When a station picks up Hanity or Limbaugh it pays nothing for the show. The satellite show gets half the commercial content in the show for national sales. Thus if there is 14 minutes commercial time in a show, the station keeps all the revenue from the 7 minutes it sells and the syndicated show can sell the rest nationally and keep the money.
Typically a local show like Medvid would cost 10 minutes of the time sold each hour. Thus a station had to sell on average 12 minutes an hour to make a buck.
With a syndicated show, which has no production and talent costs the first two minutes sold pay all the bills for that hour. If station sells 6 minutes an hour in Hannity it makes more money than if it salls 12 minutes in a locally produced Medvid. Hanity only has to do half as well as Medvid for the station to make a lot more money.
Hannity's show can't sell locally in the market. Buying a spot on the Hannity show from the Hannity producers means buying a spot on all stations that carry Hannity. It is not really possible for Hannity to sell a spot on his show to just run on KVI. To get a spot that just runs in the local market one has to go to KVI. To buy all 130 stations costs too much for locals and offers no benifet to local stores. So the money spent for the national spots on Hanity don't hurt KVI. The locals don't buy the national spots.
If Medvid were to originate in the market, and had the right to local sales, he could sell spots on all his stations or feed separate local spots to KVI for local rates.
KVI certainly does not want that.
It is all about money. I had lunch with one of the few remaining independent major market station owners last week. I complimented him on the quality of his staff. He said that with all the syndicated shows, there was a huge talent surplus. Each of the hundreds of stations that carry Limbaugh, used to have a local person in that slot. There are thousands of fewer jobs because of the success of syndication. That has resulted is a huge natioal talent pool of very good people at very reasonable pay.
In most markets there is one sales staff selling 5 stations where there used to be 5 sales staffs. There is one local news staff doing 5 stations where there used to be 5 staffs. In many markets only morning drive time is locally staffed.
There are far fewer jobs. Money is made by carrying "time share" programs that a computer puts on the air by tuning in a satellite dish.
It is just economics. The station can make more money with Hanity than it can with Medvid. He knows the reason. He is just not telling you how it is. Everyone knows the score .... even Medivd.
I seem to remember quite sometime ago, that Rush upped the charge to carry his show. We had to write letters to the local radio stations to urge them to keep the Limbaugh show. The news report said that the fee was in the $1000s/month for our local AM station to keep it. Are you sure that there is no charge for a station to carry Rush?...JFK