I Was Wrong About Live 365. And That's a Great Thing.

Back in the dot bomb, the agency I worked for at the time had the briefest of engagements with Live 365, the eminently populist online radio site that has literally thousands of broadcasters in the same way that Youtube has millions of would be Scorseses producing across the country.

Live 365 was great if you had esoteric radio interests. I, for example, was a devotee of a LiveIreland channel that played traditional Celtic music, and an All Reba All the Time minibroadcaster that played whole sides of my lady Reba crooning about mothers consigning their daughters to be golddiggers and men who cheat.

At the time, well I am not going to pull any punches, Live 365 was in disarray with the many challenges of having an unproven audio advertising model, copyright problems with a music industry that had (and continues to have) an asinine strategy of trying to limit content distribution in order to make money, low cash reserves, and a host of other little problems. And very little time to solve them. I didn't think they'd make it.



I'll say this for them then...they had a very committed team that clearly LOVED the radio format, and a sense of ethics that made them a company that DIDN'T look for dodgy ways to grow traffic with click farms and all that rot. But the problems seemed awfully big to me, and possibly untenable.

So recently I went to the URL to see who had bought it for a redirect, and was pleasantly stunned to see that not only were they still around, they seem to be doing rather well.

How did they do it? Well, I don't know anyone over there, but from what I can tell they developed a business model with over a dozen different kinds of subscription and ad revenue streams, a tightened copyright policy, and a platform that offers a variety of services for a fee.

First let's take a look at the ad model. As I recall, Live365 used to sell big square ads in their player, which rotated over the day to generate impressions. Where they went was to what I call the "CBS MarketWatch" strategy of defining an incredible array of advertising to find products that fit a variety of advertiser needs. I say CBS MarketWatch because they and their head of sales Scott McLernon pioneered the concept of a cacophony of ad products that were advertiser needs focused. And as a result CBSMarketWatrch thrived in a market where lots of others died on the vine.

But anyway, Live365 offers a cornucopia of ad products including:

1. Banners buttons and that sort of stuff
2. Audio gateway ads
3. Audio in stream ads
4. Video (natch)
5. Contests and sweeps
6. targeted niche music genre newsletters
7. Skinned players
8. Sponsored podcasts
9. Site takeovers

Well, that pretty much covers the toolset of the net, and they offer them all.

But suppose you are a consumer, and you want your Clannad or your Reba without ads? Live365 offers ad-free-subs as well to give you that ad free music experience you crave.

Live365 also learned that there were thousands of people who would pay for the privilege of broadcasting, so they get charged a fee to do it. Live365 offers coverage for all the royalty and licensing stuff if you broadcast copyrighted material.

So congrats to Live 365 for keeping it going -- and indeed innovating to succeed. I was wrong about ya'll and I am happy you proved me the village idiot on your prospects back in '01.

So the moral of the story? Don't bet the house on my predictions (I also thought Youtube would be crushed by Hollywood litigation), and figure out lots of ways to potentially make money. Sometimes you need to do the ole spaghetti strategy to see how a new media form can make money, so you try lots of things and keep the ones that work.

Thanks for reading, and don't forget to write.