Blog

The Radioplayer search engine has sparked a lot of interest across the radio industry. We’re working with one of the biggest search firms in the business, Autonomy, to develop a search experience that’s right for radio.

It takes into account not only the ‘editorial relevance’ of the search term that’s entered, but also a sense of ‘now-ness’ (happening right now, about to happen, or just happened), and location (based on a place name or postcode in the search query). These factors are important to the medium of radio.

It’s a work in progress, and we’ll be refining it over coming weeks in response to user feedback, and the actual terms people are searching for. We’re still developing the means to analyse the huge volume of searches taking place across the Radioplayer network, so it’ll be a while before we can share detailed search stats.

But in the meantime, here’s an impressionistic snapshot of the most commonly-searched individual words and numbers across a few days. The relative sizes of the terms  are broadly indicative of the number of times they were entered (but only very broadly). It’s in the form of a ‘Wordle’.

Some more media and blog coverage of Radioplayer’s first 2 weeks. This time, some perspectives from outside the radio industry… 

The Economist on ‘an old medium getting its digital act together’…

On the Gadget Helpline blog, they like the easy search feature…

Music Week covered the launch from the perspective of the music industry…

The Radio and Marketing blog reviewed our launch marketing campaign…

 And there was a comprehensive analysis of the brand and business implications from Maisie McCabe at Brand Republic

We haven’t yet had time to analyse the stats from the first week of Radioplayer, but here are some quick notes based on anecdotal feedback, and the top-level numbers we’re seeing.

Most importantly, all the groups I’ve talked to have seen an uplift in their own streaming stats.  This is great – but it got me thinking about the factors that will dictate success in Radioplayer.

There’s no doubt we’re in a long game here.  The numbers won’t double overnight – and arguably we’re not looking for that kind of seismic shift. We want people to grow their listening organically – not because we’ve forced them to change their behaviour, but because they now find online listening easy and attractive, due to the subtle changes we’ve made.

The Radioplayer search engine has attracted a lot of interest from within the radio industry – but my gut instinct is that users will take a while to discover it. Searching will probably remain a ‘minority sport’ for a while, with less than 10% of people using the search box.

So what is helping listening increase? What should stations be concentrating on, to boost their Radioplayer popularity? The slightly dull answer to this is – get the basics right.

:: Talk about your Radioplayer on air. Embrace it, explain it to your listeners
:: Stress how simple it is. Don’t underestimate this – people are nervous online
:: Make it easy for them to find it on your site, with big obvious ‘Listen’ links
:: Make your Radioplayer console simple, attractive, and useful
:: Encourage listeners to click ‘My Stations’, and add you as a preset

This last point is crucial – if they’ve saved your station, they can hover over your logo any time, to check what’s on. Then you’re always one click away from a returning listener.

That’s what will build listening hours and user satisfaction over coming months – the ‘stickiness’ of the Radioplayer network as a whole. This will increase gradually, as people store the favourite stations, get used to Radioplayer’s simplicity, and hear you embracing it on-air and on your sites.

A quick summary of where we are, one week after launch.  I’ll answer a few of the most commonly-asked questions, reflecting some of the feedback we’re getting.

Having gone live with around 150 stations last week, we put our new ‘on-boarding’ process to the test on Tuesday and added about 50 more.  We welcomed all the stations run by UTV (including talkSPORT), many Bauer stations (including The Hits, Kerrang, and Heat), Fun Kids, Planet Rock, Manx Radio, and Traffic Radio.

Further waves will join next week, hopefully including Bauer stations Kiss and Magic.  There’ll be a short gap over Easter, then the snowball will continue to grow throughout May. Judging from the feedback, there’s a real desire from both users and radio stations to see Radioplayer grow quickly. That’s our top priority.

Why couldn’t you launch with all UK stations live immediately?

Radioplayer isn’t just a ‘listings’ site – stations have to prepare their own version of the Radioplayer console (which they host themselves), and send their programme information to the search engine. This requires time and organisation, both at the station and at the centre.

With the resources available, it’s just not technically possible to add all stations at once. We have a very small central team, in order to keep costs low for the industry. We’re aiming to get the 300+ stations which have pre-registered, into Radioplayer by the end of May.

How are you deciding which stations go live when?

We’re using a fair ‘first come first served’ principle. Stations are going live in groups, based on when they first contacted Radioplayer to express an interest in joining.

Will there be any community or student stations on Radioplayer?

Yes – any Ofcom-licensed station can join, and we’ve had pre-registrations from more than a hundred small commercial, community, and student stations. There’ll shortly be a simple, free ‘player-making’ tool,  so community and student stations can create their own Radioplayer consoles.

Why does the search engine sometimes give unexpected results?

No-one’s ever tried to create a radio search engine of this type and scale before –  and as with any search engine, it’s impossible to get it completely right on day one.  We’ll ‘tune’ it over coming weeks, based on user feedback. We’re also advising stations on how to refine the information they send us – so you should notice significant improvements in the accuracy and usefulness of results.

There’s been a fair amount of press and blogger interest in Radioplayer, since we launched with our initial stations last week.  Here’s a quick selection from the 100+ articles written about the project so far.

Nik Goodman has written one of the most thorough reviews, taking both a user and an industry perspective.

Quick review from the people at Wired, with fair criticism of the search engine (which we’re improving all the time).

Emma Barnett writes about Radioplayer in The Telegraph.

Nice, short Radioplayer write-up from gadget and technology site Pocket-lint.

The BBC News Online Technology section covers the story.

Very perceptive piece in The Register, particularly around the political aspects of the project.

Radio Futurologist James Cridland gives his view.

Matt Deegan assembled a lovely timeline of tweets and comments on launch day.

And Miranda Sawyer threatened to tootle her trumpet in the Observer at the weekend.