From PR Newswire: DiscJockey.com announced today that George Taylor Morris has joined the firm as the new Vice President of Content and Music Programming. "We are thrilled to have someone of George Taylor Morris's caliber at the helm of programming during our expansion," said Richard Chadwick, Founder and President of DiscJockey.com. "He brings a wealth of knowledge, talent and industry respect to the position."

Morris, a veteran programmer of FM radio stations and radio syndication outlets, said, "With 130 active channels, DiscJockey.com is in the forefront of web radiocasting. The challenge is to shepherd the expansion of at least one hundred more formats and channels to reach the ever-widening audience that our broadband multimedia reaches."

Morris was most recently the Program Director of Boston's Adult Alternative station, WBOS-FM. Before that he was at CBS-owned WZLX, Boston, as Assistant Program Director and midday air personality. Morris is also the host/producer of the long-running AMFM syndicated Classic Rock staple, "Reelin' In The Years", developed while he was VP/Programming at Global Satellite Network in Los Angeles.

DiscJockey.com, Inc., incorporated in 1999 and headquartered in Salem, Massachusetts, is a leading broadcaster of originally programmed audio entertainment over the Internet...

In February, approximately one million unique listeners accessed DiscJockey.com's 130 channels of music and information, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. These users typically spent more than 30 minutes per visit.

Music enthusiasts connect to the site, select their favorite musical genre, such as Current Hits, Rock/Pop, Country and Folk, and Classical, and select their favorite decade for that music.

Read the full press release here or visit DiscJockey.com here. (To look at their channel guide for advertisers, which is a bit more understandable than their channel guide for listeners, click here.)

And of course your comments about DiscJockey.com (its programming, site design, self-reported audience size statistics, and/or business model) are invited -- click here to contribute your feedback.



Reprinted from yesterday's late-afternoon edition:



BY KURT HANSON
Most radio stations' Web simulcasts apparently have not-very-impressive ratings -- it seems that typically they have 10 to 100 listeners at any given moment, compared to 100 to 500 times that many listeners listening to the corresponding over-the-air signal. As a result, one of the big questions among RAIN readers right now is this: How big are the audience sizes for the Internet-only multi-channel webcasters?

We're curious to know whether the multi-channel music services like SonicNet and Spinner and NetRadio and DiscJockey.com actually have huge audiences...or not. Is that where lots of the Internet radio listeners are going? Or are those operations similarly light in listenership?

You can't get the answer by looking at the Web usage estimates produced by firms like MediaMetrix and PC Data, for the following two reasons, according to NetRadio's Dave Witzig:

(1) Those firms are having trouble measuring at-work Internet usage, which seems to be Internet audio's best daypart. As a result, they could very well be underreporting true usage.

(2) Their services are designed to track HTML page viewing, not audio stream listening. In other words, they're measuring the wrong thing. (Remember, it's possible to listen to Internet audio without going through a website at all, either via RealPlayer or Windows Media Player presets or a third-party tuner like Hiwire or vTuner.)

But there's a tantalizing hint about the size of the multi-channel Internet-only broadcasters' audiences that was provided by NetRadio in their S-1 filing and quoted in a recent Minneapolis Star-Tribune article (here):

Citing internal numbers as audited by iPro (a web traffic auditing company affiliated with Nielsen Media Research), NetRadio claimed an audience of 1.3 million unique visitors per month in the fourth quarter of 1999 -- the Star-Tribune article misqoted this number, to NetRadio's detriment, by dropping the phrase "per month" -- and, according to the newspaper article, "they were online for an average of 90 minutes."

Wow! Sounds great! To the casual reader of those numbers, it sounds as if NetRadio's listenership would be as follows

Here's an analogy: Ask me how old I am and I might say, "Okay, well, uh, my brother's 27. Got that? 27. Say, that's a nice necktie! Where'd you get it? Where were we? Oh, yes: 27. And, I'm two years older than my sister." The casual listener might walk away thinking that I'm 29. However, the casual listener would be wrong (see photo at right). Why? Because the two numbers I've quoted don't match up.(The first statistic I quoted referred to one person and the second referred to another.) The truth is that you can't tell my age from the information I provided. It's impossible. You need to know one more fact -- either (A) how much older my sister is than my brother, or (B) how much older I am than my brother, or (C) how old my sister is.

Similarly, you can't tell NetRadio's audience size from the information they chose to provide in their S-1. You need to know one more fact. You need to know either (A) the number of days visited per month per monthly unique visitor, or (B) hours of listening per month per monthly unique visitor, or (C) number of unique visitors per day.

Witzig says that because NetRadio is a public company, he can't quote any other audience size numbers (i.e., those that they didn't put in the S-1).

But what we CAN do is plug in a guess. My experience (which includes seeing some data from other webcasters) tells me that many of those 1.3 million monthly cumers are probably one-time visitors, many are semi-regulars, and a certain percentage are loyalists -- and that it possibly averages out to maybe about three or four visits per month per person. Approximately. So, let's plug those two estimates into a table to give us a range:

My guess puts their actual AQH audience size somewhere in the range of around 11,000 to 14,000 AQH persons. (It makes sense that the audience estimate in the first column is 1/10 the size of our original calculation, because we are now assuming that the monthly cumers are visiting 3 days per month instead of 30 days per month.)

(Overall, does this make sense, though? Would NetRadio have enough server capacity to handle that many listeners -- and, of course, even more during peak hours? I don't know that answer to that. If you have a grasp on that subject, please e-mail me here.)

In any event, the total I came up with is about the audience size of a .4-share station in New York City. Perhaps not stunning, but not horrible either. (And of course NetRadio has a lot more potential for growth than a bottom-rated New York station.)

But now let's add in one more factor: NetRadio's audience is divided up among 120 different music channels.

Compared to a large-market broadcast station, that's a pretty small AQH audience per channel -- but compared to a large-market broadcast station's webcast, it's pretty good. And of course NetRadio has 120 such channels.

But is it a good business?

Even if NetRadio currently has an audience size only equal to a .4 share station in New York City, however, could it be a good business? I believe so.

Here's why: I've heard it estimated that someday targeted audio ads may sell to advertisers for as much as $100 CPMs (i.e., ten cents per listener). Even if you only have 14,000 AQH listeners, multiply that many listeners times several spots per hour times 18 hours per day times 365 days per year times ten cents per spot, and you end up with real money -- potentially tens of millions of dollars.

However, note that this potential is not immediately realizable. The Star-Tribune article said that NetRadio actually had only $1.4 million in revenues in 1999, with half of that coming from CD sales. (That was on expenses of about $16 million, according to the article.)

But, on the other other hand, of course, one could assume that listening to Internet radio will grow significantly in the future. (And RAIN will be keeping an eye on that point.)



Does this analysis make sense? Do you see any interesting implications? Send us your feedback here.

More coming soon! Contribute your suggestions here. (Suggestions already in the hopper include RadioWoodstock.com, Nerve Radio, Radio Gogaga, and HotCountryHits.)

RAIN has returned to America from a week in Tokyo, where we were reporting to you on the latest in home electronics, wireless Internet (via cell phone), station website ideas, and more.

If you missed any of RAIN's coverage, you can access it via the links below. (Each day's issue included two or three stories from Japan; the issue's lead headine is described below.)

Complete RAIN News Archives here.