More stations are dropping the intro ads.
More stations are dropping the “CC” providers requiring Active X (or somethng that means I have to open them in IE. (They seem to be going more more to Liquid Compass.)
On several occasions, I have had Liquid Compass stations go down and the “older tech” WMP Popup station players seem to be the most reliable.
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This mirrors how banner ads evolved 15 years ago…. you can get away for a while with advertising that isn’t working, but eventually the advertisers demand to see results.
In the beginning, ad buyers just want to be noticed, so they’ve pay to have their ads shown in a “pay per view” basis just for showing the ads….
When they realize that the ads are not being noticed, then advertisers demand to switch to Pay per Click…. it doesn’t matter how many times the web site shows the ad, they only get paid when a bona fide visitor clicks on the ad. This led to about 5 years of systemic click fraud with firms selling “ads” to advertisers and then hiring (or paying as an affiliate) people to write computer programs to pretend to click on the ads
That then evolved into Pay per Action (PPA) where the web site only gets paid if the visitor takes some action – like buying a product, filling out a survey, requesting a brochure – PPA pays a lot more, but there are tangible results and fraud can be seen very quickly.
Where radio is headed quickly is targeted ads – it’s a huge plus for the internet streaming. Based on where your IP address appears to be (and more information about you by looking at your cookies and the web sites you visit), those ads will be targeted specifically at you and who the station thinks you are and your interests. If you’ve ordered pizza online in the past, you might start seeing/hearing ads from other pizza companies.
that’s interesting….i don’t mind hearing ads through the breaks in the program but i just dont want to see their media players or their websites blasting away with all of their noisy ads and hogging my limited bandwidth over mobile broadband and bogging down my netbook…..Clear Channel stations seem to be the worst offender with sites like KFI….
i’m wondering if they make any money off the streaming yet…a few years ago Leo LaPorte was saying that it was a $$ loser at that time and subsequently the stations would only stream to people they thought were in the U.S. or maybe in their region….prices to stream should be cheaper by now though…have you heard anything on this subject recently, Art?
I don’t work in radio, so I don’t know for sure. My guess in the beginning was that everyone was doing it because everyone else was doing it and they didn’t want to not do it, regardless of the economics.
It is true that the cost of doing it has plummetted and the players have gotten better. Most stations start out by trying to stream from a server inside of the radio station – which is a really bad idea. After about 10 users at a time, the thing falls apart, and it’s very expensive. All the big guys “StreamTheWorld, LiquirdCompass, Akamai, Securenet, Crystal, etc…) package it up so that the radio station only has to send one copy of the stream to a central computer center, and there the stream is split into 100s or 1000s of copies where bandwidth is extremely cheap. Abacast and Jetcast are still trying to do a Peer-to-peer (P2P) method that is really trying to solve the problem from 10 yeara ago – bandwidth is so cheap now, that it makes no sense to use that approach.
Clear Channel did block non-US listeners for years. I wasn’t ever sure if that was because of advertisers not wanting to pay for ads going outside the country or because of legal issues over royalty payments for music, especially with Canada – which wanted to impose domestic content regulations on any music sneaking over the border. When the CRTC (Canada’s FCC) dropped the idea of a tax on internet music to pay musicians to make music, CC seemed to drop the block – but it also could just be coincidence.
Ad substitution – replacing the over the air ads (or silence during news) with targeted ads is probably a good thing…. it’s the pre-stream ads that I penalize harshly in the quality ratings….. like 24 minutes/hr of non-program (hews/ads) isn’t enough?
Another wrinkle is the PPM rating devices pick up the streaming (if the PPM device is plugged into the headphone jack or if the person is hearing the stream on speakers) so internet streaming can affect the stations raings and income…. PPM started picking up “out of market” listening…. like someone in Chicago listening to a station in Philadelphia, which totally screws up the entire concept of ratings, markets, Demos, Shares and all that radio business model stuff. Clear Channel has been out in front pushing the idea that they[‘re in the content business, not the radio business – that “over the air” radio is just one way now to get your content in front of people. I think that is very accurate.