If webcasters are ever going to be able to afford the new royalty ratesset by the Copyright Royalty Board in March of last year, they may needto insert terrestrial more radio-style advertising into their programming. PunkRadioCast, which says it streams to over 20 million unique usersmonthly, already includes audio ads in its webcasts. Now, the company figured out how to give advertisers something terrestrial radio stations cannot: a headcount of exactly how many people (or, to be more accurate, computers) heard a webcast ad.
Fork Radio, which runs PunkRadioCast, developed this adPanel technology for its own webcast, which employs real life DJs, unlike most other online streaming services. The company plans to let other webcasters use adPanel to charge advertisers depending on exactly how many computers their audio ad reached.
AdPanel represents an improvement over the old method – statisticalsampling – which Fork claims is prone to methodological, technologicaland sociological errors:
This is all fine and dandyin terms of growing the webcast market, but we can think of at leastone other use for this technology: counting up how many listeners heardeach song in order to pay the per-listener royalty rates set by the Copyright Royalty Board.
Webcasters have complained that the data reporting requirementsdemanded by SoundExchange are too arduous. But with a modified versionof adPanel, it should be possible to automate the reporting process toa great degree.
The upshot for listeners: yet more ways to listen to music for free in return for being exposed to ads.
