Harker Research: PPM Edits Do More Harm Than Good

PPM Edits - Friend Or Foe?

In the latest post on its Radio Insights blog, HARKER RESEARCH delved into the a matter of PPM Edits, which they believe exacerbates the "listening gaps" issue, favoring formats that encode well, thereby penalizing those that don't.

"PPM’s 1980s technology simply can’t capture 100% of listening 100% of the time," RICHARD HARKER wrote. "So PPM meters end up with gaps, logged periods of unidentifiable listening. ARBITRON knew this even before PPM launched, so in an effort to fill in the unidentifiable listening -- to patch the problems, the company created editing rules. Computers review meter logs searching for gaps in listening. Algorithms then use rules to credit the gaps to radio stations.

"The problem is that algorithms can’t know for sure what a person was actually listening to," he concludes.  It can only guess based on the information it has, and given PPM’s flaws the information can be very misleading. Because PPM favors some formats over others the algorithms can end up just making things worse."

Find out why by reading the entire post here.

« see more Net News