A little over a year ago, I read an article that polled people on what they do, after they hear a song they like, to find more information on either the song or the artist.

Google and Yahoo searches made up 51% of the responses, direct YouTube searches made up 23%. And 10% went to the website of their local radio station. In other words, 5 out of 6 people interested in finding out more about a song or singer or band go to the internet to find out more, before they look anywhere else.

Another 10% said they don't do any kind of searching, they just like the song and that's all they care to know. 4% said "something else" and less than 1% said they "go to television for the answer".

That last statistic is very enjoyable to radio music programmers. In 1981, MTV claimed they were going to eliminate music radio stations. Ha! The only thing MTV - Music Television - has eliminated music from is their OWN TV station.

But beyond that, I also found it interesting that "going to the radio station's website" ranked right alongside "we don't care to find any info". Through the years, I've worked for people who actually put more time into their website than into their radio station. They say people use the internet more than they use radio. Sure, if you're just talking about "the Internet". But it's WHAT they do on the internet that matters more than how much time they spend. The most successful use of a radio website is news, weather, sports, and other information. Not music. You can drive people to your website to listen to a high school football broadcast, they are not going to go there to read a bio on Brantley Gilbert that you pulled off of Wikipedia or CMT...they are just going to go to Wikipedia or CMT and do it themselves.

Unless you actually own Google, Facebook, YouTube, Wikipedia, or a few other lesser websites just below the "big 4", you're not going to survive financially on the income from your radio station website, and that DOES include websites for news/talk stations as well as those who play music. 

Twenty years of working with radio websites has proven one thing to me: You cannot sell it ahead of the radio station itself. The website can compliment the radio ad sales as added value, but to just sell "the webpage" and not the radio station? Not gonna happen. If you work for a company that still believes their "internet income" will surpass their radio station sometime in the near future, go somewhere else. Go somewhere that still sells radio spot advertising time first, and uses the website solely as an add-on. Go to a place that concentrates on SELLING RADIO, and not one that puts more importance on tile ads or banner ads on a website. You work in radio. Concentrate on radio FIRST, not the station's website.

As a matter of fact, you are better off building a busy Facebook page for your station, and better off working with an outside company on building an online store for your station. Both of those will be discussed in tomorrow's blog post.

My advice to small market radio? Eliminate the music station websites completely. If you have a news/talk/sports station, keep a website. Music station? Don't need it. Rely on facebook. Save the money and save the time.