Airchexx November Update – Founder’s Notes and a Poll (at the bottom)

I haven’t done one of these in a long time! Hey everyone. I’m the founder of Airchexx Classic Radio, Steve West.

I founded Airchexx.com at a time when there really were, just two large aircheck sites on the “World Wide Web”. In 2002, there was just Dale Patterson’s “Rock Radio Scrapbook” and Uncle Ricky’s “Reel Radio Repository“.  “Scrapbook” just celebrated 25 years online.  “ReelRadio” is largely unavailable these days in the wake of Richard Irwin’s passing over 2 years ago.  It’s interesting that the internet has grown to be such a large part of everyday life that not only do they not call it the WWW much anymore, static websites such as Airchexx.com really don’t get much traffic anymore, either. It seems that standalone websites have largely been replaced by content creators and providers with their own apps. What matters to us, are apps that stream audio. Specifically, music apps such as Spotify, “Podcast” outlets such as Apple and so on, and places such as SoundCloud and YouTube, where people who used to be giant contributors to Rock Radio Scrapbook, ReelRadio and us here at Airchexx Classic Radio are posting their own digitized aircheck tapes to their own accounts. That’s one big reason why I decided about a year ago to build our YouTube Channel.

Traffic has been slowly falling for several years now. What that means to you is, fewer and fewer of you are coming here to sample audio and instead are going elsewhere, much of it on YouTube. One of our contributors has even ammassed a giant collection of airchecks on archive.org! I could certainly do that, If I wanted to simply make all of our archives available to the world to do with as they please… but that would eliminate any value this web museum has at all.

Here’s the deal. It costs several hundred dollars a month to provide the archives to you. Donations have dropped essentially to nothing, so I’m paying it out of my family budget. Being an old guy on a fixed income, that’s not working out very well. I’m not going to beg anyone for donations. If you feel like it, there’s a link on this site. I’ll put another one at the bottom of this page. But I WILL say what’s been on my mind for the past couple of weeks. I am seriously thinking of converting every aircheck we have online into a basic video format and posting it on our YouTube Channel. I am THINKING about closing airchecks as a website to eliminate the server drag on my family’s finances. If donations or even the annoying ads you see on this website would pay even a fraction of the bill, I wouldn’t even think about closing, but… literally, we receive just $3 in donations each month, from one person. Period. The ads take 3 to 4 months to pay out $100. That’s it. I’ve done two fundraisers this year which did net a couple of hundred $, but those are not well received, either. One of several things have happened: Either the interest in classic radio station airchecks has dropped over the years, as younger people didn’t grow up with radio as I did, The audience has moved on to app-based and video services, or something in my social media posts have turned people away. I think it’s #2 based upon the numbers and what I see on our YouTube Channel. The videos are starting to get more visitor engagement than here on the website. And I haven’t even made it to 200 videos, yet there are nearly 2300 airchecks on this website! See the problem?

We have been on the web for a long time.  It’ll be 20 years for Airchexx.com on May 2, 2022.  I’m making this post to ask for your suggestions and get your opinion. What would you like to see on Airchexx.com that would prompt you to keep returning, and help pass the word about this great repository of old radio station airchecks? Would you be willing to pay a small subscription to defray our operating costs? Are you interested in the new Social Discussion boards that you can access from our menu, and do they work (load properly) for you?

Please answer those questions for me, along with any suggestions, no matter how harsh. I’m willing to take a beating if I’ve done something here to turn you away. So, please. Add your reply below and lets come up with some answers. The LAST thing I want to do is close this website museum. 20 years of work I’ve put into this. But if visitors keep dropping and there’s no funding, well… I quit. It’s no longer financially feasible to continue.

Suggestions please. And before the ‘comment’ section, here’s the paypal link if you want to make a donation to help me out here. CLICK OUR NEW LOGO BELOW TO DONATE.  IT’S A LINK.