Halloween Another Stunning Success... And It's Not Over Yet

Dynamic Range Radio's Halloween broadcast rewrote the record books yesterday, setting new high water marks in nearly every way imaginable.

At its peak, the Halloween broadcast was reaching more than 1,200 listeners, which shattered the old record set by last year's Halloween show.

Having 1,200 listeners pushed the Halloween show into the top 30 of all internet radio stations worldwide according to SHOUTcast, and it may have even cracked the top 20 at some point. The highest ranking I saw was #21.

Among eclectic stations, which is the standard I usually measure Dynamic Range Radio by, the Halloween broadcast ranked #2 at its peak, kicking KCRW's ass and breathing down Radio Paradise's neck. (Now that it's Saturday, I'm back to having my ass handed to me by both of them.)

Looking at web hits, I tallied almost 1,000 unique page loads on Oct 31, doubling the record set one year ago. And those 1,000 hits mean that I had more page loads in one day than I've had in any single month up until now.

But despite all the people listening, and all the people visiting the website, the one area that wasn't overwhelming was the number of donations. I didn't get nearly enough to cover my expenses, so that kind of puts a damper on things.

If only 10% of the people who listened had donated $10, I would have been in good shape. Even 5% donating $5 would have been great, but when less than 0.1% choose to make a donation, that means I'm going deeper and deeper into debt.

Still, I hope that all the exposure yesterday will lead to more people tuning in to the regular broadcast over the coming months, and maybe, someday, the goal of breaking even will finally be reachable.

As for the rest of the weekend, I plan to leave the Halloween show running until Sunday night at least. To me, Halloween isn't over until the Simpsons' Treehouse Of Horror Special is broadcast, and there are still enough people listening to keep the Halloween show among the top 10 of eclectic stations on SHOUTcast, which is not too shabby.

Once I shut it down, all the servers will switch over to the regular broadcast, and hopefully iTunes will decide to keep it listed. :fingers crossed: The regular broadcast could really use the same boost that the Halloween show received.