Waves of listeners surfing WZON

The numbers are in, and the “hits” indicate that Bangor all-sports radio station WZON’s Internet broadcasts are a big hit.

WZON has been airing Internet game broadcasts, or streaming, since November, 2000. It began monitoring its Web site hits last September to determine the volume of people checking out the broadcasts which have been streamed on Zoneradio.com.

Since September, the number of unique listeners (total people tuning in at least once during a broadcast) has increased steadily each month. The December numbers (1,744 unique listeners for WZON’s radio Internet feed and 1,215 for WZON’s Internet-only feed) has more than quadrupled from September’s figures of 365 and 176, respectively – resulting in as much as a 265 percent increase.

“I think that’s the one thing that’s apparent here is it continues to grow,” said WZON program director Dale Duff. “As more and more households have computers, that is going to become your information source, your radio and your TV more and more.”

In the last four months, WZON’s Internet listeners have logged progressively more time on “The I,” WZON’s Internet service. Listeners logged on for a total of 95,995 minutes to listen to WZON’s radio and Internet-only September broadcasts. With a total of 541 unique listeners, the average time spent per hit or tune-in was 28.9 minutes.

In December, those numbers ballooned to 480,861 minutes and 2,959 unique listeners. Unique listeners mean people who log in. If someone logs onto the radio feed on the Internet site, that counts as one unique listener for WZON AM. If they then log off that and log onto the Internet-only feed, that counts as one unique listener for WZON-I. If they go back to WZON AM, that figure does not change, nor does it if they log off and log on again to WZON-I later during the broadcast.

“We don’t really care which one they click on because it’s all part of our service,” said Duff. “By having, in essence, two Internet streams, we can provide two feeds for the effort of one.”

As far as ratings go, WZON’s AM radio signal from games broadcast on 620 AM and streamed on the Internet has gone from 134 in September to 90 (October) to 80 (November) and 62 in December. The rankings are out of a total of 400 stations serviced and rated by WarpRadio, a Colorado Internet streaming company.

The Internet-only ratings have gone from 141 to 129 to 126 to 119.

“It’s bigger for us from the fall on through the spring,” Duff said. “Obviously UMaine sports broadcasts are the big draw, and we have significantly less hits in the summertime when schools are out.”

Duff said WZON Internet’s popularity was apparent last fall, when the service went down for a brief time during simultaneous streamings of the Maine-New Hampshire football game and the Bangor-Portland state final football game.

“I happened to be in the studio helping out and we had calls from all over the place, from Corpus Christi, Massachusetts, all kinds of places,” Duff said.

What’s my line?

Aroostook County radio stations WEGP (1390 AM) in Presque Isle and WREM (710 AM) in Monticello have debuted a new local sports show called County Sports Line.

The weekly, one-hour program hosted by longtime County resident and sports fan Dave Demerchant specializes in on local sports plus outdoor events and activities.

“It’s a very low-key show that goes in-depth on local sports, from college to high school to junior high,” said stations owner McDonnell “Mac” Smith. “We want to really focus on the local scene.”

The show, which first aired Jan. 13, is on each Sunday at 11 a.m. The format features a recap of recent results and scores as well as live guests. Listener call-ins are also being incorporated.

Mining for Olympic gold

New England Sports Network will premier an hour-long Front Row special titled Going for Gold – New England Olympians on Friday. The program, which starts at 10 p.m., features in-depth profiles of New England natives scheduled to appear and compete in Salt Lake City this February.

Athletes from New Hampshire, Vermont, and Massachusetts will be profiled and other athletes from Maine and Rhode Island competing in skiing, speed and figure skating, snowboarding, biathlon, or hockey are also expected to be mentioned in the special.

Andrew Neff’s On the Air column is published each Tuesday. He can be reached at 990-8205 or at aneff@bangordailynews.net.