Many people probably have no idea who the third largest (by number of stations) commercial radio station is – Townsquare is the one not in bankruptcy.
After the radio bubble burst, a Private Equity firm created Townsquare, headquartered in the upper floor of a small bank building in Greenwich Connecticut. They ran around buying up nearly-dead smalll town radio stations, many in the rust belt of Western New York and most of the Clear Channel castoffs.
Their plan was admirable – pour resources into small town radio stations, stay local, and broaden revenue sources by using the radio to promote paid events that they ran, like concerts. Build out a high quality web site and stream the programming.
Now they (and others) have a problem – ad blockers. I think I read that 60% of people are now using ad blockers. If your whole business model depends on people being forced to endure downloading megabytes of unwanted click bait, you have a problem.
Townsquare has a solution – if you visit their web site and it detects an ad blocker, you will be offered the option of casting aside Chrome (or Firefox, etc) and download a new web browser you have never heard of from a company you have never heard of – through the alternate browser called Brave, which will generate revenue through donations or voluntary ads that use a block chain crypto currency.
While most people will not know the brains behind Brave, long term readers here might. Brendan Eich is the man who invented Javascript in a week while working for Netscape. His career as Mozilla CEO came to an abrupt halt when he admitted he gave $1,000 to support the “anti gay” Prop 8 – the California law passed by direct democracy that defined marriage as between one man and one woman.
There are 14,000 other radio fish in the ocean (just in the United States). The only person who will ever download an extra browser to look at a radio station web site is the person at Townsquare who made the decision.
I love my ad blocker – fooey on a bunch of folks who think I like waiting for ads to load much less what crap they are advertising.
A pox on that revenue stream, I say!
yeah man I use Ad blocker on my ‘Opera’ browser. It does very well.I have a older Firefox on here, but I just use it for WMAL.
I dislike all those ads.
parrott