Category Archives: Radio

dMarc founders leave Google

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Looks like Google’s plans to reinvent the way radio ads are bought has hit a rough spot. Online Media Daily reports Chad and Ryan Steelberg, the founders of dMark, an automated radio ad placement company purchased by Google in January 2006, have left the company.

The brothers resigned amid reports of growing tension between dMarc, the company they founded, and Google over differing approaches to radio ad sales. There was also said to be tension over the limited remuneration dMarc could expect under the performance-based terms of its original deal with Google.

“Radio” listening up UK

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According to figures released yesterday, the number of radio listeners in Britain is at a record high of more than 45 million every week. The increase is attributed to growing numbers of people tuning in on the internet, digital television and mobile phones.

Almost 8 per cent of people aged 15 and above listen to the radio on their mobile phones, a 24 per cent increase over the same period of 2005. A quarter of 15- to 24-year-olds said they tuned in this way. Listening over the internet rose by 10 per cent and by 9 per cent on digital television.

Podcasts are also more popular. More than two million people, the equivalent of 17 per cent of all owners of MP3 players, listen to the audio downloads – a rise of 15 per cent on the previous three months. [Thanks, Bob]

iPods no threat to radio?

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Mark Ramsey at Hear 2.0:

“Every so often someone in the radio industry trots out a study which says iPods really aren’t that threatening to the radio industry’s long-term health and welfare. ‘Folks get tired of maintaining them,’ they will say. ‘They’re just a new form of Walkman,’ say others.”

And the radio industry has (apparently) spent a bazillion dollars promoting HD radio. Check out the Google Trends graph posted as one of the comments.

Everything might turn out roses and sunshine for Radio but it won’t be because of HD.

Bloggers take on talk radio hosts

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A San Francisco talk radio station pre-empted three hours of programming on Friday in response to a campaign by bloggers who have recorded extreme comments by several hosts and passed on digital copies to advertisers. This article at NYTimes.com explains and I posted on this when it first came up.

For a dozen years (a long time ago) I co-hosted a one-hour daily call-in show. We did silly shit and almost never got into politics. But we picked the topics for the most part and if the water had gotten too hot, we’d have just stopped taking calls.

That bloggers can now record what we say and send those recordings to our advertisers, urging them to stop advertising on our show… well, that just changes the rules of the game. Big time. Nothing gets a station manager’s attention like a cancellation from a sponsor. “We can always find a new talk show host. Sponsors? Not so easy.”

Your politics will dictate who’s “right” in the story above. But like it or not, yesterday’s “broadcast” is today’s “conversation.” And sometimes it’s all shouting.

Google deal with CBS Radio imminent?

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Merrill Lynch broadcast analyst Jessica Reif Cohen expects Google will team with a CBS Radio in a wide-ranging advertising deal. In a nutshell, Google would allow advertisers to bid for radio airtime using some of the same functionality as its online sales tool. But again, no deal has been announced.

Cohen estimated that a Google deal to sell 10% of CBS Radio’s advertising inventory would generate approximately $200 million in revenues and that the upside for CBS would be two-fold: “1) attracting new (likely smaller) advertisers to its platforms a la Google’s experience with search, and 2) creating a more efficient sales model that reduces the friction/cost of selling advertising.” [LostRemote]