Radio Sales Café

Have any of you had success selling gateway ads on your station websites? Gateway ads are the commercials (TV spots on radio websites or simply the radio production) that plays when you go to stream the station online. It's a 30-second spot and can't be bipassed by the user- so it's nice benefit to advertisers.

What worked? What didn't work? Was it simply added-value? What types of businesses were the most interested?

I'm asking because we've had this available to our clients for almost a year. We're not getting many bites- so I wanted to see if there was a better way of doing it. Right now, clients have to buy this feature (at a lower cost), but also invest in a radio schedule.

We had one business that had a significant online component as a sponsor, but they just went out of business. It is a hard sell - we had a package that included a percentage on the national preempted spots as well, but it was nominal revenue. Our online audience on www.khum.com is only 5% of our over-the-air audience, and we have a pretty good online following.

Yes. We cover a lot of local sporting events. We do some local high school football games strictly on line and when a 'listener' signs on to one of our streams, the first 30 seconds are an audio ad while looking at a display ad. We charged $350 a week for this and offered two per event. (we have three events most Friday nights during the season.) The $350 included 10 :15 ads mid week in regular programming, the display ad and the audio ad. Some of the events we streamed had over 4000 listeners.