Arbitron Sees Revenue, Income Increases For Second Quarter

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ARBITRON second quarter revenue rose 8.4% to $95.7 million, due primarily, the company said, to the commercialization of the Portable People Meter service in the final 15 markets in the second half of 2010, PPM price increases, and the UNIVISION PPM contract inked in NOVEMBER 2010.  Net income jumped 99.6% to $7.6 million,  while earnings per share (diluted) doubled from 14 to 28 cents.  EBITDA increased 52.5% to $19.7 million.

Pres./CEO WILLIAM T. KERR said, "In the second quarter, STARCOM MEDIAVEST and ZENITHOPTIMEDIA signed a multi-year contract renewal for radio ratings and software. These two agencies are part of PUBLICIS GROUPE, one of the largest brand communications organizations in the world. The renewal covers eight affiliated agencies, which, in the aggregate, place hundreds of millions of ad dollars on local and national radio outlets.

"In our cross-platform efforts, we recently signed a leading broadcaster to a cross-platform study of audiences to its radio and television outlets in a top-ten market. We continue to see strong interest in our cross-platform initiatives and believe this new contract shows we are moving in the right direction.

"We've also made good progress during the first half of the year on the development of a total audience measurement service, combining both over-the-air and Internet audio listening.  This planned new service would be the first combined audience measurement of both over-the-air radio audiences and Internet audio audiences with the latter based on server-side metrics for streamed radio broadcasts and pure-play Internet audio programming. The market has shown significant interest in this new service and we anticipate our digital radio service, when launched, will address an important market need for a total audience measurement service.

"Finally, we continue to work on improving margins in our radio ratings business and those efforts paid off with higher EBIT and EBITDA margins in the first half of 2011 compared to 2010.  Because we have fully commercialized the PPM service in all 48 planned markets, we also anticipate finishing the full year at higher EBIT and EBITDA margins than 2010 as revenue continues to benefit from phase-in of contracted PPM price increases while the costs associated with commercializing PPM markets are behind us."

The company reiterated its revenue and earnings per share guidance for 2011, sticking with projections of 6 to 8% revenue increases for full year 2011, and earnings per share (diluted) of between $1.90 and $2.05, up 16% from 2010.

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