Why aren prior-survey trends available for the combo immediately?
Every individual station is assigned a unique code that computer software associates with that particular station. In the above example, WBBB’s listening for Summer 2009 will be “flipped” to WAAA after listening has been credited but before any audience estimates have been processed. From the perspective of the software that processes audience estimates, all of the listening to both stations will be associated with WAAA. The software will read WAAA’s unique computer code and retrieve WAAA’s prior-survey trends. Since there will be no current-survey estimates reported under WBBB’s call letters, however, the software won’t be reading WBBB’s unique computer code, and therefore won’t be retrieving WBBB’s prior-survey trends from before Summer 2009.
