Just have been reading about the downfall, or supposed downfall, of CSW. I was struck by the comments by Hernandez that they were absolutely turning a profit. I just ran some simple numbers and find that hard to believe.
Two weeks ago Ira Glass, of This American Life, one of the most popular podcasts on the internet, told listeners that it costs his station 100K a year just to have their podcast available on their site for download. Lets assume that it costs Pappy that much for his podcast also. This is probably more than fair seeing as This American Life has 52 hours of podcasting a year and CSW has 60 hours of podcasting a week.
As a crappy assumption say that each show costs 100K for talent, on air and producers included. That is another 400K for their 4 shows. This puts the venture at 500K. Now when you add in BeBe, Spaceball, Jessie Rodgers, Offman, Glanville, Buffone, OB, Kittle, etc, that has to be another 200K.
CSW is now at 700K in expenses. The advertising budget they had was pretty remarkable, and they had to incur some nice sized travel expenses to send their guys to the Hawks playoff games.
Finally, they had to have some basic overhead costs, studio space, production equipment, and other costs.
All told, it isn't hard to imagine that the costs for this venture were easily $1,000,000. I can't imagine in this environment that CSW was able to secure more than $1,000,000 in guarenteed advertising contracts. I'm not trying to assing blame to anyone for the financial problems at CSW in this post, but I would like to point out that this venture, like most start-up enterprises was probably hemmroging costs at the beginning of its existance and needed the combination of a good business plan/model and adequate capitalization to eventually be successful because it was probably losing tremendous ammounts of money from its inception and will be for the forseeable future.
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