Yet again nearly every market has swings of 40 to 60 percent from the last book to this one.  The country station in Hamilton suddenly has 87 percent more male listeners than it did six months ago, Fresh FM in Kingston lost 80 percent of its female audience in one book, 200 percent more women listen to rock music in Oshawa than 6 months ago, and a station in Kelowna is up 400 percent in females 25 to 54 in one book.
These numbers can't be taken seriously.  Our industry needs to demand better.  Why are we paying for complete nonsense?

i would like our friend kowtch to comment as well on the inherent disparities between the spring and fall books

Since someone asked for my take on the 2017 Spring Diary Radio ratings, I think part of the problem is the introduction of Online Radio Diaries (ORD) by Numeris in the 2016 Fall Diary ratings period.

The Numeris Diary system was split between the new digital online ballots and the old-school paper diaries where many people who used those ballots would pick a station and draw a line through all the quarter hours from 6am to 8pm. In some cases, this resulted in inflated hours tuned for those radio stations.  The new digital radio diaries forced people to select the quarter hours they listened to, resulting in as much as a 30 percent drop in hours tuned in some markets. That means other stations in those markets probably saw in increase in their tuning.

ORD is more popular with younger radio listeners who participated in the Fall 2016 Diary survey. After the release of the 2016 Fall Diary survey, Numeris said the range of ORD usage was from 11% to 49% in differrent markets. 

Numeris said it best when they issued a statement to its members after the uproar over the impact of ORD on radio station ratings: "The introduction of ORD during the 13 week 2016 Radio Diary Ratings conducted September 5th to October 30th has created inconsistent tuning patterns for some markets across Canada."

In fairness to Numeris, I suspect this is more of a growing pain to move the ratings process into the modern digital age and away from antiquated paper ballots. Radio went through the same pain more than five years ago when Numeris introduced Portable People Meters (PPM) as the rating tool in Toronto, Montreal, Calgary, Edmonton and Vancouver.

The Spring 2017 Diary ratings makes it the second book to have ORDs. If the ratings for some stations mirror results of the  2016 Fall Diary book, those stations will face tough times with clients because they can't argue it was a one off book with bad ratings.

For more about the impact of ORDs on station ratings, it might be worthwhile to read my On The Kowch Blog at:  http://kowchmedia.com/new-online-radio-diary-has-negative-impact-on-fall-2016-ratings/#more-7435