Audience Measurement
Average Audience
The estimated number of people listening to a radio station or viewing a television program during any given minute of the broadcast.
What is Average Audience?
Average Audience is the minute-by-minute version of AQH. Where AQH averages across 15-minute blocks with a 5-minute qualifying threshold, Average Audience samples at one-minute granularity, giving planners a much finer-grained view of how audience flows into and out of a program.
Average Audience is particularly useful for analysing program-level performance and ad-break dynamics. A station can see that Cume for a morning show is 200,000, AQH is 45,000, and Average Audience for the 8:15 news block specifically is 58,000 — revealing that the news is actually the show's retention peak, not the host segments. That granularity informs rate cards, inventory packaging, and program development decisions.
Why it matters
Provides a more granular, minute-by-minute understanding of audience flow compared to the broader fifteen-minute AQH intervals.
Related terms
- AQH (Average Quarter-Hour Persons)— The average number of individuals tuning into a station for at least five consecutive minutes within a specific 15-minute interval.
- AQH Rating— AQH Persons expressed as a mathematical percentage of the total measured demographic population in a specific geographic market.
- Audience Composition— The demographic, psychographic, or socioeconomic breakdown of a station's listener base, usually expressed in percentages.
- Audience Turnover— The calculated ratio of a station's cumulative audience (Cume) compared to its Average Quarter-Hour (AQH) audience.