Online Accounting

Thanks to everyone who has been keeping the phone lines and the pledge page busy over the last few days. Our March Membership drive is well on the way to goal. But I would like to talk a little about our online service, and what it takes to keep it going. Station Manager Ellen Rocco says that it costs us about $180 per broadcast hour to operate on air. That cost would be roughly the same whether we had a thousand listeners, or a million listeners. The math is different online--every extra listener to our broadcast stream, for example, costs us about $.04/hour. So if our online stream is your usual way of listening to NCPR, and you are a heavy listener, say 10 hour/week--we pay $20 per year for the bandwidth sent just to your ears alone. Our newsletter service costs us about $.03 per message sent. So if you subscribe to the Listening Post and the Daily News headlines--delivering them to your inbox costs NCPR $9 year. And there are other costs as well.

Now the last thing we want is for anyone to unsubscribe, or to stop listening online as a way to save us money. These costs are an integral part of our public service mission. But there is an anxious debate in the public broadcasting community about whether the member support model that has served us so well on air can be translated to the different world of the web successfully. At NCPR we are confident that it can. That is why we impose no subscription fees on any of our online content; we don't limit streaming time for non-members, as some stations do. We offer it all free of charge, regardless of a visitor's status. And we intend to keep it that way. So, if you have come to value and rely on the services of ncpr.org, we ask that you consider that value in support of the service.