Is the land (or for that matter the island) the tower is on worth anything? Maybe they have plans to eventually get rid of it. Wouldn't really matter for 660, since they have 101.9, but it would matter for 880 if it had to downgrade or diplex somewhere as far as coverage. Audacy has been dumping tower sites left and right.
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Good Karma To Lease 880; WCBS News Programming To End
- Thread starter lanceventa
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Has the broadcast industry actually found a way to monetize digital streaming?
Looking at monthly People Meter ratings, digital streams are just a fraction of what over the air measurements are. I'm assuming this is why Good Karma has pulled out of the rating subscription game as it poorly measures digital content.
From a societal point of view, loosing a reliable straight hard news source is a loss for a city, country that actually needs vetted news sources over partisan news commentary that we seem to be getting more and more of and in effect is dumbing down are society.
For me, sports talk only works when it is local. Very little interest in national sports coverage that main line ESPN has been covering in the past. In Chicago the ratings for WSCR vs WMVP demonstrate this completely. I'm sure the same is true in New York for WFAN vs ESPN 98.7.
I think the land is more valuable than the stations.
One thing I keep wondering: Since before the switch to 92.3, WINS and WCBS were neck and neck billing wise. Doesn’t seem like WCBS was knee capped; almost set up to fail? They could have easily switched WCBS to 101.1. I don’t see CBS FM billing all that much nationally.
K.M. Richards
Program Director, The Eighties Channel™
You are correct in the unspoken fact (that a lot of the uninitiated are unaware of) that 660 and 880 are still diplexed after all these years. The tower site is in the Bronx.
Google Maps
Find local businesses, view maps and get driving directions in Google Maps.
If you switch to satellite images on that link, you'll see that it's essentially a very small separated part of the island, accessed by a single bridge on Terrace St.; the tower is the only thing there, and would be a hard sell to anyone other than a billionaire who might want to put a megamansion on it.
K.M. Richards
Program Director, The Eighties Channel™
The benefit to ESPN is that their national sponsors get clearances in market #1. That overrides any personal feelings whether it "works" or not, because Sports as a format is less driven by ratings than even ethnic or religious formats.
Even given that, in 10 or fewer years, that land will be worth more than 660 and 880 combined.
K.M. Richards
Program Director, The Eighties Channel™
See above. No. (At least not yet.)
This was asked and answered several pages back. All-News is an expensive format to operate. Doing it x2 is a significant drain on revenue. And a huge part of 880's billing was the Mets, which Audacy has retained the rights to air on 880.
WCBS-FM has a higher profit margin and would not be sacrificed under these circumstances.
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K.M. Richards
Program Director, The Eighties Channel™
We'll see. There are a lot of doomsayers who are predicting that AM itself will be nearly extinct in another decade anyway.
The other "wild card" is that Soros and his partners have been buying up a lot of Audacy's debt during the bankruptcy proceedings. That could leave him in a controlling position as the company exits Chapter 11 (or at least, he'll have a significant number of seats on the Board of Directors after reorganization). If he had any vision for that island that does not include broadcast facilities that would be a big change in the equation.
It depends. Streaming music has expensive royalties to pay, so music streaming is tough.
But streaming of sports highlights are covered by the usage agreements, and GKB apparently does well in all the markets where it owns stations.
The view from Pierre Bouvard, who used to run Arbitron, is that the PPMs don't fully measure the streaming audience. The platforms themselves to a better job of measuring the usage. The site traffic numbers are the ones SoundExchange uses to charge for music royalties, not PPM. So maybe that's the wrong metric to use. Keep in mind there is real time streaming, and on demand streaming, which are two different things.
K.M. Richards
Program Director, The Eighties Channel™
I agree with Bouvard, remembering the much-less-effective-than-it-was-worth attempt by Nielsen to tie into the headphone jack to detect stream listening. It never worked as hoped ... and then wireless earbuds became popular and rendered the kludge irrelevant.
PPM has to "hear" the encoding to credit listening. The typical use of streaming prevents that from happening.
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That's your opinion. Are you a real estate agent in your spare time?
Rrriiiight..., you didn't really answer my question. Let me rephrase it: why was WCBS kneecapped and not WINS? Why not move WCBS *and* the Mets to 92.3? Ditch WINS.
Fair enough.
Because one all-news format is still quite profitable for Audacy in NY, just as it is for them in Chicago and LA and San Francisco and Philadelphia.
And because, rightly or wrongly, they made the decision several years ago that the WINS format and personnel would be the more profitable brand to survive. As a more personality-based format, WCBS was likely the more expensive of the two to produce. And even when both formats were exclusively on AM, WINS apparently tended to do better in the ratings than WCBS.
And because by doing the deal they did with Good Karma and 880, they were able to preserve the Mets revenue (plus the LMA income) as a separate and very profitable revenue stream independent of what they're making from WINS.
K.M. Richards
Program Director, The Eighties Channel™
Yes, it is my opinion. It is based on what I know from friends and acquaintances in the real estate field. As subsequently noted, things could change down the road, but that is my position at this point in time (since my Magic 8 Ball is of no use here).
My guess -- and it's only that -- is that Audacy wanted to keep WINS purely All-News. They could not move WCBS anywhere without a change in call letters anyway (see previous discussion several pages back on the CBS/Entercom agreement for use of the calls). And what we do not know is whether or not the Mets would be agreeable to losing AM coverage.
This deal solved several dilemmas for Audacy, which already has its Chapter 11 headache to deal with:
1. They got rid of one of their two most expensive to operate News stations.
2. They were smart enough to structure the LMA to let them pre-empt same to run the Mets, the big revenue contributor, without Mets fans having to figure out where the games moved to (because they didn't) and without giving up that revenue to Good Karma.
3. They are able to migrate pretty much all of WCBS' ad revenue to WINS ... and a lot of that was probably combo buys, meaning they just increased frequency on 1010 to accommodate the spots that would have run on 880.
I hope that answers why the "kneecapped" station was WCBS. Please remember to kiss the godfather's ring on your way out.
You just made my point. Music comes in various flavors. So does news. You obviously didn't listen to either WCBS or WINS. Different formats, different presentions, different emphases.
As far as WCBS losing money, that is in question.
K.M. Richards
Program Director, The Eighties Channel™
Big A, Fybush, David, Lance and I have all looked at this and applied what we know to the situation. And we're all hard pressed to find any reason to conclude anything other than that running two News stations -- even with different approaches -- was a financial drain.
Do let us know, please, if you find someone in Audacy's corporate finance department who can provide a definitive answer.
Just crunching the numbers, you CAN make money streaming if you can sell every spot on your stream, but, unless you're incredibly big, the amount of money you would make would amount to a rounding error. I don't know how many companies actually make money streaming as selling every streaming spot is a challenge in and of itself, but margins are going to be tiny unless volume is huge.
As KM mentions, they can tell exactly how many people are listening to streams, and they have a better idea of exactly who is streaming versus who is listening to the on-air signal because the listeners are asked to offer up that information before listening online or setting up an account. Internet spots are, or at least used to be, sold in blocks of 1,000 with each unique device listening counting as one of those 1,000 spots. So, the Nielsen numbers aren't what matter. What matters is how many unique streams you have and whether those streamers are in demos the advertisers will accept.
This has been a debate for at least the last 10 years. When news is a for-profit operation, it's only as successful as its profit margin. Some argue that news should be a public good, but lawmakers currently have little-to-no desire to fund news with taxpayer dollars, which is what would have to happen to make that a reality. You could maybe argue NPR and PBS fit that bill, but Congress has been debating defunding them for at least the last 30 years.
ESPN wouldn't be the profit center it is if no one consumed it. As I've mentioned before, I listen to sports talk more than any other form of talk radio, but I almost exclusively listen to it during football season and, even then, usually just on game day and the following day. I also listen to local or regional shows (some of which are distributed through ESPN) for college coverage if something interesting happened. I also occasionally listen to ESPN or Fox Sports on game day for highlights and rundowns before the game I want to hear is on. Otherwise, I'll turn on sports talk if something newsworthy has happened, but that usually only happens once or twice a year.
K.M. Richards
Program Director, The Eighties Channel™
And they undertook the research for that to determine which would get the FM simulcast, if I remember accurately.
Viewed from that perspective, WCBS was already on the road to oblivion the day WNYL became WINS-FM.
I think the answer goes back a while, before the Mets were added, before other changes at WCBS, and before the 2022 contract. I think the presentation had just become dated, and the demos reflected that. New York was the only market where there were two heritage all news stations side by side. Audacy could see the numbers and see which one had the better long term prognosis. A decision had to be made, because radio usage overall is dropping, and revenue for news (on all platforms) is also dropping. It's not only a problem for radio, but also TV news and NPR non-commercial news. It's all gotten worse in the last year. There is a real serious question about the future of financing for journalism, and this is just the tip of the iceberg.
I wonder if GK did any reception tests before jumping on the WCBS offer. Here in central NJ, on paper 880's signal may be stronger than 1050, but at night it suffers from a lot of groundwave/skywave cancellation that often renders the audio unintelligible (unless you're lucky enough to have a radio with a synchronous detector). 1050's signal may be weaker, but it is actually more listenable. (And, for that matter, so is 1010 WINS.)
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