Recently, I've been wondering: How are things going with Dave Schrader's version of MITD? Is he growing an audience of any significance? Is it enough to sustain any kind of business model? Is there any buzz beyond the usual pockets of interest (like this forum)? Although I do personally like Dave, I just don't have time to squeeze his show into my daily listening routine. My life is pretty much kids, work, etc., so I'm effectively cut off from gauging the temperature of the whole thing from a listener perspective.
There aren't really any publicly viewable metrics for determining how Dave Schrader's show is doing after all of these months (unless someone has ShoutCast/IceCast numbers), so I thought I'd look around and see if I can at least get a general picture based on data that
can be publicly evaluated. Let's look at some FB pages.
This looks to be Dave's official FB page:
https://www.facebook.com/DarknessDaveSchrader/?ref=br_rsThere is almost zero engagement. Scroll down and look at the numbers of reactions/shares/comments under each post. Even if you go back to posts that have stewed for weeks, it's unusual to see the reactions break twenty. Very rarely is there more than a comment or two, as most have zero. This is rather lackluster for a page that's been liked 8,400 times.
And here's the page for Dave's other show, Beyond The Darkness:
https://www.facebook.com/BeyondTheDarknessRadio/?ref=br_rsThis page has 6,500 likes. It might have slightly more engagement than the page above, but it's pretty much more of the same.
Here's what looks like the official Midnight In The Desert FB page:
https://www.facebook.com/MidnightInTheDesertCom/?ref=br_rsOnly 4,100 likes on this one, which is odd since I'd expect it to beat the other two pages in likes due to Art Bell's prior involvement. Engagement on this page is even worse than the other two.
I'm not posting this as a knock on Dave Schrader. I'm merely asking the question, "What in the hell is going on here?" This doesn't look like any sort of operation that's gaining traction or growing after all of these months. I haven't looked into it at all, but my gut is telling me Heather Wade probably inspired far more social media engagement as host of MITD (albeit often for the wrong reasons).
So is this thing failing? Or is social media a bad indicator of the show's success?
Has Midnight In The Desert moved beyond KNYE in the terrestrial affiliate department? And I don't even
count KNYE as a bragging point for MITD because I think Karen Jackson put Dave on her station purely to spite Heather in the best way she knew how.
This just doesn't smell like a robust, successful operation with lots of potential. If it hasn't yet started to break out and gain traction beyond the usual circles of humanity, will it ever?
