Internet radio is not a huge growth sector overall right now; but within that niche, terrestrial radio organizations continue to gain online ground compared to “pure play” Internet radio companies.
Overall traffic for Internet radio was up 3% last year according to JP Morgan, but terrestrial radio saw its traffic grow 37% while traffic for “pure plays” fell 13%.
“We believe this divergent growth path represents a share shift as total traffic has been mostly flat since mid-2006, while terrestrial’s share grew from 35% to 43% as the pure plays’ fell,” the analysts wrote.
“With traffic still firmly above the 25-26 million range it had been stuck in most of the year, we believe unique visitors to terrestrial Internet radio’s sites could continue to post sequential and year-to-year growth in 2008.” Overall, unique visitors to Internet radio were 62.5 million in December.
Traffic at Pandora grew for the sixth month in a row to 4 million, ahead of AOL Radio for the second straight month. But AOL Radio experienced 10% growth to 3.7 million, its highest levels in a year.
