re: #126 ObserverArt

Think of Rush Limbaugh and others. Do you think the radio stations are happy with some of the advertisers they lost as compared to the advertisers that remain?

Radio is a slightly different animal, due to how shows like Limbaugh’s are pitched to radio stations (I worked in radio syndication for a few years, so I’m familiar with how it works). Shows like Rush’s are offered to stations under what’s known as a ‘trade-barter’ arrangement - ie, they’re packaged with a certain number of ‘national’ ads per hour which pay to the syndicator and an equivalent number of blank ad minutes which the stations get to sell and make money on. In the case of the show I worked for, they were mostly paid ads for armed forces recruitment. In Limbaugh’s case it’s quack medicines and foot powder and the like, and they’ve always been the core of syndication revenues. Granted, in Limbaugh’s salad days he had a number of relatively prestigious accounts, but the boycott mounted against him have been pretty successful.

But there has always been a pretty high level of fuckery going on with how his syndication company massaged the numbers for that show - in particular running episodes during the week and again on weekends, then combining the ratings for multiple airings and counting the aggregate ratings for the first airing - which ended up inflating the amount that the syndicator could charge for their ‘national’ ads.

Just like the ideas put forth on the show, the ratings numbers were essentially pretty dishonest.