Got this comment from a knucklehead who writes under a web handle ironically honoring a weekend sports talk radio host:

PAUL JOLOVITZ FAN CLUB PRESIDENT

Check out the quotes a real reporter…the Philly.com cartoonist….got on the radio ratings. NOTICE HOW HE DID WORK KYLE. Jesus you lazy racist.

Nothing against Cartoonist Rob, who once again got scooped on the ratings by a pants-less idiot dancing around a bedroom playing an air violin, but they were posted here a good 20 hours or so before Philly.com got ahold of them, and that was after I had finished the 1,900-word Bird Droppings, which, by the way, is a phrase – Bird Droppings – that was parroted on the 11 p.m. news broadcasts of both 6 ABC and NBC 10 last night because CB is basically the online coffee shop most everyone in Philly sports media stops by every day.

But about those quotes as transcribed by patron Rob Tornoe.

Mike:

“More people chose to listen to us. It’s that simple,” Missanelli said. “The people have spoken.”

Josh:

“You can see how many people listen to a stream at a given time. You don’t need an estimate,” Innes said. “I’m beating him using the same system he used to beat the previous show. He is reaching. Will he hold up his promise to quit if he’s still losing to me after the season?”

Neither guy is wrong. This is why radio ratings are, largely, bullshit. The whole thing, as I’ve been told by numerous people, is built around less than 2,000 people for the entire Philly market. Think about that for a second. It’s all an estimate, extrapolated from perhaps only tens of people listening to a station at a given time, maybe less. Which means that when you get into the low single-digit numbers – what the streams get – you’re talking about potentially just a handful of people off which the rating is based. Is using the actual number better? Of course! That figure doesn’t exist for over-the-air broadcasts, but it does somewhere for the stream… though I honestly wouldn’t be surprised if stations had trouble pulling together even that straightforward data. But the fact is, if Josh, and Mike, want to pound their chests about winning in the ratings, then they can’t pick and choose which somewhat bogus numbers they use. Josh screamed early last spring about victories over Mike, including a narrow margin in a portion of the February ratings period of just 0.2 points, which could literally be one person. So if he’s going to accept those numbers – and declare himself the winner using them – then he can’t dismiss the 1.6-point advantage Mike had in streaming numbers last month, the same way Mike can’t make excuses about it being only one month, not football season, or interested observers tuning in for a new show, when he gets beat.

And as small as these sample sizes are, the trends are consistent. 97.5, for at least two months in a row now, has had a much larger streaming estimate. That makes sense. Their audience is decidedly younger (they do much, much better in 18-34 than WIP does). So though the sample size for the streaming estimate may be small, it makes sense… at least, as much as the fuzzy math used in the rest of the ratings makes sense. GATHERING TUNE: