This is a riff on Cenk Uygur's piece, which called into question Limbaugh's claim that he has 20 million listeners.
As a long time student of the media (I have degrees in Radio/TV Mass Communication, New Media Communication, and am currently working on my Masters in New Media Journalism), I know a little about this.
Let me just say this about his audience claim in not so scholarly language...
It is unverifiable bullshit. Any ad buyer with the sense of a protozoa knows this.
So, lets look a some real metrics about ditto-heads. If he does indeed have 20 million idiots listening to his drive-time drivel, they must not have computers.
More below the squirrels in flagrante delicto...
According to Doubleclick (Google) Ad Planner, a tool used by savvy ad buyers, rushlimbaugh.com attracts 1 million unique visitors every month. "Unique visitors" is defined as the estimated, unduplicated number of people who visit a site over a specific month.
Using my mad math skills, this tells me that 19 million Limbaugh listeners either do not have computers or are totally unaware of the Internet. According to US Census Bureau statistics from 2009, 68.7 percent of American households have the Internet at home. That's 81,939,000 homes for those who count these kind of things.
Since there are 119,296,000 homes in America, that means that 31.3 percent of households do not have the Internet. This translates to 37,367,000 homes where 19M Rush Limbaugh fans presumably live alone with only an AM radio set. The other 18M homes are probably in foreclosure, or are the second, third...etc homes of Mitt Romney, John McCain and their friends.
Maybe ditto-heads are poor and homeless, driving around aimlessly in their cars listening to Rush with coat hanger antennas duct taped to the fenders of their '85 Monte Carlos. Nope, 83 percent of his Internet audience earns between $50,000 and $150,000 or more, according to Ad Planner. If they are living in their cars, they are in some damn fine automobiles.
And, if statistics from a 2005 study by the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism hold true today, those folks listen to talk radio on average about 77 minutes per day. Since the average commute time in America is about 25 minutes (U.S. Census), this means that a large proportion of talk radio listeners are obviously from Washington D.C., where the round-trip commute is nearly 8 hours.
From these statistics we can use the "Rush Rule of Thumb" and deduce that about 10 million people from Washington D.C. are stuck out by Tysons Corner on the Beltway listening to Rush Limbaugh constantly because they don't have computers at home and shitty AM radio is the only source of information they have access to.
Or maybe, just maybe, those DC people are politicians out there in their shiny black cars listening to Limbaugh while their personal assistant furiously faps them.
The other 10 million or so are probably truck drivers and traveling salesmen out on Highway 9 just trying to stay awake so they can sell or deliver whatever it is that they sell or deliver so they can barely pay their bills while Limbaugh makes $38 million per year for offending America's mothers, sisters, and daughters.
(FYI, DailyKos has 820,000 unique visitors, which means if Marcos had a radio program, he would have maybe about 15 million listeners.)