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WAGS-A/Bishopville, SC Goes Dark After 64 Years On Air

How sad. As I understand it, WAGS was a pretty unique station playing a music mix that included lots of independent and local/regional artists while being live and local. I surmised it did not do very well financially but I could be wrong. It has been for sale for a mere $75,000 including the building and tower site (from how the listing read). I guesstimated the station to be billing around $5,000 a month. The primary coverage hit around 15,000 folks. Everyone I know that saw the listing pondered what skeletons were in the closet for the station to be so cheap but it might just have been an owner that was ready to make it easy for the next guy to take the baton. Obviously, the owner, at around age 70 or 71, is ready to give it up and simply enjoy life outside the radio station.
 
1kw AM Daytimer in a sparsely populated low-income area with no FM translator. Under those conditions, I don't see a case for being an ongoing concern as a standalone. Surprised one of the religious networks or spanish-language networks didn't pick it up.
 
I agree a daytimer serving 15,000 in a lower income county isn't pie in the sky but I have worked low income, low population stations that were it in the county and they did pretty well. You weren't laughing all the way to the bank and nobody was getting rich but it could maintain and throw off a little money. In each instance we seemed to do a format the business owners in the area sort of liked and they saw the station as hitting their trade area. Spot rates were pretty cheap and we ran plenty of them I suppose because we had to be affordable enough for the smaller business to have a meaningful schedule. And we did local news, announcements and weather in each case.
 
b-turner said:
I agree a daytimer serving 15,000 in a lower income county isn't pie in the sky but I have worked low income, low population stations that were it in the county and they did pretty well. You weren't laughing all the way to the bank and nobody was getting rich but it could maintain and throw off a little money. In each instance we seemed to do a format the business owners in the area sort of liked and they saw the station as hitting their trade area. Spot rates were pretty cheap and we ran plenty of them I suppose because we had to be affordable enough for the smaller business to have a meaningful schedule. And we did local news, announcements and weather in each case.
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The success of a small town radio station nowadays has as much or more to do with the vitality of the local advertising market. Bishopville has been in a bad way for a good thirty to forty years. Even in small towns where the economy is stable or growing, one has to determine if there are enough businesses in the market which make their own advertising decisions. The chain stores don't do any local advertising....radio or newspaper. If you have decent ratings, you might get a buy when they first open but that's it. Banks were once a huge advertiser in small towns. Now most small town banks are a branch of a regional bank and if they do radio, they buy the big regional 100KW FMs which have good ratings across several counties. Small towns which used to support three local stations, now may support one. Many which used to support one can't any longer. Newspapers in these places hang on due to subscription income and legal notices. It's the world we live in today.
 
I'm not familiar with the Bishopville current economic climate versus the past.

Your comments are 100% correct. I love that you offer such great detail. It should be very valuable to the person looking to get their own station. Ownership was never easy even where there were fewer slices in the advertising pie. It's not easy today. You just have to be creative and learn how to do more with less, sometimes much less. Labor of love enters the picture as the extra work gives you just enough income but not cover the extra work it involved.

Not only do the chain stores not buy radio, they tend to make it harder for the mom and pop business that competes to stay afloat. Dollar General or Family Dollar can have this impact. Small town businesses are close to the edge anyway. They have a limited customer base, buy in smaller volume and have a lot less 'wiggle room' that a business in a larger community. When that local buys at the big chain store in the next town or goes online to buy, the little guy hurts a little more. In short, that gap between profit and loss is much thinner today than it ever was.

There's much more competition for the ad dollar as well. There are not just all those new stations that popped up on the dial over the past few decades but all those upgrades to stations made, such as going from a 6kw to say a 50kw to try to serve a more regional area. Chances are the cable company has a sales rep coming through town here and there to sell clients. You have the local paper out selling. You have 'shoppers' that you see at store entrances with their 'free, take one' sign and the ones that arrive in the mailbox. And then there is the online presence. Some merchants are cutting back on advertising to use Facebook and frequents posts there to market themselves. Because they might get a few comments they think, wow, instant results.

All of this means the local small town station has a rough go of it. And that newspaper, I know a lady that owned a small town paper. About 2004 or so, she was selling about $85,000 in advertising a year in her little town (a mere $25 million in retail sales). Ten years later her state recognized award winning paper was down to $35,000 in advertising sold for the year. She went a year not taking a salary and trying to turn the tide. She shut down. Also, the subscription price, thanks to higher printing costs, usually doesn't cover the printing and postage (for this publisher it cost 60 cents an issue for printing and postage versus 50 cents retail price for the paper, a weekly 8 pager). Radio isn't the only media facing the tough road.

For this publisher, it wasn't the poor job she was doing, it was the competition from online (including Facebook) and the 'shoppers' that touted multi-county coverage and reader numbers of maybe 25 times her actual readership that ate at her slice of the advertising pie.

I have looked seriously at some stations I wanted to try to buy. I have seen a trend. At one point a radio station might get as much as $5 per $1,000 in retail sales in the small town. That's when you are running like a well oiled machine. Today that well oiled machine can barely do $2.25 to $2.50. Depending on the station and the town, about 50 cents per $1,000 in retail sales might be realistic. That would mean a town like Bishopville might only bill about $50,000 a year under the worst case scenario but $225,000 to $250,000 at the very most if everything was perfect. The average would be about $10,000 to $12,000 a month for a place like Bishopville. Looking at Bishopville, the fact WAGS is an AM daytimer on a fairly crowded radio landscape, I suspect it is more like $50,000. From what I gather, the average seems to be about $1.33 based on the small town stations I have looked at.

I understand the station is still for sale. Yes, it includes the studio/office and tower in the backyard. I have no knowledge of the equipment or ground system. At least the asking price will make you want to take a look. The seller isn't like most. He isn't looking for that buyer to be his winning lottery ticket. I've seen just a CP have a bigger asking price.
 
I should add this in regard to newspapers: in some states Public Notices are a really big deal. The city, school board and county have to publish their minutes and there are some other requirements as well. There are a great many newspapers that simply would not exist without the Public Notice requirement. In some states we're talking hundreds of dollars a week. For some small towns Public Notice dollars is about equal to the subscriptions and advertising revenue combined. Colorado and both North and South Dakota come to mind.
 
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