How do you monitize your stations?
I'm wondering what kinds of stations people are running who use drupal and the station module as your front end.
Looking at most of the site links that I see in poster's signatures, I see many of them are college radio station, or seemingly other non-profit stations.
Is there anybody out there who is a for-profit station? Or at least do not have your bandwidth funded or subsidized from an organization such as university.
I'm about to launch my site to the public, and wonder how I can monetize the site to cover the cost of bandwidth. I've done alot of reading and it seems quite hard for Internet radio stations to advertise because listeners don't click through your site as much as they would other types of contents and if they add your station's stream to their preferred player as a bookmark, they may not even visit your site at all.
Anybody want to discuss this?
So the station you're
So the station you're running will be solely an internet affair - no terrestrial signal?
The two strategies that such stations seem to take are:
Go with a stream hosting company such as Live365 who runs their own audio ads in the stream. They also sell premium accounts for listeners with higher-quality streams and no ads; I think you get a kick-back when they sell one, though I'm not sure how they associate the sale with your stream.
Beg for donations in the stream and/or on the web site.
You could also theoretically try to draw in advertisers yourself, but good luck on that when your listener count peaks into the double digits.
Either way, don't expect to make much. Don't even expect to make enough to recoup the streaming cost. If you're trying to break into internet radio to make money, you're going to be sorely disappointed.
Get advertisers for the stream
I would say the best way to make money off of your station would be to get advertisements on the station. You can view the monthly listenership statistics via Shoutcast I'm pretty sure.
Yes, this is an Internet
Yes, this is an Internet only station. No terrestrial signal.
Live365 is not an option for us.
I would consider to ask for donations, but I'm doubting that will cover the costs completely.
I have considered selling ad space to advertisers because it is a very niche genre of music. I don't expect to make money with this station, but I do want to run it.
I'm just wondering how others out there are surviving the cost of bandwidth usage. I wish there was a graph somewhere that showed how much of a bill you would rack up depending on how many users are listening.