If you are selling soft drinks, you can tell very quickly how you are doing. You can count the sales you have made. That is true for the mighty Cocoa Cola and the humblest soft drink vendor. Bottles and cans are easy to count. Moreover, money is paid for goods like soft drinks and you can easily add up sales income.
Broadcasting is unusual even in the field of communications.
Telephone traffic is easily measured. Newspaper sales are added up and comparisons between different titles can readily be produced. Now with the Internet, one can be almost overwhelmed with the wealth of data on web access and use that can be readily accessed. Millions of transactions and movements on the World Wide Web can be and are being daily computed. But this kind of consumer information is not so easy to obtain in broadcasting.