Last week, I wrote about how to add a YES banner to your site so that visitors could see what song is currently playing on-air without having to build an interface with your music scheduling software or your audio system. If you are unfamiliar with the YES banner, I suggest you read last week's column first to get up to speed, and then check back here.

This week, The Net Untangled will look at some of the more advanced features YES brings to the table at no cost to radio stations. Things like music videos, links to purchase music and listener chat.

Smarter Than Your Average Bear

The main advantage behind YES is that it offers a lot of features that stations would like to implement on their sites, but haven't done so due to cost concerns. Sure, stations could create their own MySpace clone, like Clear Channel did, but that takes time and money that many stations and ownership groups are simply unwilling to spend at this time (another discussion for another day). If your station doesn't have access to web programmers (the code writing kind, not the station-running kind), then you are left to make do with what you have.

For instance, if you were able to build a way for your site to display the last 10 songs you played on air and have it updated live - that's a tough job and you should be congratulated. However, if you wanted to add links to buy those songs on iTunes or Amazon, the job gets a little tougher. And automatically displaying associated videos from YouTube makes that job far too complicated for the scale of most station websites. (As I said before, this could be tackled at a company-wide level if the company is big enough, but the majority of people reading this column don't have the power to make that happen.)

So, you turn to YES, which does those things for you at no cost. Well, no financial cost. There is the cost of pulling your visitors away from your site to use these more advanced features. By moving these features off your site, you won't get the full amount of page views you would if you did it yourself on your site. That being said, you'll still generate more page views with these features, even off-site, than if you simply didn't offer them at all.

To combat that, at least one station is offer the YES page for their station inside their streaming audio player, allowing users to see what song is currently playing on the station, listen to it, play videos of it and chat about it, while still leaving their site open in the browser. WZZN, 94.7 - Chicago's True Oldies Channel offers their stream online. If you open up the Windows Media Player stream in Windows Media Player, you should soon see a message that asks if you want to play enhanced web content. Click "Yes", and then you will get both the WZZN stream and the WZZN page on YES.com in the same window. This "smart" stream is much more valuable to listeners than the standard pseudo-psychedelic visualization that Windows Media player provides. Of course, you could also build a pop-up window that shows both the YES screen in a frame and the embedded stream to handle users who do not have Windows Media Player.