this post was submitted on 17 Aug 2024
128 points (97.1% liked)

No Stupid Questions

35866 readers
2160 users here now

No such thing. Ask away!

!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.

The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:

Rules (interactive)


Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.

All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.



Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.

Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.



Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.

Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.



Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.

That's it.



Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.

Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.



Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.

Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.

On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.

If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.



Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.

If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.

Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.



Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.



Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.

Let everyone have their own content.



Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.



Credits

Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!

The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

Might be a local thing, but in the US I feel like all the similar radio stations go on commercial break all at the same time. Is this just an iheartradio monopoly thing or is it some odd coincidence due to standard ad deals?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] themeatbridge@lemmy.world 5 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

Probably a bit of both. Stations change personnel every few hours, typically on the hour. Depending on the programming, that may be more or less likely to be a commercial break.

Marketing research probably has strong indicators for when the most people get in their cars or turn on the radio at home. And they know that people tend to change the channel until they find music, and then are much less likely to change it during their commute. If your competition is on commercials, you can either also go to commercial, or you can try to steal those listeners with content.

I don't know how common it is now, but I know stations used to have syndicated programming as well, so they would have a local DJ or prerecorded local identifyer between songs or other content, and then the content would come from a regional or national feed. I know PBS works this way, because there are places where you can tune into different public stations and hear the same content. But to do that, you would want standardized, predictable commercial timeslots. Modern network communications and automation could probably eliminate that need, though.

And of course there's always coincidence. You remember the times when you happen to flip through stations and hear only commercials, but you quickly forget the times when you only have to change one station. You don't even know how often every station you're not listening to will go to commercials while you're listening to music. So there is a significant confirmation bias.