I'm sure KEOM's format would attract listeners in any location the format is launched. It would likely need the same sort of scenario as KEOM: an educational entity to fund it or enough of a population base to garner enough listener financial support. In rare instances, a commercial operator with a frugal operating budget and active sales staff can get enough local ads dollars to make it happen but it would likely be on a fringe signal and not enjoy full market coverage, possibly an AM versus FM signal. In small town radio where almost all sales are direct, formats that do not work in larger communities can succeed and sometimes do quite well. In other words, a station serving a county of 50,000 people can likely pull it off quite nicely.
Being in the demographic that KEOM would appeal to, I realize the listener base is not the recipient of buys from the advertising agencies that control virtually all the ad dollars except the smallest businesses. If you've done sales as I have, they'll tell you (if you ask): your station does not reach the advertiser's target demos or your audience size if too low to allocate dollars since the budget is pretty much blown after buying the biggest stations that have the desired demo and numbers. The bigger market stations are under the gun to produce the revenue, so if KEOM was commercially viable, a station hungry for positive revenue flow would have taken a chance on their format long ago. You can bet the big stations have looked at it. As a rule of thumb, if it is commercially viable and can produce decent revenue, chances are the station will have a local competitor (same applies to KAAM).
KEOM, as a non-commercial station, is less concerned with ratings and such. I do not know the size of their audience. It might be fairly large as comparable to other stations in the market and while that matters in respect to getting financial support if the station was not owned by a school district, I do not know of another example of the format and it's performance as a non-commercial station. The questions is, in listeners and in revenue potential, as a non-commercial format, can it out-perform what is already on the non-commercial stations in a particular market? As I was told early on in my radio career, if it's not on the air someplace on the dial already, there's likely a very good reason for that.
