"O&A doubled Roth's ratings with their target demographic of 18 to 34-year-olds. But the improvement merely amounted to an increase of 2% to about 4% of the audience-- a third of Stern's old numbers in New York City.
[19] Following the Summer 07 Arbitron ratings, O&A's 18- to 34-year-olds ratings slipped, while their morning drive rating in NYC of 2.1 left them only ahead of sports based WFAN network in the morning.
[20] In the spring 2008 under the new
Portable people meter ratings system, Opie and Anthony again failed to crack the top ten in morning drive, and their flagship station WXRK ranked 20th out of 24 stations in overall ratings and out of the top ten in the coveted 25–54 demographic."
Based on this, the 2.1 they were getting in NYC in the 18-34 demo means that 2.1% of the surveyed population was listening. Basically 2% of men 18-34 were listening. Say 23% of the NYC tri state area is aged 18-34. Now cut that in half for men. 8,000,000 estimated in the tri state area. 11.5% of that would be men aged 18-34. 920,000. 2.1% of that would be 19,320. So, figure double that for total unique quarter-hour listeners. 40,000 in the biggest market in the country. Now double that for XM. 80K daily listeners between NYC metro and all of Satellite. You're telling be the remaining sister stations make up 900K people? Come on. Let's say there are first half and last half listeners. We can double these numbers and get 160K uniques daily. But now you lose all of your terrestrial stations for poor performance. No body was listening for free, but millions are paying for it?