How we measure our audience and market reach
Every audience number on this site is sourced, computed, and verifiable. The Finger Lakes is not a Nielsen-rated radio market, which means no station here has "official" listener counts. What we do have is better: real data from authoritative sources, combined transparently.
Here is exactly where our numbers come from.
American Community Survey, 5-Year Estimates (2022)
County-level population, household income, homeownership rates, education, commute patterns. This is the gold standard for demographic data — used by every government agency, bank, and research institution in the country.
March 2026 (Q3 2025 measurement period)
National radio reach (93% of adults monthly), format audience share data, in-car listening patterns, and ROI measurement. Nielsen is the industry standard for media measurement.
Share of Ear, Q4 2025
How Americans divide their audio time across platforms. Confirms AM/FM radio commands 61% of all ad-supported audio and 80%+ of in-car audio.
Licensed coverage contours, updated on license changes
Official predicted coverage areas for every radio transmitter, based on power, antenna height, and terrain. We use these to define which counties each station serves.
First-party measurement, live
Direct measurement of Finger Lakes Daily News website traffic — sessions, pageviews, geographic distribution, engagement. Not estimated. Not sampled. Measured.
Campaign-level tracking, live
Newsletter subscriber counts, open rates, and click rates tracked at the individual email level. Our 49%+ open rate is measured, not estimated.
A five-layer model that starts with Census population data
We use FCC-licensed coverage contours to determine which New York counties each station's signal reaches. Then we pull the Census population for those counties. This gives us the total addressable market — the number of people who can hear the station.
Nielsen reports that 93% of American adults listen to radio every month. We apply this rate to the adult population (18+) in each station's coverage area. This gives us the total number of radio listeners in the market.
Nielsen publishes national audience share by format: Country holds 13.8% of all listening, News/Talk holds 12.3%, Adult Contemporary 7.5%, Classic Rock 8.1%. We apply these shares to each station based on its format, with adjustments for small-market dynamics (fewer stations means each one captures a larger share).
We measure streaming listeners directly — exact counts, every hour, every day. Industry research shows streaming represents 2-5% of total radio listening. We use our measured streaming data as a floor check: if the streaming-implied audience is higher than our format share estimate, we know we may be underestimating.
The final estimate for each station is the highest defensible value across all layers. No station exceeds 30% of adults in its coverage area. Every number traces back to a credible source.
Our website and newsletter numbers are not estimates. They are direct measurements.
Finger Lakes Daily News traffic is measured by Google Analytics 4 using first-party data. Monthly users, pageviews, geographic distribution, and engagement — all directly observed, not modeled.
Newsletter performance is tracked by Mailchimp at the individual email level. When we say our open rate is 49%, that is the actual percentage of delivered emails that were opened, measured across every send.
Questions about our methodology? We are happy to walk through the data in detail.