In the online world, there are a number of people who rely so much on search engine traffic, instead of a healthy dose of direct traffic, that it’s a disaster waiting to happen. Just check this out, one day Google decides it doesn’t like you, and the next day your company implodes, soon after raising over 100 million in investment too.
You just can’t put all your eggs into one basket and think that it’s a good plan for a long term strategy. The rug will be pulled from under you one day, and the longer you delay doing something about it the harder you will fall.
In the Internet Radio space there is no shortage of parallels to this. The two most notable examples have to do with living by referring traffic from the iTunes Radio directory and WindowsMedia.com Radio directory.
They are nice services in and of themselves, however a few people have figured out that if you do things a certain way you can get massive amount of radio listeners through those portals.
The trick isn’t new and has to do with how these portals list entries – in this case alphabetically or by an ASCII sort. It’s the old Yellow Pages trick, where companies name themselves AAA or Acme Something, to get the top listings.
On iTunes Radio, some people try to come up with listings starting with the letter A, so that they float to the top. On WindowsMedia.com, a cottage industry has formed where services actually rename themselves to ridiculous names such as 181.fm, .club977 (yes that’s with a dot so it ranks above others), 1.ab, 007Radio.net, etc..
No, really. 181.fm is ran by same guys who had a wonderful Kicking Country channel, among others. Now it’s 181.fm (at least to my outsider knowledge).
.club977 used to be “Club 977″. Hey at least 1.fm guys were just that from the very start. Yet others now create a shell wrapper name that fits this model, and convince other desperate services into “virtually” signing up to contribute to a fake network of radio channels.
Brand name doesn’t matter to these people I suppose, as long as traffic comes and ugly banners are served to sucker listeners.
Tell me if this sample screenshot below isn’t ridiculous:
After a few attempts to tell Windows Media folks how their directory is being gamed, things haven’t changed much at all. Some of these services even sport same advertising id codes on their websites, so it is obvious they are owned by same individuals.
I have to admit, I have made a proof of concept service like that as well on WindowsMedia.com. And yes the traffic that comes in is quite high, and with that you get to brag to partners or advertising folks about your numbers. If you ever see a popularity listing of popular independent radio stations, just know that probably half the traffic or more is derived by these methods. Lately I am starting to change things around in this experiment to see just how far one can go with clueless (or uncaring) Windows Media content staff.
But guess what, one day the game will change. WindowsMedia.com may decide to do what Apple did with iTunes, and show all listings starting with digits AFTER all those starting with letters. Or the game of ridiculous fake companies keeps expanding, and your listing gets supplanted by other radio sploggers above you.
One day these services will find the rug will be pulled somehow, and they will loose 50-75% of their traffic virtually overnight. Same story goes for those so reliant on bandwidth donations from the same provider, but that’s a story for a different post. At least at Digitally Imported we have premium service to fall back on if things go south, what many other companies have is nothing.
So literally, there’s quite a facade going on for many of the small independent Internet radio services. If I was an investor or looking to buy services out to consolidate, I’d maybe consider just one to three companies today who are worth what they have to show now. And usually those companies either have a loyal source of traffic, great people behind it, or great technology behind it. All others can have their audience crumble at any time and they won’t be able to do much about it later.
So the moral is that if you are aiming for the long term with a business around content, you better build something of value that can get direct traffic too. Direct traffic is mostly that traffic which is not referred either from a search engine, or other sites, such as a radio directory portal. Direct traffic is mostly people who already know of your service, and like it enough to come back. Our SKY.fm website gets 71% of its traffic directly, I’d say that’s pretty darn good.
And by the way, I am not suggesting you eliminate referring traffic to boost the direct traffic %. You should do everything to maximize everything. But also do try to do it in a way that results in direct traffic ending up as the bigger chunk.
Ari: Interesting blog. At GotRadio, our brand is very important and we have not used any scams to try to increase our positioning on the player. However, you talk about how important it is to convert referred traffic to direct traffic, but you don’t offer any suggestions on how to do that.
Can you provide me with some ideas?
Val Starr
GotRadio
Re-branding for placement is ridiculous. Another aspect that is sometimes overlooked is that these directories (right now at least) are Marketing costs. You should focus on using these directories to drive traffic to your website not to drive traffic to your broadcast…
Audio advertising alone will not cover your streaming costs in the vast majority of cases. You need your branding, graphic/video ads, and preferrably a subscription service to boot.
I’d recommend customizing the broadcast for the specific directory if possible to maximize your marketing efforts.
Thanks for the comments to all the new visitors from RAIN, also great to see some new people I already know personally.
@Val: I think what I was saying is that regular direct traffic in the end is more important than referring traffic. However I didn’t say anything about converting one into another. It is a great question though and I’ll have to ponder on how to reply that in another post.
@Jason: excellent points all around. It is unfortunate that with sites like WindowsMedia radio tuner it is really hard to apply that to your real brand. As people found out, it is far more effective to rebrand (I agree it’s absurd) or launch new brands just to get to the top. If you are all the way on the bottom, there’s only so much “customization” you can do. So much so that for many of our new channels I have stopped submitting to that directory altogether.
I dont understand how Windows Media does not see that this is an issue. Overall it HURTS their overall quality. I consider only about 10 sites on that radio directory to be good quality websites but I cannot even find them in there anymore which is why I stopped going to that directory all together because the directory is filled up with a bunch of crap.
@Kevin:
I have tried to bring this up with them a few times. At some point they’ve made some changes…
For example at first change, they have said that they will now need to see a matching domain or URL, or branding of some kind. So no more submitting a name and get it included right away without any verification.
So what happened is that people started rebranding themselves, or creating fake websites, to get through this official rubber stamping.
Then “supposedly” they got stricter and wanted to see even more official branding, but there are still plenty of services that make the cut.
For example, upon asking why .977 entries starting with a dot are still there, when all other scammers had their dot removed, someone said the reply Windows Media team gave them is beause .977 is a real radio terrestrial radio station. Which is just silly, because they run multiple channels, and we can all open a local radio station somewhere too and slap a dot in front of it. So it sounded very very fishy and bordering on collusion from the WM team, I am sad to say.
I wrote this post precisely to try and get the word out about it. Maybe if enough people snub this practice, Windows Media folks will wake up.
Why are you so concerned with other Internet Radio stations and their business practices? I mean you even admited to doing the exact same thing on this blog and that doesn’t make you any better than the other station that list their stations on the guide. Sounds to me like you’ve suffered a loss in listenership and now you’re crying fowl. Maybe you should concentrate on putting out a good product and less on questioning how other radio stations do things. I would have expected better from an Internet Broadcaster Leader such as yourself.
@Steve: I would like to respond to your question and comments here when I get a chance soon…
No they do not, however it was a concerted effort to CHANGE all the branding, they didn’t just slap a name on there and have done with it. Perhaps you people should visit the website and tune into the stations before bitching.
.977 does not have a terrestrial station
Whatever Matt – Thats a crock of shit. In my opinion, 977 started all of this nonsense and everybody followed. Why change the branding? Because that station cant get listeners if they arent on the top.
By the way Matt – you act like 977’s website is so great. It’s a joke and their forums have zero traffic with spam. In fact i saw a knock down drag out fight between them and another radio station on how 977 hacked the other station’s free aol bandwidth server. 977 would not be crap if it weren’t for their top listings for all of these years.
@Steve:
I don’t really care too much about how other people do it. I was sharing my opinion to the community. Whether I do it or not has little relevance to me being able to comment.
In fact I would argue I have a better perspective on this having tried it out. I am interested in anything related to Internet radio, and I’ll test out as many things as I can for personal experience.
The practice in question is not one I would even call “unfair” – all’s fair so long as it’s legal in my book. Maybe not something to respect, but definitely not unfair. I just think it’s not a value to the company who’s doing it, and it’s a potential pitfall.
So just that we’re clear, I am not telling anyone to stop it. I would, however, like to see Windows Media be clean and relevant to end users, as it’s becoming available on more and more devices as we move forward.
As for crying foul, trust me I still get plenty of traffic, though it’s not often profitable anymore with advertising rates going down for the moment. Further, there’s nothing preventing me from launching more and more of these new brands all the time, so if I wanted to I could have 4 or 5 networks like this. I am tired of that, I did it to prove a point and gain experience.
Hopefully by getting even more people into it, like any trick, it will get so annoying Windows Media team will finally clean things up even more, some day. So I actually do encourage you to do it yourself. What’s a couple of more 001YourRadio.com listings there.
I think Club977 has a decent product, at least with 80s channel. So I am not surprised people stay with it once they get on it. So Jeff’s doing something well (or, many things, hehe).
Really, individual services are not to blame. If there’s a way for it to do it, someone will do it. I strongly urge radio directories to clean up their act though.
But Ari, you stated how these operations take advantage of the name game, you do it with another product too. You talked about free bandwidth and you get the benefit of the AOL deal too so I’m perplexed. What exactly is your problem. You get and do what they do and you’re complaining about something you do.
Isn’t that like a rich democrat talking about how the rich need to pay more taxes. Do they not know they’re the rich not paying enough?
Do you get the point?
There’s plenty of sites both better and worse than yours and they could and probably have said the same thing you just did but I’m sure they don’t have the advantage of AOL free bandwidth or even other brands they use to gain higher placement in a media guide.
I would like a list of the top 10 most respected internet only radio stations in the usa at the moment because the more I read up about this the more I am beginning to think that this industry is going down the tubes.
@Clifton:
>What exactly is your problem.
I don’t have a problem, I am trying to tell others who may not already know of this.
Actually the only problem I do have with this is that a great potential resource such as Windows Media tuner guide looks horrible to the end users. As a result, my primary business brands, the ones I really care about (DI.fm and SKY.fm), along with your own I presume, cannot get naturally exposed to the audience there. This is for Microsoft to fix.
>There’s plenty of sites both better and worse than yours and they could and probably have said the same thing you just did but I’m sure they don’t have the advantage of AOL free bandwidth
In all 2007 for example I haven’t used a single connection of AOL’s bandwdith for this experiment. In fact I sunk tens of thousands of dollars in Windows Media format hosting to learn the dynamics. BUT, this really is NOT about me. Others are free to write too btw, blogs are free to start. Reality is, not everyone knows how bad it’s become.
>You get and do what they do and you’re complaining about something you do.
I think you misread a bit. The whole point of my post was that unlike many outfits there, I don’t rely on doing business that way. This has been a small side experiment, my every day focus are with DI.fm and SKY.fm. If Windows Media ever reigns in their garbage directory, it will not impact me negatively.
And again, I am giving my thoughts about it, not complaining anyone should do anything differently (other than Microsoft).
Let me give you another analogy. If I decided to try out smoking casually, it would still be within reason for me to write about my experience and what negative or positive effects I experience as a result. I may recommend other people don’t do it, and personally I can certainly quit cold turkey within a second. But for those who are “hooked on it”, they’ve got potential problems some day.
I would love to see all of the stations who arent hooked up with free AOL bandwith and see what their numbers would be like compared to legit net radio stations who actually have to pay for their bandwidth.
I am sorry to say, but without the free AOL bandwidth, Club 977 and 181.fm and others would not have nearly the amount of listeners.
No offense to you Ari because I really do like your product and I will not single you out because you have a great site, but it drives me crazy when all I hear from Jeff from Club 977 and StarMedia Group is how big and bad their network is when in fact the only reason their network has any listeners is because of the AOL promotion and bandwidth. I about wanted to vomit in my mouth watching him on the NAB video a few years back with the way he was cocky and arrogant.
As you can tell, I am not a big fan of that group. I think they have destroyed internet radio with this nonsense game they are playing.
No offense taken.
There are bad sides to using AOL bandwidth as well, and it’s a whole separate discussion. Let’s just say people get hooked on it like a drug and it has you by the b*lls.
In the grand scheme of things, it doesn’t matter what the individual services are doing or how they are conducting their business. We can all focus on our own, and just work to clean up directories that we may enjoy as well.
As for free bandwidth, there are ways to get free bandwdith from your loyal audience if you just spend the time to ask. One thing I tell people is worry about your current audience levels, not the ones you want to have in a few years. I’ve had bandwidth donations even before AOL was giving anything away, and I’ve daisy chained them in many ways. Anyone can do it, and many are.
” In fact i saw a knock down drag out fight between them and another radio station on how 977 hacked the other station’s free aol bandwidth server.”
What???? Where did you see this?
This really upsets me. I am the president of Star Media Group, Inc., and it upsets me to see others bad-mouthing the company I founded with just a few dollars in my pocket.
Yes, it’s true. We utilized the alphabetical and ASCII-style listings of Windows Media to grow our business. However, that was only after others started to do so before us and drive us down in the tuner. At the time we employed that, we had just started 977music.com and had no traffic at all. These days, much of our traffic is, like that of DI.fm or Sky.fm, direct traffic. Our main site sees much traffic just like our windows media pages do. The whole “they have a .” thing doesn’t really affect us anymore.
However, there’s a reason we were able to keep our dot. At the time, WindowsMedia.com staff had one strict guideline you had to follow to keep that dot: your station name, all imaging within your station, and such had to employ the dot as a part of the station name. Our site, our imaging, everything, all say “dot 977″ within them. That’s why we’re still able to employ that.
Secondly, as far as AOL bandwidth: only TWO stations out of the eleven we have utilize that bandwidth. The rest are all utilizing Windows Media and MP3 bandwidth that we purchased from a datacenter, spending tens of thousands monthly to keep our stations up, running, buffer-free, and without limits, so that any listener can tune in at any time. And that’s why our numbers keep growing, regardless of tuner listing. Most of our stations aren’t on iTunes, because frankly, we don’t care about MP3 bandwidth. If the 80s and Hitz channel lost their MP3 bandwidth tomorrow, we’d keep going, and to be 100% honest, we’d hardly care. We’d be set back until we could have our bandwidth pipes we pay for turned up, but we’d bounce back within 24-48 hours and be as big as ever.
Thirdly, our site: we’re in the process of putting up a better site with more features. One that would cost us more to design than most stations earn in revenue per year. I, unfortunately, inherited this site when I joined forces with Jeff. I’m not pleased with it, and it’s gone to hell, but at least I’m working on it. How many new stations do you see coming up every day with some silly-ass name and a crappy one-page site, only to get at the top of the listings and run the rest who have legit stations out? That’s not us.
Fourth and final, each and EVERY one of our stations is run by a real DJ. It’s not just some instance of a broadcast software up rotating the same list every day, or a playlist put together in 5 minutes. We spend hours each week putting our rotation together, mixing it up, and making sure it’s good as gold. We have a PAYROLL with several DJs employed for us. Can those of you complaining say the same? I’m sure Ari can. How about the rest?
One more thing: yes, someone came to OUR forums and blasted us. I can hardly say there was a fight. It was some DJ, no doubt someone with a silly-ass name and crappy site, who came and blasted us on our own turf without us throwing any “bait” out there for him to have a reason. It makes no sense. In the time of higher royalties, where online broadcasters need to band together to fight the man, we’re instead fighting each other. Sad.
My two cents. Take it as you will.
Jamie,
Thanks for chiming in with your post.
I think you may have just sent a dozen people to their graphic artist to redo their stations’s logo to have a dot in front of it. I am surprised Windows Media didn’t want to see http://dot977music.com as the domain, though I am sure there is no shortage of sites trying their best to go that route there.
In all seriousness though, are you free to elaborate on who is behind Star Media Group these days. There’s been some interaction with the original Club977 and Jeff, and I’ve even seen mention of RadioStorm one time. Just curious, but certainly understand if you want to keep it private.
In our space it doesn’t hurt to learn more about who is who.
That they may be, but at the same time, it just won’t work anymore. Back when Windows Media allowed dot-prefixed listings, those were the guidelines. However, recently, I believe Windows Media announced they would no longer allow listings with a dot at the beginning, regardless. We kept ours because it seemed we were the only ones using it that followed the rules by the book. Unfortunately, I don’t believe even that works in today’s world.
The simple fact is thus: if you want listeners, try other methods besides “beating the system.” Create a product worth listing to. Try to utilize DJs that work only to be heard and not paid. People like listening to dynamic content. That’s what’s hurt the terrestrial world of radio… all stations spinning the same stuff, with the same content in between. We spend a lot of time auditing the content of our competitors and trying to do what they don’t. And it seems to work. Even our stations that aren’t listed on the tuner get high listener numbers, so we know that all of our traffic isn’t tuner-based. Like Ari said, direct visitors are the most important thing in the world of online radio. If you have a product worth listening to, they will come.