Newstalk: Off The Ball

Word according to who???

Turned on YouTube one nite last week and there was 80 odd watching the newsround live.before that would have been well in the hundreds .the number of paid up memberships on the live feed almost nonexistent

Just looking at their YouTube page now. The Sunday Paper Review has 694 views. Before the subs they would usually be getting 4/5k views.

The Manchester United content they do would usually get 5/6k views, there's an interview with Martin Lipton from 3 days ago about Utd which has 590 views.

It really is a huge drop off, surely their ad revenue is down massively.

Nope i wasnt. the main appeal of OTB before for me was there was no subscription, a lot of my listening was for background noise. Happily listen to an ad not to have to pay. I've found plenty free pods to keep me going. Some aren't the same quality and some are better

Still says 9.99 a month when I click it.

I'd say youre looking at the YouTube Premium price but thats €11.99.

If they are doing the same work as before (more or less) but are getting even a few hundred paying, it might be ok for them.

Hard to know what the business model is

Not really though, the only clips to go over 1,000 views in the last week are the rugby ones. Most other are languishing in the low hundreds which by modern YouTube standards is desperate.

As a sponsor you’d nearly get more eyes on your product sticking a poster for it on a lamppost

I believe what happened is they contacted a certain poster on this thread.

OTB asked them would they spend a tenner a month and the poster said, Yes Ger, Please Ger, I'd actually pay 50 a month Ger cos everything ye do is so wonderful.

And the market research said 100% of people polled said they would be willing to pay a tenner a month.

Obviously the thing has been a failure. The lads just aren't good enough to make money out of this from a subscription model. If they rolled back now and held their hands up I actually think they'd get a decent bounce in listeners.

I'd listen to a lot of their stuff if it was free. But I wouldn't pay for any of it. I think that's the sentiment across the board.

Made a similar point about this recently. They have no competition* so saying they are the "biggest radio sports show in Ireland" is not a great metric.

*Game On cannot be considered competition given how terrible it is

Their listenership live between 7-10 every evening I'd say is small.

Their bread and butter was podcasts and the sponsorship associated with those listens.

The loss of those ears, and people shrugging shoulders and finding other content of better standard, does render them irrelevant to many people.

Yes, I am comparing weekly numbers to 2 shows a week numbers. Biggest show i.e. highest number of listeners a week.

You can of course break it down as average number of listeners per show.

Ultimately, neither of us have the numbers so its just a pointless argument.

Er...yeah,I'm pretty sure the change in model did effect them!

Quoting figures from before that is obviously a bit pointless but as you say nobody has exact figures now.Major drop off though according to those who still watch/listen on YT.

I can only state my own position (which by anecdotal evidence seems to be shared by many) I used to listen a couple of times a week,I dont listen at all now and have found other stuff.