Virgin Radio Sees Workplace Listening Boost Online Audience

Virgin Radio has been named the highest ranking radio station in the US-based Arbitron Infostream listening figures for internet radio during November 2000, having grown its online listening by 40% since the end of 1999. Arbitron’s figures suggest that Virgin achieved a listener total of 237,000 aggregated tuning hours from the UK and abroad, by serving 1.25m streams to internet listeners over the course of a month.

Steve Taylor, enterprise director at Virgin Radio said, “Virgin Radio has a core young, male biased audience who are crucially early adopters of technology. As more companies have permanent connections to the internet and as streaming technology has been improving, workers have increasingly used their work PCs for listening. The latest RAJAR figures show that Virgin has more listeners who tune in via the internet than any other UK commercial radio station.”

At Monday night’s Media Question Time, one of the questions put to the panel was whether ‘old’ media owners would ever make money from new media. While David Mansfield, chief executive of Capital Radio, said that his company’s online efforts had come close to profit but that further investment counteracted the effect, a representative of Virgin was the only audience member to confirm that his own company was in fact already making money from the internet.

Arbitron is an international media and marketing research company which produces the US equivalent of RAJAR figures and monitors over 2000 net radio stations worldwide.

Arbitron: www.arbitron.com Virgin: 020 7434 1215 www.virginradio.co.uk

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