As radio stations go, less commercials and more music is king. Everyone hates those pesky interruptions to your favorite rock station. Everyone hates the commercials except of course the station manager that has to pay the bills. The selling of commercial airtime is paramount to keeping your station on the air. This is why Rush Limbaugh calls his commercial breaks as "time now for an obscene profit timeout". Of course Limbaugh has the massive listener audience to joke about the barrels of corporate cash he rakes in for his show. Now at the other end of that spectrum and highlights the need for corporate commercial sponsorship to survive we have "Air America" as an example of a failed listener content. The public didn't buy their claptrap talking heads and thus had somewhere in the neighborhood of say, 12 listeners. 12 listeners do not lure corporate money especially since the anti-American, anti-capitalist content they were spewing daily.
Now, we have another "air America" example of the failed content variety. I speak of that cable channel that recently was sold by Al Gore (Current TV). While Al Gore owned it, it could not muster enough revenue and lost money because, again, the content was not being consumed by the public. So, Gore got out of the TV business and sold to, wait for it, Al Jazeera.
It seems that they go live this week but only have 6 minutes of airtime sold to commercial advertisers. With over 1,000 journalists and a whopping budget they think that they could invade the US TV market and actually build viewership. When Al Jazeera is best known for playing all those Bin Laden tapes as soon as his donkey courier delivered them from some cave (er, I mean mansion in Lahore). I thought I would never say this about CNN, but their audience numbers won't be impacted by a new rival on the block, or maybe they will.
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