Re: [MLUG] most wired local markets...

[Jonathan King <EMAIL:PROTECTED>]

On Wed, 4 Apr 2001, Mike Miller wrote:

> On Wed, 4 Apr 2001, Jonathan King wrote:
> 
> > But I still don't know what Mike has against metro areas; the suburbs
> > aren't going away. :-)
> 
> Nothing against them, it's just that....

[St. Louis weirdness omitted]

> The reason is probably that St. Louis is very different from its suburbs.
> That's why it's important to be clear about what we mean when we say that
> 58% (or whatever) of people in St. Louis are on the net.  It's probably
> more like 30% in St. Louis and 65% in its suburbs.

Absolutely.  And that gets back to the real problem with any such set of
numbers about the net:  I can predict that for most places, what you're
getting from this poll is just information about a region's relative
proportion of inner city/rich city/suburbs.  Which is okay if you're
interested in geographical markets, but not so compelling if we're talking
about the net.
 
> I'm not accusing you, Jon, of being unclear.  It wasn't anything you
> wrote.  The statistics are very interesting but they would be more
> informative if they gave us details about sampling methods and how regions
> are defined.

Yeah, and I tried to find that out, but didn't get many hard facts.
Sampling was a so-called random sampling of telephone numbers, and I'm
sure the markets are close to or identical to whatever Nielsen uses for
local market TV.  Last thing I knew about those was that they were sort of
like the census MSA regions, but were defined by media outlets rather than
commuting patterns.  (Obviously pretty highly correlated in most places.)

OK, so Nielsen defines local markets as designated market areas aka DMAs
(tm).  (Yes, they trademarked their term...)  Nielsen does over 200 of
these for TV, but only polls 35 of them for the net; quarterly samples
seem to be in the tens of thousands. A crappy map of the current DMAs can
be found at, e.g.:

  http://www.softill.com/dma.html

It turns out that these are basically even bigger than MSA-sized units,
consisting of wads of counties, and they "cover" everything, including
rural areas (except for vast chunks of Alaska...). So that might be
another important predictor, since not all of these rural areas are likely
to have really any quality of net service.

And here are the names of the DMAs with their sizes:

  http://www.nielsenmedia.com/dmas.html

Columbia-Jefferson City (plus surrounding counties) is the 143rd largest
DMA in the country with 152,000+ TV homes.  That's .149% of the total. :-)
New York is #1, and almost 50 times larger.  There are 102 million TV
homes in the US, so about 2.8 persons per TV home, and apparently about 
420,000 people in our DMA.  Given the size of this thing compared to Boone
County alone, I take back what I said about our likely ranking in this
particular scheme; there's too much "boonies" in our market...

jking




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