TuneIn – Angel Street Capital

Social Media is a key indicator of audience engagement and what is resonating in the social media ecosphere. While there are a number of social media channels for purposes of this analysis I chose Twitter. I utilized the services of Socialping, a company that specializes in Twitter audience metrics. Socialping provides twitter analysis including monitoring key words. I decided that I would apply Socialping measurement to Internet Radio. I created watch lists for key words for the following;, iHeartradio, Pandora, TuneIn, KROQ, Rdio, WBLS and Spotify. The measurement period is for one week beginning 2/25 – 3/3.

					Unique Reach
Service	Followers	Tweets	Retweets	ALL	Average
Iheart	154,957	9,993	6,553	16,546	2,909,856
KROQ	68,570	1,554	2,128	3,682	1,248,637
Pandora	148,716	521,263	118,693	639,956	35,760,075
Rdio	90,145	10,403	7,905	18,308	3,768,454
Slacker	41,270	20,952	481	21,433	1,430,976
Spotify	436,545	275,878	38,230	314,108	35,500,325
Tunein	42,649	68,691	18,147	86,838	7,000,918
WBLS	7,096	2,107	413	2,520	679,258

The above data reveals several key findings;

1) Spotify is the leader in followers with almost 3x that of Pandora. This is probably due to its more international offerings. However, Pandora and Spotify have approximately the same reach.

2) iHeart radio has more followers than Pandora. However, the # of tweets is only 3% of that for Pandora (Note: iHeart’s radio audience as reported by Triton Digital is 15.9% of Pandora’s). Has Clear Channel driven people to follow but they are not engaging with the service?

3) One of the top single stations in the country, KROQ has roughly half the followers of iHeart Radio.

4) While Tunein has less than one third the number of followers as iHeart they have 3x the reach.

Tunein is perhaps one of the largest directories of Internet radio stations with over 50,000 stations listed with most available to be streamed. The company has been signing up stations to be part of their directory although we do not know the business terms of these deals. I think it is safe to assume that they are not exclusive. Tunein was created by the merger of RadioTime (on line station guide) and TuneIn (mobile Internet radio app). While Tunein provides information about radio programs and can stream your favorite station, for many years they allowed users to connect to a station’s stream through their guide without having the station’s explicit approval. Some radio station companies such as CBS have asked Tunein not to carry their streams. Although obtaining a $6 Million investment from Sequoia, they struggled for many years on how to monetize the service. Since they did not have a relationship with the underlying station they had no way to insert audio ads. The revenue component could only come from preroll ads (audio or video), display ads, and featured listings. Even preroll ads are questionable as many stations insert preroll video so Tunein would have to insert a preroll video ad in front of another preroll video ad, something that would not make for a great user experience. They appear to be running only ad network display ads. There were preroll videos in front of some streams but again these are most likely the ones inserted by the stations themselves.

While no public data exists on the size of the Tunein network in a press release dated 3/22/12 announcing the carriage of The Wall Street Journal Radio Network, Tunein claimed to have 30 million listeners and be in the top five in Apple’s App Store’s music category. It would be great if Tunein would release more audience metrics but I can only surmise that they need to develop their business model first by entering into an agreement with stations whereby they can obtain part of the ad inventory or solidify premium placement for accessing streams. Any measurement would a duplicate of that also measured at the individual station level but at least we would have a better feeling for the use of the Tunein platform. Tunein is a great service and one that we watched the founder, Bill Moore, develop and where we came close to investing on several occasions. Whether we made the right decision or not remains to be seen.

Archive for category: TuneIn