GoGaGa.com goes silent on Internet radio

BOULDER ? The Net waves have fallen silent for Internet radio innovator GoGaGa.com.

The Boulder-based Internet radio company ceased streaming operations for its gogaga.com and gogagadenver.com Web stations on Jan. 9, said Ray Skibitsky, president of The Eclectic Radio Company Inc., parent to GoGaGa.com.

For now, the gogaga.com and gogagadenver.com sites will remain up, but they say that the site is “temporarily disconnected.” The Internet radio station’s business has not been dissolved, but Skibitsky said Eclectic Radio is “liquidating some assets to prepare for going out of business, if that happens.”

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Eclectic Radio launched gogaga.com, Colorado’s first Internet radio station and one of the first in the nation, on April 1, 1997. In May 2000, the company made a local debut with gogagadenver.com.

Eclectic Radio still is looking to raise funds through strategic investors and from partners in the newspaper industry, but Skibitsky said it is “not looking real positive.”

Eclectic Radio received a round of venture financing nearing $2 million in November 1999. Last summer, the company entered into a partnership with The Denver Post to develop a co-branded site that would create radio programming for newspapers.

Skibitsky said the joint-operating agreement established between the Post and the Rocky Mountain News had a big effect on the partnership, leaving unresolved questions about JOA Web content properties.

Skibitsky said Eclectic Radio is still attempting to talk to its JOA partners about its model, but the company may seek another distribution partner.

Besides indecision regarding its newspaper partnership, GoGaGa.com was unable to generate enough advertising dollars to maintain its Web stations and grow the company as it had planned.

Both gogaga.com and gogagadenver.com had a growing audience. In a four-month period, Skibitsky said the stations acquired more than 30,000 different listeners and were adding new listeners every day. But the company was just starting to get traction with ad dollars and didn’t have enough revenue to grow, he said.

Had it been able to maintain streaming at its sites, Skibitsky said GoGaGa.com would have had 200,000 listeners within a year and with that many listeners, the company would have generated significant revenues.

“Our purpose was to prove that our model worked,” Skibitsky said. “Streaming media hasn’t gotten ad revenue yet. 80 percent of radio advertising revenue is local dollars. We were going after a much larger pie.”

The Internet slowdown was another reason GoGaGa.com ceased streaming operations. Like other Net-based businesses, GoGaGa.com fell victim to the shakeout that shut the doors of more than 200 Internet companies nationwide in 2000.

“It’s winter on the Internet,´ said Eclectic Radio Founder and General Manager Joe Pezzillo. “Only the strongest plants will make it through the season.”

Chuck Lontine, general manager of Boulder’s KWAB AM-1490 and radioforchange.com, said the timeliness of GoGaGa.com ceasing streaming operations coincides with the downturn in audio streaming nationwide. Since October, Lontine said more than 1,000 streams have disconnected nationwide.

“In a new medium like Webcasting, there is going to be a natural process of natural selection,´ said Bill Rose, vice president and general manager of the Webcast Ratings Division of Arbitron Inc. “The companies that have the models to monetize their streams are going to generate revenue and survive.”

According to Rose, Internet radio companies with connections with traditional media, those that are well funded, and those that are able to show growth in the long term, will be successful. In the end, he said the shakeout will prove healthy.

“Any time a new medium is created there are a lot of entrants into the field,” Rose said. “This happens with every business in any industry.”

Whether or not GoGaGa.com will resume streaming at its sites in the future remains unclear. “The reality is this is not an easy business to be in,” Pezzillo said. “I’m grateful that we all had this incredible experience. (GoGaGa.com) touched a lot of people. It took a lot of people to do that.”

“(GoGaGa.com) developed a concept that deserves a second look; hopefully, it will find itself resurrected,” Lontine said.

Contact Anjanette Mudd at (303) 440-4950 or e-mail amudd@bcbr.com