10 counties covered, less than 100k pop, FM sells for $7 million

To be accurate, a 100 kW C1 FM along with a 500 watt class D AM and a 1 kW class C AM sold together for $7 million...I'm assuming the FM is the big gun here.

The FM is KUTT 99.5 Fairbury-Beatrice NE, with AMs KGMT 1310 Fairbury and KWBE 1450 Beatrice. KUTT just misses the Lincoln metro, and if their website is any indicator, the station doesn't waste its efforts on the big city.

The 10 counties covered by KUTT total less than 100,000 population. Average per capita income is around $16,500 to $17,000. Yet, it is reportedly billing around $3 million a year.

Guess that's what happens when there's a well directed sales force and little competition. In the home county, there are only four commercial FMs rated moderate signal strength or better by Radio-Locator.

Two times billing seems pretty modest. But $3 million in rural Nebraska seems unlikely, unless that's for all 3 stations together.

Radio in the Midwest is quite viable. More often than not the small market stations are full service, live and well entrenched in the area. Most have a strong ag emphasis. They sell everything. Every auction for property, home and farm is advertised. Local cattle sale barns buy time to broadcast the results of their sale days. It is not rare for a client to sponsor severe weather reports, sometimes several accounts. Even seemingly tiny markets bill a substantial amount (I know one station that dominates over several small population counties...25,000 at most that was billing about $750,000 a year as a fulltime 1 Kilowatt AM (their FM didn't do as well in billing). And yes, AM is very viable in the rural areas. Being in Texas, the spot rates are much higher than here and the programming, more or less, is the difference between night and day comparing small market stations.

Keep in mind many low power AMs travel great distances there. Ground conductivity is amazing. Larger stations even give more statewide weather forecasts and sometime current conditions across a wide area.

In short, I was pretty shocked listening to some stations in tiny places, like towns of 3,000 and 5,000 in the county, running 14 minutes an hour in advertising, mostly in 30s, and selling $5 to $8 a spot. These such stations are not terribly rare, especially in the upper midwest states. Pull out a map and check Valentine, Nebraska. Somehow they can manage to be live and local during all operating hours.

Sure, some markets have an incredible number of stations and opt for satellite or computer (ie: one Nebraska town of 8,000 with about 10 stations). With the stations shared by only a few companies, sharing staff and studios, they all do pretty well.

There are several regional predominately Ag stations in Kansas, Iowa, Nebraska and South Dakota.

Many of the stations use music as a filler more than anything. In a tiny North Dakota town they had network news, local news, regional weather and various features and reports throughout the average daytime hours, managing to play about 12 to 16 minutes of commercials an hour and maybe 5 songs in an hour. The jocks were pretty experienced sounding and I could tell from my on air days, it was a tough format to pull off well...one of those that left you mentally exhausted on those days you were just off or catching a cold. I recall thinking I felt like I knew everything going on in the area by merely listening as I cruised the county on one visit.