And because of this we lost one of the best internet radio stations, Woxy.com.
Today Woxy.com had to close its doors to do the fact that company that owned them couldn’t find sponsors or advertisers to make the station profitable. You can read the whole story at Cincinnati.com so I will not bore you with all the details. The story of Woxy is really interesting; I just wish it had a happier ending.
Why It Happened
I think the reason Woxy had to close its doors was not because of bad management or poor content. It was because the advertising world is still stuck on old media and display ads. It wasn’t till just recently that display advertising took off. But that just covers one part of online media, blogs. This does nothing for podcasts, videocasts, and streaming radio stations like Woxy.
Many popular podcasts are struggling because advertisers are trying to use display adverting to sell to their audiences. This doesn’t work and there missing a huge opportunity. A podcast has a captive audience that is not only listing, but chose to take the time to download what there listen to. This is powerful stuff.
You would think the ad world would eat this up. They could get their message heard by people that will not change the channel to something else. Also since most podcasts cover a niche, you can hand pick who hears your message. It seems like a no brainer.
The same goes for streaming internet radio stations and videocasts. They too give the same opportunity to the ad world to reach an audience they can’t reach with boring display advertising.
Why Change is Hard
I am not some big advertising genus so I am sure I am not the only person that realizes this. I think the reason the ad world is stuck on only using display advertising is because it’s so easy to track. Every impression, click, or sale can be neatly track in any analytics software. Showing you how effect your campaigns are. The ad world loves crunching numbers.
The thing about advertising on podcasts, streaming radio, and other forms of media is they are harder to track. Yes you can see how big the audience is, but it’s hard to track what action they take on your campaign.
The ad world hates risks and not having numbers to crunch.
What Can Be Done
Sadly as content creators this nothing we can really do. We just have to keep creating killer content and hope the old advertising world catches up to us. It took a while for them to figure out how to advertise on blogs so it’s going to be the same with podcasts and streams. I just hope we don’t lose anymore internet super stars while we wait.
More and more podcasts and streams are starting to find advertisers let help this is a growing trend.
