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Tuesday, May 26, 2009

A Balance In Advertising

First off I want to thank the many people who have bought audio and showcase ads on BHR. It has been with your help that we have been able to keep 'exposing indie artist to the world'. But now we feel a change is needed.

One of our main goals when we started BHR was to keep the advertising within reach of the artisans. With the CPM based model for audio/banner ads the cost is going to be (if we were strict) 50 plus dollars a week at the current rate. We have been working behind the scenes to accomplish 2 goals:

Setup a flat rate advertising program that the artisans can afford.

Increase our listener base 10 fold over the next 3 months.

Huck and I have been working feverishly the past few weeks with site design, streaming server setup, and all that other geek stuff that makes BHR work and sound good. You may have noticed some of the changes in programing. We actually have the hosts prerecord their shows and play them like a song. The audio quality is a lot better and the host are free to interact with the guests in chat. BHR is switching streaming servers in about 10 days for several reasons. With this new company we will be listed on shoutcast, aol, windows media guide, itunes, and more. Listeners will have the option to open the BHR player or one of 1000's different one available that they personally use. This opens us up to 1000's of more listeners but we do not have control if a banner ads plays in it or not. With the test server we have been using I've seen a dramatic increase already. The second most important reason is the fact that I have space on their server to upload media. This means if I lose electric, Internet, or Huck spills more coffee on my computer the station will never be down. It will automatically kick in a stream from there if they detect BHR is not streaming.

Now on to the meat and potatoes. The new BHR audio ad.

If you notice on top of the blog there are 4 150 x 150 banners in rotation. These will be on all the Blockhead Radio 'Live" pages, chat room, blog, sponsor links page, any other place I can find to stick it, and eventually the BHR Player. There are 14 banners in rotation on each one. We will be offering 12 spots on each one for advertising. The other 2 are being held for cross promotions and giveaways. Each banner rotates on a 5, 6, 7, or 8 second rotation. This keeps it in motion and attention getting. With the banner ad spot comes a one liner that is read on air. Larry can back me up on how effective this is. Each banner will have an ad/plug played in rotation i.e. "Take a look at LaDeDaCreations.artfire.com and the other great sponsor of BHR by visiting BHR.com" This makes a very good impact and isn't tuned out as a commercial. 3 to 4 plugs will be played in rotation every hour with different hosts doing voice overs. This makes BHR "commercial" free which will help in attracting new listeners.

Sound good so far? Now for the cost. We are throwing the CPM out the window. (fellow casters don't throw anything too hard at me) It will be a flat rate of $21.00 per month. This is actually a little less expensive than just the showcase spots, and yes this is the last week of them. It will be setup as a subscription through Paypal and we are hoping to attract long term advertisers. Once the 48 spots are filled we will create a waiting list. I plan to have the banner installed on all the pages in the next 2 days and at that time we will open it up for advertisers. We will announce in on the air, plurk, twitter, and here on the blog.

If you have any questions please email me at advertising@blockheadradio.co

Thanks,
Rod and Huck

1 comment:

pigatopia said...

how awesome

Thanx
shannon