I had kind of a crazy idea today, let’s compare WestSideWill Radio’s Alexa Numbers to the Alexa numbers of radio stations across the nation.
Remember Alexa is a measure of website popularity, so clearly this is only to compare WEB popularity of the stations vs. WestSideWill Radio, we aren’t comparing their offline popularity.
Let’s Start with WestSideWill.com’s Alexa Numbers:
1 month avg 300,281
3 month avg 333,390
First up, we’ll go head to head with one of my favorite stations in Chicago (really it isn’t a terrible station, the only issue is that they play like 8 songs, so you can’t really listen to it for a long time, but I do enjoy it in doses) B96 96.3
1 month avg 461,263
3 month avg 441,612
According to Alexa.com we are pounding B96 to the ground in terms of web presence, again ONLY web numbers.
Let’s move slightly east to Indianapolis: WNOU 100.9
1 month avg 1,091,818
3 month avg 970,381
Another station with a web presence that is much less than WestSideWill Radio…to their defense they are a much smaller city than Chicago and probably can’t compete like B96 was able to.
Let’s head north to Detroit – and Doug FM!!! First why compare Doug FM to WestSideWill Radio?! Because our Media guys name happens to also be Doug, so I’m just sending a shout out to him! High Five!
1 month avg 3,308,841
3 month avg 5,360,569
I don’t think Doug FM is the most popular station in Detroit, but I know very, very, little about Detroit. The reason I picked them was that they “Play everything” and that’s kind of what we do here at WestSideWill Radio.
Now to Milwaukee – and one of the big boys of radio Kiss FM. 103.7 Kiss FM to be exact:
1 month avg 394,455
3 month avg 388,498
This one was a close one, but who would expect anything different? It is a Kiss station for goodness sakes, and they have more money than WestSideWill can dream off…although they still aren’t bigger than us online are they?
Let’s head West a little bit shall we? How about to Denver, where first I just want to say thanks for Jay Cutler, and KIMN Mix 100 FM
1 month avg 629,687
3 month avg 691,613
They aren’t really that close to us in internet presence, but I will give them props for dropping Ryan Secrest in February! Also, they were a part of a $19.5 MILLION deal between Wilks Broadcasting and CBS Radio…hey…I know the dudes who run WestSideWill would take HALF of that 
Let’s head to beautiful Seattle where Kiss 106.1 lives:
1 month avg 1,607,028
3 month avg 1,588,117
What am I starting to learn by doing all this looking up of stats on Alexa? Simple, a lot of stations that I thought would be really good don’t exactly get the type of web love that I thought they would…go figure?
How about our friends in Texas? Well let’s hit up San Antonio and visit Mix 96.1 KXXM:
1 month avg 682,990
3 month avg 731,908
Another city, another fairly weak online presence. What does this mean? I’m not really sure, but I know it means WestSideWill.com is way more popular on the web than they are.
What’s the point of all these numbers? It’s simple really, they just show that our little internet radio site is more popular on the web than terrestrial radio stations that have websites where you can listen to music. This is something to make note of, with the slow, and in some cases surprisingly fast, death of “traditional” media sources it isn’t always the worst case to be unsigned and only have your music played on stations like WestSideWill.com. Who knows, maybe in 5 years being big on internet radio will the only place where you can be “big”. Who ever thought blogs and what not would kill newspapers like they are?
Obviously if things start to go like that FM radio stations are going to have to make a shift over to the internet, just like newspapers did, and as we can see by how the newspapers are doing those shifts will end, at best, with mixed results.
