Audience Measurement
Share
The percentage of the total active radio or television consuming audience that is tuned to a specific station at a given time.
What is Share?
Share measures competitive position, not market penetration. Where Rating expresses audience as a fraction of the entire market population (tuned in or not), Share expresses audience as a fraction of only the people currently consuming the medium. If 100,000 people in a market are listening to any radio station and 15,000 of them are tuned to Station X, Station X has a 15.0 Share — regardless of how many additional people in the market are not listening at all.
Because Share is a zero-sum competitive metric, it is the number stations watch most closely in head-to-head format battles. A Share gain is always a Share loss for someone else in the same measurement period.
Why it matters
Share is heavily relied upon in competitive positioning; a 10.0 share indicates that ten percent of everyone currently consuming media is engaged with that specific entity.
Related terms
- 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.
- Average Audience— The estimated number of people listening to a radio station or viewing a television program during any given minute of the broadcast.