Link rot, RAJAR and the BBC's global numbers

For all the links and more, try https://james.crid.land/update/link-rot

Episode Transcript

(00:00):
Hello, I'm James Cridland, the radio futurologist, and every week or so I write a newsletter

(00:05):
all about the future of radio and radio's international trends, and this is the podcast
version for August the 6th, 2023. It's called Linkrot, Rayjar, and the BBC's global numbers.
Over time, links go bad, whether it's the result of a site redesign or a site just
simply falling off the internet. And some publishers, like BBC News or The Guardian,

(00:27):
do a really good job of retaining all of their archive online. But most of the links from
them just don't work anymore. They've succumbed to Linkrot.
Now looking back at the first edition of Pod News in May 2017, I realised that two of the
links there were broken as well, and I wondered how I could fix that without rewriting history.
And particularly, I wondered whether anyone was doing anything about this. And I went

(00:50):
searching the other week for Linkrot policies, because you'd assume that somebody like the
BBC, or indeed The Guardian, would have written a fair amount about this. But if they do exist,
I can't find any. But as you'll see, if you go back to have a look at the first ever
Pod News from May 2017, two of these original links are now marked as being broken, and

(01:12):
they link to the internet archive. And that's an automated process. The code that I've written
checks links, and it fetches any broken ones from the internet archive as close to the
original data as possible. And then it updates the article. Anyway, I've written a blog post
about all of the details of how I do that on my personal blog, James.Cridlin.net. And

(01:32):
I'd be really interested if your organisation is doing anything similar in terms of Linkrot.
It seems a pretty important thing to get right, I think.
Now this was an interesting development last week in podcasting, a music show where the
artists get paid.

(02:11):
Yes, it's the excited sounds of Adam Curry, the Podfather himself, and XMTV, VJ, of course.
If you use a compatible player, the music artists that you listen to in that podcast
get paid for every play, and it gets paid whatever you think that they're worth. You
can even send boosts directly to the artist without a middleman. It's quite a technically

(02:34):
impressive thing. I was curious to see how it worked, and curious to understand a little
bit more. And so of course I did what, of course I would do. I had a quick go to a music
show myself who find that linked. And in order to make me understand how it all worked, I
had to write the RSS feed in a text editor. I had to use calculators. It was a fairly

(03:01):
horrific thing. But yeah, it works really, really well. Now, of course, the music isn't
anything that you'll recognize, but one of the artists, Ainsley Costello, who's the fifth
song that I play, is already earning more from this than from any other platform that
she's on, including things like Spotify. So perhaps there is something in this, I think.

(03:24):
In the UK, the quarterly Raja results are out. An excellent analysis from Matt Deegan
and from Adam Bowie, as you would expect. Matt seems to have done up his website as
well. It looks very lalida. Now, something that I don't believe that either of those
people mentioned, the platform data, and there's a story, I think, going on there,
websites and apps have shrunk really quite considerably year on year. Smart speakers

(03:47):
now driving more hours and more share than websites and apps, which is quite a change
from a year ago. Now, DAB is still considerably bigger than online. But of course, DAB comes
with a lack of first party data, which is why commercial radio groups would rather that
you signed in to listen online in the BBC because it thinks it's a commercial radio

(04:08):
group these days, is copying the commercial broadcasters as well. But worthwhile, a peak,
I think, at the platform data. Now, last week, I mentioned that the BBC's overall global
reach has declined quite markedly. And I suggested that making BBC News, the BBC News channel,
available on YouTube for free, would really help that. And something, incidentally, you

(04:32):
can geo block country by country. So if they wanted to, they could start today by making
the BBC News channel only available in countries where they don't have carriage deals. Now,
I'm told that the main loss is from the significant cuts to the BBC World Service, however, not
least the closure of BBC Arabic radio. I'd also been unaware that the BBC Minute had

(04:53):
been closed as well. That was a one minute news bulletin aimed at younger audiences,
and it aired on many FM radio stations across the world. You can still listen to one of
those because its official RSS feed still contains the last news bulletin aired on December
the 23rd, eight months ago. It was a shining example of the BBC getting its content on

(05:14):
air everywhere, and it seems a bit of an own goal that it's all gone. Now, let's take a
listen to a little bit of commercial radio from Australia many, many years ago.
The makers of Priscilla welcome you to Australia's biggest and brightest quiz.
Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.
And to give the money away we give you Jack Davies.

(05:37):
Yes, yes, yes.
Hi Roe, everybody. Welcome to the Priscilla show. Give it a go.
Give it a go. We're Jack Davies who sounds very northern to me and most certainly not
very Australian. Anyway, commercial radio in Australia turns 100 years old this year.
2SB started on the 23rd of November, 1923. It's the oldest continually operating licensed

(06:00):
radio station in Australia. It did change its name though from 2SB which stood for Sydney
broadcasters over to 2BL, Broadcasters Limited, because its competitor appeared a couple of
weeks later and called itself 2FC and 2FC sounds a bit too close to 2SB.
Anyway, the radio station is now known as ABC Radio Sydney. Now, I tell you all of this

(06:22):
because firstly I find it a really interesting point of difference between Australia and
the UK. Legal commercial radio in the UK only came on air in 1973.
And also because today I was on Brisbane's 4BC, a station that actually launched in
1930. Talking about the future of radio, you'll find a link to that in the show notes and

(06:45):
my newsletter at james.cred.land and I was interviewed by Spencer House.
You might also want to read Michelle Rowland's speech. She is in charge of communications
and the media. I think that sort of thing. Anyway, she did a nice speech in Parliament
this week about 100 years of commercial radio in Australia which is worth a read.

(07:07):
Thank you to Broadcast Radio, to Clyde Broadcast, Richard Hilton and James Masterson, Brunn,
Audio Consulting, SOMA FM and Media Realms Radio websites for your kind support. If you
would like to support my work in any way, you can buy me a coffee. You can be a member.
So give regularly or just give a one-off coffee or five. You can do that at buymeacoffee.com

(07:29):
slash jamescred.land and you can follow me on Master Don as well. I'm James at bne.social
over there and way, way more active there than anywhere else. So yeah, do follow me
there if you can. My professional website has more detail about who I am, what I do and
whether I can help you further. You can hear this newsletter being read to you on a podcast

(07:54):
player near you. It says here. Yes, you already know about that, don't you? And where will
I be? In a couple of weeks, I will be in Denver in Colorado looking forward to that, hoping
to be in Munich. That'll be fun, wouldn't it? In October, in November, I will be in
Mexico City. Also, I'm going to be in London. It's a 23rd ish of September. Looking forward

(08:20):
to that. Radio Days Asia in Kuala Lumpur. Earlier than that, in early September. So all over
the place really. So if you're coming to any of those things, it would be fantastic to
see you. But until next week, keep listening.