilst in somewhere like Cornwall, there is only the BBC local radio station and 2 ILRs to go with the nationals.  Guernsey and Jersey have only the local BBC station and one commercial station against the nationals.  And now with DAB, there are over 20 national radio stations, not the 8 we've been used to on AM and FM.  It does mean that making sense of the reach figures in a bit trickier.  However, for a local station, a reach below 10% is not good.  And even up to 15% probably indicates some improvement needed.

Basically to improve your overall performance, you need to reach as many people as possible, and once they're listening, get them to listen for longer.  It's not easy, but there are ways to be more successful at it.  I'll get into those methods in a future post.

I'll be ready at Midnight tonight to get the data release and analyse it myself to see what can be determined.