The first set of TV and radio listening figures have been released by market research firm GfK, who, as previously reported, are using small wrist based receivers that monitors what the people taking part in the survey are listening to or watching. And they may well mean a bit of reassessment on who is listening to and watching what.
For example, while the traditional radio stats from Rajar showed Radio 4 as having 10m listeners in its last quarterly report, the new research shows the station as having 17.9m. Radio 2 have 12.2 million, rather than the 13.2m according to Rajar. And good news for TalkSport - one of the strongest advocates of the new research method. This research shows a listenership of 8.1m, compared to the 2.2m listeners RAJAR gave them.
GFK also revealed that Sky News and Sky Sports 2 has a viewership more than double previously cited - 16.5m and 8.9m respectively (though the first period of the research was during the war when all news channel viewing was up).
Of course critics will argue the new method has its own limitations. Aside from questions about the reliability of the technology (which can only tell what media someone is near, not what they are proactively consuming), all current ratings methods rely on very small sample groups and some questionable maths.