Thanks for a wonderful three years of listening in to Highway 6 - Your Road to the Country. We've had hundreds of guests and even more stories over the time we were on the air at 98.3 WOW-FM (983wowfm) and it was great to be able to share with so many people my passion for all things rural.
But, this month we had to pull the plug on he show. We just could no longer subsidize our rural passion.
What most folks don't realize is that we were buying the time from 98.3 WOW-FM at a cost of $300 for each week's show. That's $15,600 a year. Our goal was to gather enough sponsors at $25 per ad to cover the cost of the show and the costs to write, produce and seek guests. We never actually got over three sponsors at $400 a month and for the past seven months our only paying sponsor was our friends at Capital City Equipment the Kubota dealer in Des Moines and Ames.
We thought that because there are more folks living on small farms and acreges in the 70 mile radius of Des Moines than there are large farmers, it would be a great show to advertise on. But either we didn't try hard enough to sell the program or folks didn't see the value of having over 3,000 people listening here in Central Iowa with hundreds of others from all across the country on the live stream.
In the end...It's...business. And as much as that hurts...we had to pull the plug.
But our passion for rural remains and soon we'll ramp up another way to broadcast the stories about the people that make up so much of this country...and this state. We're taking a detour. In the meantime we'll be here on this blog talking about those important things regarding Rural Iowa and Rural America. You can still reach us at @RuralLifeRadio on Twitter and our new Internet Radio Show - Insight on Business airs Monday - Friday starting at 12:30PM Central on www.MacsWorldLive.com and we've added some agriculture tidbits to that as well.
But...while we get to "move on" I want you to know how much I've been grateful to all of the listeners who took part in our show...you guys ROCK.
Michael Libbie - Host and Acreage Owner
It's sad. You'll be missed. You had a wonderful show, I hate to see it go away.
Posted by: Georgie | July 27, 2009 at 07:43 PM
Hey, thanks Georgie. IT was fun to do...but lots of work and cost loads of money to do. We'll figure out another way to talk about Rural America.... Thanks for always being there...and for the comment.
Posted by: Michael Libbie | July 27, 2009 at 07:50 PM