Understanding public radio’s multi-platform audience–and being prepared for what you’ll see.
Public radio is spread across many platforms that use inconsistent and sometimes contradictory metrics. When you equalize them, it gives you a sobering look at where the industry is at.
Welcome to Dispatch #77 of The Audio Insurgent.
Before we get too far along, we have a really interesting part-time temporary gig on a really great project available. See the first item below.
Okay, so I talk about a number of different audio topics in these dispatches, but most of them concern podcasting and U.S. public radio. The funny thing is whenever I write about podcasting, the public radio people grumble. And whenever I write about public radio, the podcasting people grumble.
Today is about public radio, but I’d offer that almost anyone who runs a show or network that reaches audiences across platforms stands to gain from the concept we’re going to discuss today: measuring Attention Time.
So let’s go…
[TODAY’S SHORT FIRST THING: COME WORK WITH US!] A brief request for your attention before we talk about attention…
We have a temporary Producer opening on our team for a new energy and climate show we are producing. We need an extra brain to help finish up a small batch of episodes over the next few months. Could be a part-time gig for someone (as in doesn’t need to be a full-time commitment). What we are looking for: an experienced audio producer who can take an outline of a story with some suggestions of guests, book and conduct interviews (generally about 2), pull selects and write a story using those two interviews into a ~30 minute piece. After that, record a talk segment with the hosts that is cut down to about 10-15 minutes and included at the end. It's best if you have experience in narrative storytelling.
If you are interested, reach out to my colleague Christine Driscoll who can tell you more.
[TODAY’S MAIN THING: ATTENTION TIME] People can tell you your work is great. They can praise it, share it, even say it changed their life.
But there’s only one way to know what someone really values: they give it their attention.
Attention is the most precious thing we have. We guard it carefully and only give it to the things we care about most. I’d argue that for many people (including me) their attention and time is worth more than money. So the real question for anyone making media is: How much of their time did they give you?
If you’re in public radio, or any audience-supported organization, this is an existential level question. Because financial contributions follow perceived value—and value is driven by consumption. And the most telling measure of consumption? Time.
Have I lost you yet? Hopefully not. Read it again, because this shit is about to get really good.
But this is also where things get a bit tricky. Public radio (and media orgs generally) reach audiences on a dozen platforms—broadcast, podcasts, newsletters, websites, social media, and events. Each has its own analytics, its own jargon: Cume, Downloads, Sessions, Views, CTR, Subscribers. None of them play nice together (let alone measure the same things).
So how do you make sense of all that? You reduce everything to a common denominator: Attention Time.
To back up half a step…public radio - or any subscription service (and at its fundamental core, public radio is like a subscription service) - follows a simple sequence (and there is a mountain of data analysis to back this up): audience financial contributions directly correlate to value. So what drives value? Consumption. How do you measure consumption? Time.
Have I lost you yet? Hopefully not. Read that again, because this shit is about to get really good.
Over the past two years, I’ve worked with about ten public radio stations—sometimes just on Zoom, sometimes working on site with staff—to help answer a deceptively simple question: “What’s working?” Which often leads to a more urgent one: “And why aren’t we making money from it?”
The answer usually comes when we stop looking at revenue and start looking at attention.
So here’s what I started doing.
Whenever a station tells me, “Our newsletters are strong but under-monetized,” or “Our podcast hit big last year but didn’t drive membership,” I suggest we back up. Forget the money for a moment. Let’s look at the attention each of those platforms is actually earning.
Because often, the issue isn’t a broken revenue model—it’s that the thing isn’t generating enough value to monetize in the first place.
The problem is, every platform speaks a different language:
A “user session” on your news site
A “download” of your podcast
A “view” of your video
A “subscriber” to your newsletter
A “listener” to your linear broadcast
These are not apples to apples. So we convert them. All of them. Into time.
This simple reframing changes everything.
Because when you do, those numbers tell an unsettling story about how little progress public radio stations and organizations have made towards their digital future.
To come to this way of thinking, I’ve been deeply influenced by three incredible pieces of best thinking on audience and measurement. The first is the work of David Giovannoni and his company Audience Research Analysis during the 1980s and 1990s, which really set the foundation for proving, statistically, that listening to public radio and giving to public radio are deeply linked. As part of that work, David came up with a simple measure, Listener Hours, which converts all listening on a station or to a program into a simple number of hours (across days and dayparts throughout a week).
The second is much more recent, as Bumper has developed their podcast audience data analysis tools focusing on Listen Time, inspired by the YouTube measure “Watch Time,” which also cleans up a lot of consumption data to focus on a real, simple number that is easy to understand and compare.
And finally, my incredibly smart friend Will Page has long advised that attention is the measure that will matter most as digital continues to disrupt established business and consumption. (Will’s book has an entire chapter on this concept and rightfully makes the case that not all attention is equal, which is a conversation for another day).
So I borrowed their principles and built a method to calculate something similar across all of a station’s platforms. Not listeners. Not clicks. Just hours of attention. It is a way to see everything together on a level playing field.
The way to do it is actually quite simple, at least theoretically. Buried in most user data are measures that measure time as well as occasions: length of user sessions, consumption rate for podcasts, listening duration for broadcast, time spent reading a newsletter, etc.
Then convert everything into hours, list them out and add them up.
Here is some anonymous data from a station to illustrate how this works:
I recently worked with a station—let’s call it XX Public Radio—that wanted help making sense of their digital efforts. During our first meeting, a senior staffer told me proudly, “We haven’t equaled our broadcast audience yet with digital, but we’re getting closer every month.”
He pointed to the numbers:
168,700 Cume listeners to broadcast (both FM and streaming)
67,000 monthly user sessions on the local news site
12,000 podcast downloads
9,000 newsletter subscribers
16,000 followers on social media
2,000 attendees at events
In his mind, that was a lot of people. Sure, there was some overlap. But still—tens of thousands engaging on digital platforms? That had to be meaningful, right?
Here’s the problem: those numbers reflect presence, not attention.
So we started digging.
Of those 9,000 newsletter subscribers, about a third opened each email. They spent an average of 2 minutes reading.
The average time spent on a social post? 2.5 seconds.
Podcast downloads looked promising—until we looked closer: only a portion of downloaders actually listened, and those who did made it through about 60% of the episode.
So we did the math. We converted it all—site visits, listens, reads, posts, everything—into actual time spent. Then we compared it to the Listener Hours from broadcast.
And this is what we found:
99.94% of total audience Attention Time came from linear broadcast.
0.06% came from everything digital. Combined.
Let me say that again:
For a station that considers itself a local leader in digital journalism, that has spent the past two decades building a web presence and a robust newsroom—the sum total of its digital audience attention is less than one-tenth of one percent of its broadcast footprint.
That’s not a rounding error. That’s the reality.
And this station isn’t an outlier. I’ve done this same exercise with a number of stations in Top 20 markets, with significant digital teams and real investment behind them. The best result I’ve seen so far?
2%.
That’s the high score.
Can you run these numbers for your own organization? Yes. It takes some digging, and some math. But it’s possible. I can even help with it as well. Just yesterday, as I was finishing this up, IAB announced an initiative to pretty much look at the same question, but with a much more sophisticated (and expensive) lens. But honestly, most public radio stations and organizations would likely see the same results.
Which brings us to two questions.
First: Why can’t we seem to make money from digital? Well, now you know. It’s not a revenue problem. It’s a value problem. And not in a vague, hand-wavy way—value, in this case, is time. Your audience simply isn’t giving your digital platforms enough of it. And if you’re not generating value, of course you’re not generating revenue.
This is true whether you’re a public radio station, a podcast network, a newspaper, or a media company trying to future-proof itself. If you want a sustainable revenue strategy, you need a value strategy first. And that means measuring time and being honest about what you see.
Second: Now that you know this… what the hell are you supposed to do with it?
Well, for starters: don’t panic. And don’t get discouraged.
This isn’t a failure—it’s a starting point. Because the worst strategy is one built on false assumptions. If you’re chasing engagement or monetization without knowing where your attention actually lives, you’re building on sand.
Instead, build on truth. Audit your audience’s attention. See what’s real. See what’s working. Then ask: where do we want that Attention Time to shift over the next 1, 3, or 5 years? And what do we need to do—what stories, what programming, what products, what relationships—to earn it?
You can’t architect the future unless you know where you stand.
And once you do? The strategy gets a lot simpler. The right questions emerge. The right priorities reveal themselves. And your team can stop spinning wheels and start building toward something that actually moves the needle.
That’s the power of Attention Time. It cuts through the noise.
It gives you a map.
Hope this makes sense. It really needs to.
Okay, that’s it for today.
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Make great things. I’ll be listening.
--Eric