Since radio began the industry has been a hybrid of content aggregation and content origination. The original content being what happens between the records, on-air announcements by the disc jockey, imaging, promos and ads. The aggregated content is made up of the popular songs we identify that were obviously produced by others as well as the actuality audio we use when reporting on news or entertainment news stories. Plus, with songs especially, we used our announcers and imaging to somewhat repackage them and present them in a way that increased their appeal to the audience. Through trial and error each format eventually found the proper balance of the amount of original content it should provide and how much aggregated content to include. 

In this digital age we’re faced with figuring out that same equation on the digital content side. Which leads us to several questions. Should we just share other people’s digital content? How do we repackage that content and make it our own? How do we create our own original digital content? How much digital content can we realistically create? 

When you look across the industry, most radio stations are simply sharing other people’s digital content. There’s certainly nothing wrong with that and it’s better than nothing because at least it gets the stations branding in front of whoever sees those liked, shared and retweeted posts. But, really the biggest beneficiary of that is the outlet that originated the content. 

A better approach would be to figure out how much original digital content we can realistically create on a regular basis and use outside freelancers and third party content creators to help supplement that content. Then, do our best to aggregate, credit/source, and repackage other people’s content to make it our own as opposed to just sharing it. We would still outright share some content, but the more we can originate from our platforms that we monetize the larger our share of the digital dollars will be. 

If you need help creating original digital content, like videos and blogs, email us at andy@radiostationconsultant.com. 

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