Gaydio eyes London move

MANCHESTER radio station Gaydio is contemplating opening a London office six months after picking up digital licences for the capital and Brighton.

The station’s managers are keen to capitalise on its larger audience but say they have no plans to abandon its roots as a community station.

The deal in January to take on Gaydar licences from QSoft Consulting gave the FM station, which attracts around 100,000 listeners, an extra 750,000 on DAB licences across the South East. This has made it the largest gay radio station in the world.

The new digital licences share most of Gaydio’s programming, but some separate specialist music and magazine programmes are broadcast in Manchester only, to comply with the station’s community remit.

Station director Toby Whitehouse told TheBusinesDesk: “It’s still fairly early days, but having a physical presence in London would be beneficial.

“A big significant opportunity is online. With increased audience advertisers are seeing significant return on investment. The Shard has just taken a campaign with us for its viewing area and within two days they asked how they could extend it because they had really good results. We are a radio station but we’re starting to realise there needs to more of a focus on the online world.”

Despite its commercial outlook the station is a long way off breaching the limit of 50% commercial revenue for community stations and is still dependent on grants, in return for outreach work and other projects.

“I’d love to be in a position where this was a problem, but we’re still heavily reliant on grant funding,” said Mr Whitehouse, who set up the station in 2010 with Ian Wallace.

He added: “We’ll never be a commercial station. The business is a social enterprise regardless of what licence we have.”

Gaydio broadcasts from Manchester One, formerly Portland Tower, on Portland Street. It has five staff and 75 volunteers.