RadiomanATL
Senior Member
You are correct. A stations success is not measured in number of viewers but in the advertising dollars it is able to attract. Of course the more viewers, the more advertising dollars it generally gets.
Except in the case of non-profits. Which is what I was referring to. Then it is strictly audience size and the size of the donations that the the station can attract.
Well I was not addressing a non-profit concept, but even a non-profit entity has to be able to generate income somehow or it cannot operate either.
I know. The thread you were replying to was kinda circling around the non-profit issue though, so I had to throw it in.
Air America was run as a for profit entity, but was being sustained like a non profit. It sucked so badly, that it could not attract much in advertising dollars and, as I mentioned, the last year even its wealthy benefactors were abandoning it. George Soros' Moveon.org for instance was expending a lot of money with Air America, but even they eventually could not justify how little bang they were getting for their buck.
Absolutely. Their business model sucked bad, and predictably failed.
A better move, and one that still might happen, is to start a liberal syndication network. This means that, like Dial-Global, Jones Radio, Premiere Radio and USRN, they offer radio programs on an a-la carte basis to already established stations. Basically following an already proven successful business model. Just focus on liberal programming.
Air America failed partially because it was sort of like an all-or-nothing kind of thing. They did offer some a-la-carte choices to other stations, but they focused all their energy into getting stations to carry their whole line-up.
A liberal syndication network would have to be done right though. As of right now, they probably have an opportunity to do something like that, considering liberal talk is still relatively in its infancy compared to conservative talk. If too many of the hosts get too well known though, they will be offered syndication deals by already established syndication networks, and thus dooming a concept like that to failure also. This is also the reason why there is no "conservative" syndication network. The hosts are already locked in with one of the established networks already. And while they may dump one for another, they're not going to dump one for an unproven conceptual conservative syndication network as of right now. No reason to.
Last edited: