Why are FM audience measurement methods increasingly being questioned?

I work extensively with online channel metrics, where it is possible to monitor in real time how many listeners are connected to a stream, how long they stay listening to a station, and even where they are listening from.

When we move to what is called traditional radio audience measurement, many questions arise not only among laypeople, but also among advertisers, station owners, and even professionals from mathematics and statistics. In other words, there is a legitimate technical questioning of methods, sampling, and data collection procedures.

What started to generate greater distrust was the moment when some research institutes began to include alleged online audience numbers in their reports. In many cases, these figures were very far from what the stations’ own real streaming measurements actually showed.

Let me explain. When a radio station has its own streaming infrastructure, it has access to objective information. It knows exactly how many devices are connecting and disconnecting, the average listening time, the number of simultaneous listeners, the approximate location based on IP, and even which website or application initiated the listening session. This is not an estimate. It is real data, measured directly from the infrastructure.

These observations refer primarily to the Brazilian market. However, it is important to note that in many other countries this grey zone is even worse, with even less transparency and even greater methodological fragility in audience reporting.

This opened space for inevitable comparisons. And the results drew attention. Institutes were publishing online figures that were completely disconnected from observable technical reality. In some cases, so discrepant that even large global digital companies operating in Brazil began to question the reliability of these reports.

Within major streaming portals, there are professionals who informally acknowledge that certain published numbers sound almost like a joke. For example, stations with extremely low real traffic appear as “online audience champions” in these surveys, while radios with proven high performance show up as insignificant.

Of course, there are also stations that try to artificially inflate their numbers through multiple player openings, using bots or scripts to simulate accesses. However, this practice is relatively easy to detect through more refined analyses of logs and connection patterns.

There are even stations well known in the market that routinely use this type of trick as a marketing strategy, creating a false perception of large online audiences. In practice, these are “robot listeners” whose sole purpose is to generate artificially high streaming counts.

Credibility risks

A strong position in audience measurement directly affects the size of advertising budgets allocated to radio. Media agencies, brands, and advertisers base a significant portion of their investment decisions on these rankings and reports. Therefore, any distortion in measurement does not merely misrepresent reality it actively redirects money, favors some players unfairly, and penalizes others that may, in fact, have stronger real performance.

For this reason, audience measurement deserves a much higher level of scrutiny regarding reliability, transparency, and methodological rigor. Radio is a mature economic sector that cannot remain vulnerable to fragile models or to any form of manipulation, whether intentional or structural.

As the media ecosystem becomes increasingly digital, it is inevitable that audience assessment will have to move closer to direct digital measurements and auditable data sources, and move away from vague estimates, opaque projections, and black box methodologies. The future sustainability of radio depends, in large part, on having measurement systems that reflect real consumption with technical precision, not statistical guesswork.