When 790 The Ticket lost the FM portion of its signal last month, I asked someone in that business what would mean to their ratings: “Everything,’’ he said.
Well, we’ll see in the coming months. With its 104.3 FM signal, The Ticket had a 2.2 rating in July and 1.7 rating in August to continue a two-year run as South Florida’s top-rated sports station.
In September, its first month without FM? A .4 rating. But that evidently comes with a big asterisk, according to Doug Abernethy, the vice president/general manager of Entercom Miami (which owns the The Ticket).
Due to the change from FM, Nielsen ratings only measured the AM ratings for the final week of the four-week rating period in September, Abernethy said. So the math went three weeks of zero ratings and a fourth week at the .4, he said.
WQAM (560-AM) had a 1.2 rating to reclaim the top local spot for now (yes, I’m going back to my old Miami Herald roots by writing about radio and TV). But maybe the people who actually care about this are going to have throw September out completely, not just because of The Ticket’s changeover but because of its show shifting as Dan Le Batard went to the mornings to accommodate ESPN and Israel Gutierrez and Ethan Skolnick just starting the late-afternoon lineup.
Mainly, there’s probably this: One of my FM settings on the car radio was to 104.3 and my AM settings were to 560 and 940. I didn’t have a 790 setting. Maybe it takes people a while to adjust to the change. Or maybe FM just meant that much to the ratings.
The previous conclusions must come with the disclaimer that I’ve bloviated into a microphone at three South Florida stations, appear on all of them regularly and remain currently owed money by one (640 went bankrupt on me). In other words, I type words for a reason.
Credit to the Sun-Sentinel who originally published this article