Diamond Dave gets the can
So Diamond Dave is getting fired. If only he quit, I could have used some kind of ‘Jump’ pun. Maybe he’ll move to Panama! Eh…why bother?
Roth’s radio career began in January, when he replaced Howard Stern on the CBS stations. But reviews were poor and Roth fought with management over the show’s format, putting the show on the skids less than four months into its run.
Roth, during one angry on-air rant, predicted the show could be yanked before May.
He always was ahead of his time. Opie & Anthony, who I’ve never actually listened to, will replace Diamond Dave, who I’ve also never listened to.
106.9 The Fox rocks the bandwidth theft hits!
Here’s the latest craze that’s sweeping the nation: Bandwidth theft!
Last week we had some great pictures of Drew Barrymore at the Golden Globes, and as particularly attentive readers may recall, Drew was lacking some essential support in her girly regions. We got a ton of hits from this, but it seemed like our data transfers were going up at a much faster rate than the actual traffic would imply. I scoured or stats on Google Analytics, yet I couldn’t find the cause of the rise there. Maybe I was figuring wrong.
Then I checked the Webalizer stats and it all made sense. The top referrers in Webalizer were 1069thefox.com and a few other addresses that’ll get you to the same site, which was odd because there was no mention of it in Analytics, but it adds up to 7,372 hits from this station’s site at last count. That’s not insignifigant.
You see, Google Analytics only tracks pages that contain a small piece of tracking code that sends a ping back to Google when somebody loads that page. The reason they didn’t show up Analytics was because they were simply stealing our bandwidth by loading our images of Drew Barrymore directly without so much as a link recognizing where they came from.
Ordinarily I wouldn’t have a problem with someone straight up taking the picture. In fact, I would actually think it’s kind of cool to find it somewhere later on down the road. I’m not particularly attached to the photos that I took of the TV while I had it paused with TiVo. What annoys me even more than the bandwidth theft is that they didn’t even acknowledge us.
I realize that the page that the offending images are loading on isn’t linked up anymore, but I figure I’d send a few visitors over in that direction anyway. There’s just one problem: The images of Drew now show Brian Peppers for some reason.
Hmm, go figure. 106.9 The Fox doesn’t realize how close they were to loading a couple of pictures from a certain Web site that begins with goatse and ends in .cx.
Clogged in the Crap Filter
You just never know what’ll turn up in the ol’ Crapper these days.
For instance, this morning I found former Van Halen frontman and current radio/DJ personality David Lee Roth doing absolutely nothing bold, nothing innovative and nothing fearless in his debut as Howard Stern’s replacement on 92.3 Free FM. Apparently there’s very little rhyme or reason to the format and yesterday’s broadcast left virtually no impression. 
The liveliest section of Roth’s four meandering hours came when his uncle, Manny Roth, dropped by to talk about his World War II experiences and running the Cafe Wha? in the Village. The Cafe presented Bob Dylan, Richard Pryor, Jimi Hendrix and many other cultural icons. The elder Roth, 86, was prompted by his nephew for stories from the good old days, but didn’t remember much.
Call me crazy, but if that’s the best bit in four hours — your elderly uncle talking about the good ol’ days but not remembering any of them — then Roth’s venture into radio is more ill conceived than even I could have predicted.
Might as well jump (ship, Dave). Go ahead and jump.
Howard finally goes commercial
Catch him while you can, because after today, you’re going to have to pay $12.95 a month to catch Howard Stern every morning. Today is Stern’s last show until January 9, which is when he’ll appear on Sirius Satellite Radio.
I haven’t listened to Stern in about a year and a half. The station where I used to live was one of the Citadel stations that dropped him early on. It was hard to say if they actually felt threatened by him talking about satellite radio, or if it was just a convenient excuse to get him off the air in an extremely conservative part of the country. These days, I take mass transit to work, so I can’t catch him on the radio anyway.
I never really bought the whole excuse about his constant promotion of the Sirius. Most people aren’t going follow him to Sirius, although I think that New York might be an exception. Even if he never mentioned what he was doing when his radio show ended, did the affiliates honestly think that nobody would think twice about it when one day Howard Stern was gone and they were suddenly stuck listening to the morning Zoo Crew?
This experiment of Stern’s is going to make or break both his show and satellite radio as a viable medium. I just hope his seriously inflated ego hasn’t gotten in the way of his better judgment.
Good luck, Howard
Howard Stern, radio martyr
This is hardly any big scoop, but Forbes.com is running a story about how Howard Stern is being silenced for talking too much about his move to Sirius.
Howard was taken off of Citadel stations, including the new rock station here, last year. The main difference here is that Infinity, his own bosses, have taken him off this time.
The part about all of this that I find most ridiculous is not the fact that Howard Stern is convinced that he’s the greatest thing to happen to radio, but that Infinity seems so inclined to believe him. Howard’s got a fairly rabid fan base, but I really, really doubt that they’re going to follow him to Sirius in the numbers he’s expecting. You can’t write a story about Howard Stern without mentioning Sirius, and by shutting him down, even temporarily, they’re only providing more press for him and his move to satellite. The people who will buy a satellite system have either already bought it, or are at least sold on the idea.
I really wonder how many people would really invest $100 or so in the receiver and then pay the $13 a month for Sirius service, just to listen to Stern. I’m also willing to bet that most of his listeners catch less than an hour, and more like a half hour, of his four-hour program every morning. I realize that listeners will get a lot more than that, with all the other music and talk channels, but is a half hour of Stern worth the initial investment? I really doubt it.
A bit of an aside: If you’ve ever listened to Howard Stern, you know that the commercial breaks are probably run about eight to 10 minutes at times. What’s that mean? It means that people change the station. People will sit through a minute or two of commercials, but once you start stretching the breaks out much longer than that, they start switching. They might switch back, but then they’re still not hearing the ads, which is really what the radio business is all about.
I wish they all could be Diamond Dave
Everybody’s always out to get Howard Stern. It’s all good though because he’s moving to Sirius, so none of you haters can ever complain, since just about nobody actually has satellite radio.
Infinity Broadcasting announced his replacements today, and it doesn’t sound too bad. In fact, it’s sort of like they took Howard and chopped him up into little pieces.
Adam Carolla is getting his west coast stations, and if you’ve seen Too Late, it stands to reason that he can be entertaining when he’s not doing the latent homosexual gig with Jimmy Kimmel or giving questionable advice to herpes-infected teenagers on Loveline.
If you’re into strippers, you’re in luck because David Lee Roth is taking over on the east. Hey, you go with what you know. Kudos, Diamond Dave. You’re being passed one heck of a torch.
If you’re somewhere in the middle, it’s the luck of the draw. You’ll probably end up with Jack-FM, CNN or some lame talk show. Then again, if you’re somewhere in the middle of this country, you probably learned to keep low expectations years ago.
