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How do we know that CBC's On The Coast is number one?

Great news from our friends at CBC today! For the first time ever, CBC Radio One’s On The Coast with Stephen Quinn has claimed the top spot for afternoon ratings in general audience numbers (I'll tell you exactly how they track those at the end of th
Great news from our friends at CBC today! For the first time ever, CBC Radio One’s On The Coast with Stephen Quinn has claimed the top spot for afternoon ratings in general audience numbers (I'll tell you exactly how they track those at the end of this post). A longtime listener, I featured Stephen on the blog back in November of 2011 as COFFEE #6 in my then-50 Coffees series (now 500 Coffees). A year and a half later he is still "that intelligent, witty and ultimately friendly personality that you hear on the radio every weekday afternoon" and along with the hard work of his producers (which include Matthew Lazin-Ryder who was my COFFEE #8) they bring us a range of engaging guests and stories about issues that are affecting our city and our province. It's my personal favourite show to listen to when I'm in the office, and I think one of the key selling points is that even though I don't always have time to actively listen to it I still get a lot out of it; Stephen is super active on Twitter and gives a heads up before most guests come on, so if listeners are particularly interested in a subject they can turn it on, or up, as they please. And he's not simply giving notifications, he also delivers a brand of humour that I appreciate. You should FOLLOW HIM. I asked him, through Twitter, how he was feeling about them being #1. Here's his response:
I also asked Lazin-Ryder for his thoughts on how he was feeling:
The official statement from the CBC notes that the "The April PPM ratings have been announced" and that On The Coast has claimed the top spot with 10.3% of the audience share in their time slot. But how do they know that? They know thanks to the Portable People Meter Program that is silently working all around us! Seriously. I found out about it by accident one day when I was doing my weekly feature on another local station (102.7 FM The Peak) and I noticed a sheet of paper that had a bunch of strange numbers and stats on it. It was then that I was brought in to the secret world of PPM and I am so thankful that today I can share it with you. PPM stands for Portable People Meter, which is a device (pictured below) manufactured by a company called Arbitron. You wouldn't know it, but it's carried around by hundreds of people in the city. Embedded in each of the local radio stations' streams are inaudible-to-the-human-ear tones that are only picked up by these devices. So when the people wearing PPMs are within earshot of a radio, they pick up how long they listened to it and automatically report that back to a database. When these people are in a store or a restaurant, walking down the street, in their car - anywhere - it's always tracking and even if they're not consciously listening and a station is just playing, it picks it up. All of this information is then chewed up by a computer which every month spits out reports of the percentages of people listening to which radio station. Again, congratulations to Stephen, Matthew, Lisa and everyone at CBC's On The Coast for claiming the top spot! Tune in at 88.1FM or 690AM weekday afternoons from 3-6PM.