Radio Today reader survey 2015

Recently, we completed our Radio Today reader survey, with the intention being to find out what you enjoy about the site, but perhaps more importantly where we can improve and what we can add to the site for you.

The survey was conducted anonymously through Eriks Celmins Third Wave Media. None of us are aware of any individual identities or IP addresses, the results are completely anonymous.

Firstly, thanks to everyone who took part, we had a robust sample size and the findings reflect that. It’s a pretty comprehensive study, so rather than publish everything, we’ll give you an overview of three things; 

• Firstly, the profile of Radio Today readers.
• Secondly, how important various content topics, and other information on Radio Today is, or isn’t, to you.
• Thirdly, a few themes (positive and negative) from the open-enders.

Before we hook into it, we should note that your feedback has gone into the further development of the site, and we are well down that path. We will relaunch an updated version of the Radio Today site over the next couple of weeks, and whilst it won’t be a radical redesign, it will be a fresher look designed to make it easier for you to use the site, and incorporating much of your feedback.

Radio Today Readers

So what is the profile of Radio Today readers, or at least those who took the survey.

The vast majority were from Australia (93%), with New Zealanders next (4%) and the remainder scattered amongst various countries in Europe, along with the US and the UK primarily.

RT readership has a very slight male skew, and as you’d imagine the majority of our readership (71%) work in the radio industry; with 7% in digital media, 6% students, 4% working for an advertising/agency, 3% in television and the remainder across the music industry, production houses and print media.

The demographic profile is shown below:

Of those respondents who work in radio;

• 61% have been in the industry for over 10 years, 20% for 5-9 years and the remainder less than 4 years, or declined to answer.
• 13% work in corporate or group roles, 32% work at senior management level in a market, or a station, and 48% in some other capacity.
• 36% are on-air, 17% in programming/content/music, 10% in promotions/marketing/integration, 10% in production, 7% in sales, with the remainder either preferring to not say, or working in digital, creative, technical and administration.

When, and how frequently, do you check Radio Today?

The majority of readers check Radio Today when they get to work in the morning, followed by first thing in the morning (before work), and then after work/evening. Weekend checking in was the most infrequent.

The table below shows how often readers visit Radio Today.

What content/features are of the most interest to you

Combining ‘very interested’ with ‘fairly interested’ the areas of content that you are most interested in are:

That the job vacancy section did not make the Top 10 content areas of interest on an overall basis, surprised us given it is our most visited page (aside from the home page).

So we checked the cross-tabs, and found that for readers under 34 the job vacancy page was of enormous interest; however for those over 35, far less so; and for those over 45 it was of minimal interest. Which makes sense.

What you all agreed on however, regardless of age, was that station and group financial analysis is not of much interest to you.

Survey

When it comes to survey results, you were pretty clear on what you wanted.

Who’d have thought that you were somewhat disinterested in reading press releases although, perhaps unsurprisingly, those respondents in Promotions & Marketing were extremely interested in reading them.

The kind of content more generally that you are interested in largely reflected the profile of the readership, that is to say that those in Content/Programming were particularly interested in articles on that topic, those in Sales on that topic and so on.

Radio Today Updates

The demographic divide was no more clearly illustrated than in the question on how you would like to receive updates on Radio Today stories.

Email (38%), and Facebook (35%) were the two mediums of choice on an overall basis. However when you cross-tab by age, email is far less relevant under 34, however dominates over 35; Facebook remains powerful under 44, yet those over 45 didn’t really care for it; and Twitter was of zero (literally 0%) interest 45+, and moderate 35-44, yet was not far behind email for those under 34.

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