Nielsen a dead duck, for radio ...

Couple years back, the global ratings service, Nielsen, set themselves up as a US radio ratings service. This week they kicked it. Cumulus and Clear Channel had subscribed in many of their offered markets, but now it's all over.

From RadioInfo: Nielsen bows out of the radio ratings battle.

Two years ago, Cumulus Media had high hopes when it selected Nielsen as the winner of its Request for Proposals for a new, more affordable ratings system with large sample sizes. In fact, Lew Dickey may well have sought out Nielsen, given its global reputation and cachet in research. But after beginning with a base of 51 smaller markets outside the top 100, Nielsen wasn’t able to grow the franchise, though it did add Clear Channel (in 17 of those 51 markets), and later ESPN Radio, Black Crow and Maverick Media. As Monday’s bulletin from Radio-Info.com put it – last week’s historic contract between Clear Channel and Arbitron may’ve been the coup de grace for Nielsen’s effort. We don’t know the terms of the Arbitron deal, but presumably it came hard at Clear Channel, trying to re-claim its lost markets. Now we’ll see what Cumulus does (and did that have an effect on its stock yesterday? Keep reading). Here are the basics of the Nielsen situation – it will deliver the Fall survey for Shreveport and Huntsville, the two markets that got Fall ratings. It will keep its back data and Radio Advisor software up for clients. And it will very much continue to conduct the radio ratings in 11 other countries. Those include Australia, which employs the sticker diary that was the basis for the U.S. diary system. (Instead of respondents writing in call letters, slogan, etc., they used pre-printed stickers.) But Nielsen ends its multi-year (three-year?) commitment with Cumulus early, and both sides move on.