John Lilly is CEO of Mozilla, which oversees the Firefox browser (which I’m typing in right now), and the Thunderbird mail software (which is hateful).

Mozilla’s valued, according to Wall Street analyst Henry Blodgett, between £750 million - £2 billion. In this month’s Wired magazine (which plopped through my letterbox this morning), John Lilly agrees - but says that Mozilla is staying private:

“As long as we can pay the bills, we can take a long view of the world that we couldn’t if we had shareholders and quarterly reporting”.

This one simple sentence really resonated with me: enough to write a Mark Ramsey-style bold hectoring sentence:

Isn’t the inability to take ‘a long view’ the thing that’s killing commercial radio?

Chasing the monthly target invariably means cramming radio full of too many crappy ads, and not telling advertisers to remove that crappy ad that people have heard 40 times and is demonstrably hurting your audience. Chasing the monthly target means a ‘winning weekend’ on a sexy local brand run by the British Plastics Association (no, I once really did an execution of this in the last 1990s), rather than something that fits and resonates with your audience. Chasing the monthly bottom line means paring programme costs down to the minimum - removing presenters not because of ability, but because of their effect on the short-term profit; removing local programming because it costs too much. Chasing the instant return means not experimenting with new platforms, or stifling them with so much advertising that they’re an unpleasant experience (try a local GCap station website and watch your machine crawl with the amount of Flash advertising they cram on each page).

Shareholders don’t care about the long-term health of commercial radio; instead, they care about short-term profit growth and fast returns. So, if commercial radio wasn’t owned by shareholders, wouldn’t that make for better commercial radio?

Perhaps we’re just about to find out. With Bauer Radio Ltd now owning the radio assets of Emap plc, and Global Radio UK Ltd looking set to take over GCap Media plc (Monday looks set to be an interesting day), the future for commercial radio could be rosier than we thought.

Photo: Stephen Mackenzie; used under licence