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Good news and bad for NPR streaming

steve mulder“I have good news and I have bad news,” states Steve Mulder, Director of User Experience and Analytics at NPR Digital Services.

Analyzing third-quarter metrics of stream performance across 173 NPR stations (data sourced from Triton Digital), Mulder finds that listening hours are up, while Cume (cumulative audience, or unique users within a reporting period) is down. In a nutshell: a smaller audience is listening more. The comparison is Q3 2013 to Q3 2014.

Mulder reports that hour spent listening to station streams are up 9%. The Cume is down 5%.

“While it’s terrific that our existing audience is streaming a bit more often, it’s worrisome that we’re not seeing real audience growth, especially given all the research that shows listening is shifting more and more to digital,” Mulder says. “Are people shifting more to on-demand listening?”

That’s a reasonable speculation, and Mulder says that NPR is building a system for measuring how programs are consumed that way. The difference is between listening to station streams in real-time, as webcasts, and time-shifting programs via a listening platform like TuneIn, which makes it easy to call up a previously aired show, e.g. last week’s edition of Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me.

At the same time, that notion appears contradicted by a stunning upward metric of people listening to streams on station websites: up 41%. (Even higher via smartphones.) Real-time streaming on TuneIn (different from on-demand time-shifting) has leveled off year-over-year, according to Mulder.

News programming clearly did better in this comparative study than music, over-indexing for both listening hours (+13%) and Cume (flat, not dropping).

Brad Hill

2 Comments

  1. Isn’t it possible that people are listening more to their NPR affiliate station, now that gas prices are lower — thereby enabling them to spend more time in the car?

  2. More people are listening to more streams. The people who want to stream NPR are already in the NPR ecosystem. That’s not going to grow at the same rate as the growth in all streaming listeners.

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