No doubt Sirius has added a lot of subscribers in the last year. But, the real question is -- how many of them joined up because of Howard Stern? If anyone has a link to a story speculating about the answer to that question, I'd be interested to see it.
As another poster pointed out, Stern's well publicized departure from the public airwaves has given a ton of exposure to satellite radio in general, whether it be XM or Sirius. That is valuable in itself. But, it would be interesting to see how many people who sign up for Sirius are doing it to listen to Stern, as opposed to wanting commercial free radio, feeds of news stations, etc. I got XM last year after a friend of mine got it. My wife came next, then her parents, then several friends of mine got it; then my boss signed up for satellite radio in a new car. None of this had anything to do with Stern; it all was based on good word of mouth in my little "family tree" of people. Whether they joined XM or Sirius dependend upon the particular equipment they wanted (be it portability, small size or whatever came with the car).
Certainly Sirius must have released some sort of expectations as to what it considers to be subscribers who will sign up because of Stern, and those who joined up due to other factors. Personally, in my very uninformed opinion, I suspect that Sirius would have gotten the subscribers with or without Stern. At the very least they overpaid for him. But, its their money and I'm glad that Howard is now on it, because now that I haved stopped listening to commercial radio, I don't ever want to go back!
