How much can you make with internet radio?

[CaptBob92]

OK guys, I'm starting up an internet radio station. Here's my idea: I've programed a computor to play files of LOCAL news stories. In other words there are a bunch of LOCAL news stories placed on it and it plays them then repeats just like you play music. Ofcourse, there is going to be a webb site on which you will find the button to stream the news as well as the usual stuff, banners, written local news etc.

My thinking is this, here in Florida there are few radio stations that do any LOCAL news anymore. They either join the net for five minutes an hour, if that, for National stories, do a minute of headlines or just skip any news all together. That being the case, my content is unique and easy to, produce as I record each story once and add it to the rotation, not read a newscast over and over. The issue for local people, working , sitting at home playing on the computor or soon listening in cars will not be how they get my service but rather THAT THEY DO.

Ofcourse, I have to pay for this somehow and even though I have worked out an unbelievably cheap way to do it, I need to know what I can expectto make selling commercials and banners etc.

Anybody out there make a living doing this? How much do you make a month from your site? Do you make a strong effort to sell? How many salesmen? Can anybody tell me?

Thanks in advance

 

[V.Riley]

I asked this question or something similar to it about 4 years ago, and the answer I got was "You can charge what the market can bare". At first I thought this told me absolutely nothing, but it did give me a clue. What I ended up doing is figuring out how much I need to earn in order to cover my costs, then determine how many commercials per hour I wanted to interrupt my music format. I then took that cost per month and the amount of commercials I'd play in a given month to come up what I should be charging per commercial. Of course as in terrestrial radio it is hard to fill all your commercial spots, so then I increased the cost a little to cover the shortage.

As for sales staff, I personally don't have the right attitude to be a salesperson, but I do have a DJ that finds time in busy day to approach prospective sponsors, and he does a good job at it. Its not full time for him, but more of a casual thing he does as he meets people.

It's most likely a good idea to sign sponsors up for long term, i.e. 6 months or a year, as you don't want to keep searching for new ones every month. Of course these are just audio advertisements I'm talking about. Web banner ads, I've found it best to go with advertising firms, like Google's ads, Adbrite, etc.

Do I make money, yes. Do I make enough to make a profit, not yet. But I'm hopeful that eventually we will. Of course since you won't be playing music, you shouldn't have to worry about royalty costs which is where a lot of our cost is.

Good luck!