Something doesn't seem right here. Falling donations should normally result in cutting back on someone's number of monthly hours or stations, not a total cessation of all radio output. A sudden total stoppage makes it sound like the ministry is receiving no donations, and that a bank account stocked with former donations may have been getting drawn down slowly, until finally, this month, reaching its exhaustion point.
They are likely running out of money. With Stair having been dead for over four years now, and the world having not come to an end, perhaps people are bailing from all that nonsense.
Or perhaps they now realize that shortwave is dead for being an effective medium for spreading their message.
Considering how cheap shortwave airtime is
It’s probably too cheap. Private shortwave stations need to make enough money to cover operating expenses and turn a reasonable profit. Yet we had WBCQ asking for $500k in donations a few years ago to keep things going (the pay reportedly only got $5k) and WRMI had a GoFundMe (or similar) asking for money for hurricane damage repair as the station had no insurance.
Now there is chatter about shortwave operators needling to cut airtime charges to attract new clients. But who would those clients be? And slashing income will just send those stations into a financial death spiral, which they are likely already in.
I would think that if any donations were arriving at all, they would keep at least one shortwave station in their portfolio -- like whichever broadcaster was best equipped to throw their signal in every imaginable geographic direction, with the best propagation, at different times of the day. Being heard everywhere on at least one frequency, some of the time, would be preferable to total silence for anyone pushing a message, no?
You can push your message far and wide on shortwave, but who is listening other than a handful of hardcore SW hobbyists? Is that the way to reach a wide audience?
Which stations do you reckon may be facing closure on account of this? WRMI, WBCQ, and WWCR all seem to have enough other programming to survive, even if perhaps one or two transmitters need to be unplugged.
WRMI has plenty of other clients, though the Overcomer shutdown will be a huge financial hit. Of course transmitters that aren’t on the air won’t be eating electricity.
WBCQ will stick around because Allan Weiner is gonna be Allan Weiner. Besides he still has the income from the flat earthers leasing the 500kw transmitter.
I’m keeping an eye on WWCR and WTWW. WWCR recently closed down one of its four transmitters, and may have to shutter a second one that was leased to Overcomer 24/7. Perhaps they can get by with only two units in operation if no new clients show up.
WTWW was wanting to run Overcomer on one transmitter 24/7, but that won’t happen now. Very little programming on the remaining operational transmitter. Perhaps it is time to close the station…again.
.The biggest inexplicability I keep noticing with the broadcasts of Stair's "classics" is his people's apparent unwillingness to exclude or edit embarrassingly dated material. Almost every other time my receiver stops on a shortwave signal running his old tapes, Stair is lamenting a "current event," like the collapse of Lehman Brothers, followed by warning all his listeners they have just months to evacuate the cities before everything goes Mad Max. It's real pie-in-the-face stuff.
It’s not unusual to tune across Brother Stair and find him ranting endlessly about President Obama. Ridiculously out of date material.
Even people who would otherwise continue following him -- the way others keep following Gene Scott -- aren't going to remain donors for long with repeated doses of cringe like that.
Should note that while we still hear Gene Scott’s preaching 20 years after his death, the broadcasts are of scripture teachings that are pretty much evergreen. No blathering about current events from decades ago.
The Melissa Scott programs seem to be fairly generic as well, though many of those sermons could be from years ago.
To say nothing of what new listeners would think. "Is this radio station broken?"
A lot of stations are broken. It’s just that the owners are going to squeeze every last penny they can out of them before finally pulling the plug.
