At the risk of invoking the "topic drift" penalty flag, some thoughts:
1) Who is willing to pay for the time? On shortwave, one used to be able to arrange a variety of barter arrangements that made sense when everyone had an underutilized transmitter. For example, CRI placed programming on RCI's Sackville site, and RCI then had its programming relayed to Asian audiences by CRI. These arrangements required no incremental cash outlay and increased the potential audience. In this new era, broadcasters have shut down transmitter sites in part because they're underutilized; some (like Radio Prague) have placed audio on WRMI, but many broadcasters have either cut their budgets so much, or changed their priorities so much, that they aren't motivated to put their broadcasts on SW even if they no longer have to pay for the operation and maintenance of a transmitter plant.. 2) How do you know anyone is listening? This has long been a significant blind spot of shortwave; only the largest broadcasters maintain Audience Research efforts to track who listens, when, where, and how. The time-brokered model works well when there's a feedback loop built in -- i.e. donations sent to the programmer mentioning where they heard the station. Religious programmers have long used this model with domestic AM / FM. To that end, many / most religious broadcasters register themselves in the USA as 501 (c) (3) charitable organizations and maintain accounting systems and standards to keep track of funding...something that, as we've already said, G24 didn't appear to do. For traditional broadcasters, getting useful feedback has been agonizingly difficult. Most people writing in simply request QSLs or schedules and have nothing useful to say regarding programming, or demonstrating that they're doing anything other than building station logs. These questions are more difficult to answer for SW than for MW/FM, and I suspect that the time-brokered model is challenged, in part, due to this...but I admire the willingness of WRMI, WBCQ, and their brethren for trying to make it work. Richard Cuff / Allentown, PA USA On Sat, Mar 7, 2015 at 1:04 PM, [email protected] <[email protected]> wrote: > There are a number of "rents-by-the-hour" radio stations nationwide like > WNWR 1540am( in Philly) and others that seem to survive just fine, I wonder > why it doesn't seem to work as well on shortwave where the potential > audience is so much bigger? CRAIG > _______________________________________________ Swlfest mailing list [email protected] http://montreal.kotalampi.com/mailman/listinfo/swlfest To unsubscribe: Send an E-mail to [email protected]?subject=unsubscribe, or visit the URL shown above. For more information on the Fest, visit: http://www.swlfest.com http://swlfest.blogspot.com
