Them's Fightin' Words

As a blogger I often find myself reading stats from other sites and wondering how, in the name of all that is holy, they manage to get numbers like that.

It’s a subjective topic at the best of times because if I look at this site, the figures WordPress gives me vs Google Analytics vs Afrigator are all different.

This creates a grey area that I think some bloggers exploit to secure advertising for their blogs, but that’s just my opinion backed up by casual observations and my gut feeling. When it comes to internet radio stations in SA however, the evidence that they’re fluffing their figures is far more compelling…

Enter 32 year old IT Specialist Shaun Dewberry who decided to do some digging when it comes to the listenership figures the stations 2OceansVibe Radio, Ballz Internet Radio and KingfisherFM are publishing (read his report here before you read the rest of this post).

All I can say is what he uncovered was very interesting to say the least.

Among other things, Shaun discovered that the Shoutcast servers that are hosting all three of those stations each have set a maximum limit of listeners that would seem to be substantially  lower than the number of listeners they claim to get.

Here’s a table to illustrate this point:

In the case of Kingfisher FM, their figures are plausible so from here on in I’ll stop picking on them. Shame.

As for Ballz, sure their hourly figures are higher than their maximum set number of listeners, but we need to account for the fact that listeners tune in and out.

In other words, for them to get 8 500 listeners in an hour that means that every 20 minutes 2 833 listeners need to tune in and out which, though it might sound like a high number, is believable considering that they have some big names like Sasha Martinengo, Darren Scott and a host of scantily clad “Weather Girls” (thanks for the idea 2OceansVibe!) driving listenership.

HOWEVER, for 2Oceansvibe Radio to do the numbers they have published according to their 150 listener limit, it would mean that roughly 16 people would have to tune out and 16 new ones tune in every second for the full hour.

That’s if you listen for one second. If the average listener tunes in for 5 minutes, that figure rockets to 5 000 people tuning in and 5 000 tuning out every 5 minutes or 20 000 people tuning in and out every 20 minutes if you want to compare this figure with Ballz Radio’s modest 2 833 during the same time frame.

Is that fish I smell…?

Of course, all of this is based on the assumption that the maximum possible number of people are listening to these stations all the time. So yeah, in layman’s terms, they are based on your Tiger pal giving these stations the benefit of the doubt.

When Shaun actually tracked the listenership numbers that Shoutcast was reporting over the course of the past week he found that on average, Ballz Radio peaks at about 210 listeners per day and 2OceansVibe peaks at just under 40!

Now before you go grabbing your torches and pitchforks, I’d like to conclude by pointing out two simple facts before I bow out – firstly I am not passing judgement on either of these internet radio stations until they are offered an opportunity to properly address Shaun’s report and provide substantial evidence to support how they got to the numbers they did.

And secondly, phoning Shaun up and bullying him on your show is NOT the way to properly address this issue and to be perfectly honest, just makes you look more guilty.

So yeah, Ballz and 2Oceansvibe, over to you guys.

-ST