This Czech radio is building a database of loyal listeners, sending newsletters, registering users, and offering subscriptions.
Digital audio has been on the rise in recent years, and it is not only because of podcasts that have already overtaken listening time in the USA. Streaming radio has never been more popular; in fact, listeners spend hours each day tuning in to their favorite stations.
At the same time, the overall radio market is in many ways very traditional, still relying mainly on ad revenue. But some broadcasters are finding out there is another way and are laying the groundwork for subscriptions or launching them straight away.
Across Europe, audio accounts for roughly a fifth of total media consumption but attracts only around a 5% share of ad investment, according to recent reports.
Demand and attention are there. The money has not fully followed. For radio brands, that gap means opportunities.
The brands that move first are the ones turning passive listeners into known, logged-in, directly addressable audiences, and then giving those audiences something worth paying for.
No need to look at it as rocket science; it’s pure logic, and radio broadcasters like the Czech-based Active Radio and its stations Evropa 2 or Frekvence 1 are leading the charge.
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Going premium requires first laying the groundwork
When Evropa 2 first came to FatChilli, the task was simple: they needed a new web player for their digital streams.
The station just released its redesigned app with new features that laid out the groundwork for direct audience revenue. The online player on the website needed the same treatment.
Evropa 2 was the first commercial radio station in the Czech Republic and has held an innovator’s reputation for more than three decades. It invests in music testing, new formats, social and live events, and it has some of the most loyal listeners on the market.
FatChilli rebuilt the web player from scratch as a modern React application. That single core will power four of the group’s web players.
“What we built is small, clean, and fast, and more importantly, it was built so that everything they want to do next, ads or no ads, subscriptions, can sit on top of it,” explained Daniel, head of front-end engineering at FatChilli.
Skipping a song, jumping ahead in a podcast, and gating either one behind a login or a paywall became seamless possibilities via the web player, not just in the mobile app. Evropa 2 can monetize these features today because the underlying player was rebuilt to support them.
When publishers launch subscriptions, they are looking to have as many known users as possible. Having someone’s email is usually, and most often, the first step in converting them into paying subscribers.
The most recent Radioprojekt national listening survey put Evropa 2 in second place in average daily reach with almost 700-thousand listeners, behind only the public broadcaster Czech Radio’s flagship station Radiožurnál. For a commercial music station, that is a strong base of habitual, returning attention.
Evropa 2 laid the foundation by creating registration hooks. The stream is free to listen to even for anonymous users, but if you want to skip a song or jump ahead to the next podcast episode, you are prompted to register or sign in.
Of course, with the registration active, you need to keep users engaged and in the loop. For that reason, Evropa 2 also launched a weekly newsletter.
“Specifically for Evropa 2, we built this super easy newsletter builder within REMP that allowed them to create a newsletter in seconds that is ready to be sent,” recalled Matej Borko, co-founder at FatChilli responsible for product strategy & media partnerships.
The best part of all of this is that the web player analytics, email sending, and registration were all built on REMP – the Readers’ Engagement and Monetization Platform. Therefore, all data and entry points flow into a centralized CRM, enabling audience segmentation and personalized offers.
With REMP, it is that simple because everything a publisher or broadcaster needs lives under one roof and one shared platform.
We started building a direct relationship with our listeners in the app. What FatChilli helped us do was bring that same thinking to the web, so signing in and being a known listener is now part of the experience there too.
Lubor Zoufal, Chief Digital Officer, Czech News Center / Active Radio
The first Czech radio with a subscription, ad-free listening, and premium features
On that foundation, Evropa 2 launched Premium, a paid, ad-free version of the station inside a completely new mobile app.
By charging a 79 Czech koruna per month subscription (around € 3,20), Evropa 2 became the first Czech radio station in the country to offer a paid, ad-free tier, and arguably one of the few that could pull it off.
“It is a natural step that matches what today’s listeners expect: freedom of choice and maximum comfort,” said Martina Říhová, CEO of Active Radio a.s., on the Premium launch.
This was possible only by relying on the strength of its community and the fact that its app is the most downloaded among Czech commercial radio stations.
The subscription runs so far only in the mobile app, but the website, which is visited monthly by more than 300-thousand unique visitors, is, thanks to REMP, fully prepared to adopt the subscription as well.
Speaking of laying the groundwork, Evropa 2 is part of the Active Radio group with several stations that can utilize everything that was deployed on one station to the rest of them.
Endless possibilities
The whole stack for Evropa 2 was also built to give the broadcaster maximum monetization options for both present and future.
One of the built-in features ready to go is also an option to monetize the non-paying audience intelligently.
FatChilli designed rewarded ads for the web logic into the player: when a listener arrives, the system can determine in real time whether a high-value rewarded ad is available for that user, and if it is not, fall back to the station’s existing preroll inventory.
The point of the design is that the listener always sees a commercial outcome, the most valuable one available at that moment, without leaving gaps in revenue.
This is the same logic FatChilli has proven on subscription news sites: a small slice of opt-in, high-completion rewarded inventory can carry revenue weight far beyond its share of impressions, and it monetizes exactly the audience that will never subscribe without touching the experience of the audience that might (see case studies from The Shift News in Malta or Denník N in Slovakia).
What radio operators can learn from this
1) The audience-revenue toolkit built for subscription news publishers maps cleanly onto radio.
REMP began life inside a news publisher, Denník N, and was open-sourced from there. The same building blocks – identity and login, registration-gated value, lifecycle email, audience segmentation, and opt-in monetization – are exactly what a radio brand with loyal fans needs to grow a direct audience relationship.
2) Owning the stack is a strategic choice, not just a technical one.
The owned-stack route that Evropa 2 took keeps the listener relationship, the first-party data, and the pace of innovation inside the station, on open-source foundations.
3) The audience is ready before the industry is.
Listeners registered with no promotion. Premium launched into a market where no competitor had done so. The macro data says the same thing at scale: audio consumption is high and rising while audio’s share of ad monetization lags. The brands that build the infrastructure to capture the value represented in that gap are the ones that will survive.
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