The November 27th issue of Forbes Magazine has a scathing article, entitled Dethroned, talking about Howard Stern's move to Sirius and how he has "slipped as a cultural force."

The article cites several pieces of data to prove it's point - some of which are legitimate - others are unrelated in my opinion. 

For example, Forbes states that Stern's media mentions are down 23% year-to-date compared with 2004. It also highlights that Sirius has less of an audience than his terrestrial show. These are facts that can't be disputed and are related to the story.

Unrelated is Sirius' loss of $853 million last year, and the fact that Sirius' stock is down 44% since his first show debuted - there's a lot more factors in stock price than just Stern. It is intriguing to learn the 31.3 million shares Stern had handed to him back in January - then valued at $236 million - are now worth $116 million today (who knows if he's dumped any along the way).

Forbes does stick to facts though, if only to prove their point. They acknowledge his "antics" at CBS helped add 2.2 million subscribers for Sirius in 2005. They also point out that Sirius added 1.8 million subscribers since Stern's first show - but that rival XM added 1.2 million subscribers during the same time, sans Stern.

This graph illustrates the figures very nicely: 

And while the "dethroned" concept is probably only of interest to celebrity-watchers and the media (since they loathed referring to Stern as their "King"), the data itself`makes some good points - and if anything wakes up those who thought this was going to be an ongoing trend. I think that's really the bottom line here. Everyone needs to understand that there's a finite number of hardcore Stern fans, and there was a finite date to hear him on terrestrial, so this created an event. This is not a sustaining event though - and the numbers alone show it.

Where do we go from here? That's the question.

According to a recent Bridge Ratings study, 12.8% of Howard Stern's terrestrial radio fan base have converted over to Sirius Satellite Radio. Bridge estimates that's a total of 1,530,758 subscribers.

Bridge also feels that 20% of his original terrestrial radio audience were his most loyal fans, and are the most likely to convert to Sirius (makes sense). So using those numbers, Sirius has roughly 7.2% of his "most loyal" fans left - a group that I assume they'll pursue this Holiday season.

Converting 1.53 million ain't too shabby, but that doesn't prevent the NAB's favorite publication Inside Radio from spinning it to say that Stern's "impact is lessening." Of course it's lessening, there's a finite number of hardcore fans out there (and we're only talking about 20% of his audience - the other 80% are familiar with Stern, and as such, Sirius). Take a look at this graph to see The Stern Effect in action:

Now tell me if adding over 300,000 retail subscribers a month can be realistically maintained. No? Then it's lessening. Isn't that crazy? Note to the people at Inside Radio: if want to know something that's lessening, try looking at your status as a legitimate media publication first.

[Bridge Ratings] 

Yet another great e-QB special from FMQB, this time around the e-QB features an interview with Tim Sabean (the Program Director for Sirius' Howard Stern channels).

Howard fans, and others alike, will find this interview a good read. It not only captures the excitment behind working on Howard's channels, but the level of opportunities that satellite radio presents for creative-types.

Questions range from the biggest challenges in going from terrestrial to satellte; to working with strong personalities; to Pete Townshend walking off the show; to the creation of The Bitter Half - it's a great interview and must-read.

[FMQB e-QB] 

Sirius free two-day event was widely publicized - from on-air promos, to multi-lingual press releases, to commercial spots chanting "Howard! Howard!" - they pushed it hard. The question remains though whether this was effective in driving new subscribers... and that question will likely not be answered for a few months.

What we can do though, is look at traffic numbers. 

According to Hitwise, traffic to Sirius' website was up 91% on October 25th compared to the week before and up 201% when compared to the same day a year ago.

And while I loathe referring to Alexa data now (it seems to be getting less and less accurate), it does show Sirius' traffic numbers nearly doubling from its average levels. 

Looking at the Yahoo Buzz Index, which scores according to Yahoo searches, shows that searches for "Sirius" jumped 78% on October 25th over the Monday before. Searches for "Howard Stern" went up 51% over the same weekly period as well. Google Trends, on the otherhand, shows no change in searches (perhaps it's not updated yet?).

For some hard numbers to compare this with: Sirius.com drew in 1.75 million unique users in September, while HowardStern.com grabbed 832,000 (XMradio.com drew in 2 million unique users in September as well).

The interest in Sirius and Howard Stern, at least for a free-trial, did cause a significant spike in traffic last week. If we're to assume the same numbers as in September, that's an average of ~60,000 unique visitors a day to Sirius' website. So a 91% increase would work out to just under 115,000 unique daily vistors for those two days. Not too shabby. Whether or not this translated to paying subscribers? Well, that's a different matter.

[AdAge]