This year, Las Vegas area consumers will spend $6.3 billion in local restaurants and drinking establishments. There are thousands of local restaurants from Pahrump to Mesquite  hungry for a bite of that cash.

Unfortunately, many of the restaurants that are here today will be gone tomorrow. According to FSR, an industry trade magazine, 60% of restaurants fail within their first year. Eighty percent never make it to their fifth anniversary.

CBI Insights studies why small business owners, such as local restaurants, fail.  Reason number eight is poor marketing and advertising.  Good food and friendly service are not enough to make a cash register ring.

The first radio station in Las Vegas went on-the-air in 1940.  Sixty-four years later, Facebook inaugurated the social media era.  Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and Snapchat, Pinterest, Reddit, and hundreds of other sites quickly followed.

As social media matured from a novelty to part of consumers' daily rituals, some Las Vegas business owners began to experiment with advertising.

By every key advertising metric, though, Las Vegas radio remains the best choice for a small business to market their goods and services. Here's why.

This year marks 79 years since KENO became the first radio station in Las Vegas.  From that time, local, small business owners have depended on radio advertising to market their goods and services.

So, it is a fair question for a 21st-century business owner to ask: Is Las Vegas radio still relevant in the life of local consumers?

"You wouldn’t know it from all the media coverage focused on streaming video and streaming music," said media expert Doug Schoen in Forbes Magazine, "but recent Nielsen data shows radio actually has the most reach among American media consumers." 

Last week, for instance, significantly more local consumers tuned-in to a Las Vegas radio station than watched local TV, read a local newspaper, or logged-on to a streaming audio site like Pandora and Spotify.

Here's a quiz for Las Vegas small business owners:

Which of these online sites reach more adults each month than Las Vegas radio stations: Google? Netflix? ESPN? YouTube? Twitter Facebook?

The answer may be a surprise. Radio reaches more adult consumers every month than all websites and apps.  This is critical information for Las Vegas business owners to knows to be able to choose the best way to advertise their goods and services.

The number one media characteristic that contributes to the success of an advertising campaign is reach. This is a measure of how many different people are exposed to an advertiser's message.