Every media plan opens with a number, and it is usually a peak. The biggest night. The best minute. It is a lovely number, and the wrong one to pay for.
A peak is a moment. An average is a habit.
A peak shows what a channel can draw on a big night. An average shows what a spot will usually meet. You are buying next Tuesday, not the best night of the year.
Price a spot on the average. Treat the peak as upside.
How StatAxis counts
For each day, in Indian time, minute by minute: a channel’s audience is the latest sample of each live stream, added together. Samples older than three minutes are dropped. The average covers the minutes the channel was live. The peak is the highest minute. Nothing is interpolated; a slot with nobody live is left out, not counted as zero.
Three numbers that matter more
- Steadiness. How alike the days are.
- Trend. Whether the second half of the window beats the first.
- Days seen. How many days the channel was live, and the confidence that follows.
From audience to price
Enter what a spot costs. The planner divides it by the average audience in thousands: the cost per 1,000 live viewers. Against the middle of the channels you priced, that becomes a value index. 100 is the middle; higher is more audience per rupee.
The rule
Ask for the average, the steadiness and the days seen. A plan that leads with a peak and cannot give the rest is selling a story.