I claim no credit for this, but I certainly am cheering.
Clear Channel is going to stop running those damn prestreaming ads on a large part of the day. According to the story at Tom Taylor’s newsletter, CC’s new policy is they’ll only run ads before 8 AM, 11 AM to 2PM and 5PM to 8PM.
Advertisers are pissed. Boohoo, cry me a river. Paying for streaming by rolling in a delay is a horrible business model. You would never accept that on your car radio.
If you test steams, you probably notice a high failure rate on Clear Channel stations. After a long delay, the player reports that there is no stream available, which is not true. What happened is the video preroll ad server failed to respond in time. If you click OK instead of closing the window, the stream will start playing. This usually gets worse right around the top of the hour.
I suspect CC also is catching heat from employers – having 500 employees arrive at work and more or less at the same time fire up Quinn & Rose and bringing the employers LAN to a crawl would motivate me to consider blocking all streaming
Hah! Make that 501 employees 🙂