Tim Montemayor loves radio. I mean he really loves radio. In fact, he recently said, “I am in love with radio today as much as I’ve ever been.”
However, you won’t find Tim Montemayor, who most know simply as ‘Monty’, anywhere on the radio dial. You’ll find him on YouTube. Each weekday he’s live from 3p-6p MT on a channel he and his son have built out. That channel now has over 130,000 subscribers.
Monty has been in talk radio for a long time. Way back in 2000 he was a producer at Fox Sports booking guests for the likes of Jim Rome. He did evenings in Sacramento at KHTK, spent time at KTRS in St. Louis, followed that with a stint at Sporting News Radio, then headed Cumulus San Francisco, followed by a move to Salt Lake City as PD and morning show host at KFAN. A land sale ended the run for that station after two years, leaving Montemayor to figure out what was next.
Fortunately, Monty was able to do some work on the national level again with ESPN, but also, he had his son Jake telling him YouTube was the place he needed to be at. So, while he did national work for ESPN Radio, he started diving into YouTube. The rest as they say is history.
“I just have a little bit of a different perspective from my experiences now,” Montemayor said. “Not working in radio and doing YouTube and podcasting, it’s given me a completely different perspective that I don’t know that I could have had when I was working inside of radio. It just makes me realize how much I love the game.”
“What happened with Cumulus in Salt Lake was a real eye-opener for me,” Monty explained. “That experience really changed me because I got to work for Bruce Gilbert, and my market manager was a guy named Terry Mathis. They were just really supportive, strong individual leaders. We had just had our first ever million-dollar year, and done some really great things. But the business was just upside down for Cumulus.”
He continued, “I got really lucky that we started doing YouTube and everything kind of snowballed from there. I’ve had opportunities frankly, but radio is not the same anymore. You can’t count on performing as a barrier to whether or not you keep your job or your contract gets renewed. You can be number one in your market, make the company money, and have ratings and revenue, but that doesn’t mean you’re going to keep your job. I’m fortunate that I have great listeners and supportive sponsors, and it’s really helped me make the transition to where we are now.”
Monty said when the money started to follow the amount and quality of the content they were putting out it was a momentous occasion for him and his family.
“We started to understand that we were in control of our own destiny. Now we didn’t have to worry about our program director getting fired or our sales guy having a bad month.”
Montemayor says he and his son learned everything the way most people do, by trying. You succeed at some things, and fail at others. But as long as you learn from failures, everything should be ok. Figuring out why some posts hit and why others didn’t was one of those learning curves.
“I dove all in on YouTube SEO and never until that moment, I had no idea how important your title and tag was and had no idea that YouTube transcribes your show. Until I dove headfirst into it, and got into the SEO part of it and started doing custom thumbnails every day, titles, tags. Understanding that SEO is not just tags that it’s the words you’re actually saying that’s really where we kind of turned the corner and started seeing our YouTube recommendations go way up.”
Montemayor and his son have formed a great partnership. Monty handles everything on the business end and the SEO while Jake does all of the video production.
“I’m making sure that I keep up with trends and shorts and it is challenging,” Monty said. “I’m fortunate that I’m also in the YouTube research pipeline. We do research and surveys with them pretty much every month. Once you get into their community and you get into their pipeline it really can help.”
Montemayor has helped other hosts who want to go out on their own, but mostly he will talk to anyone that wants to know more, and potentially control their own destiny. Monty says getting started is simple. “Pull out your iPhone and start recording yourself,” he said. “A lot of people are not comfortable with it – it doesn’t matter, you have to do video.”
The other thing Montemayor discusses with hosts who express interest in going the digital route, is whether or not they realize the time commitment to doing it right. He says some come in with all of the right intentions, but don’t want to put in the time and the effort or aren’t willing to stay on top of the latest technology has to offer when it comes to distribution.
“You’ve got to treat it like a gig,” Monty said. “You have to get up every day, get dressed, and go to the office no matter where that is. One of the first lessons you learn is this is a job, and it is not easy.”
Seeing many people in the radio business getting laid off recently, Montemayor posted on his LinkedIn that he was willing to offer his services, free of charge, to anyone who had been affected and wanted advice on how to start up on their own.
“I get so much more out of helping people and giving back,” he said. “I spent so much of my radio career not understanding the value of relationships.”
Monty said he expected maybe a couple of people would reach out in reply to his LinkedIn post, however, he was surprised when it was many more than that. “I probably talked to 25 people, I was really surprised how many people reached out.”
He said he told them all something that is very important and key to their success in digital: Do not care what other people think.
“It’s the number one mistake that people make,” he said. “You’ve got to do it for you. That’s where your passion and enjoyment are going to come out.” He said people in our industry have a tendency to worry about what others may say, and his point is, you are the one doing it, so continue to do it how you want to because you only have to answer to yourself.
As far as who he sees out there that he thinks is doing a great job with digital media, he first points to an old boss – Jim Rome. “Jim Rome is crushing it,” Monty added. “That’s my dude. Jim used to have an open door, and he would allow me to come sit in his office and just talk to him about the business. If I could go back in time, the resource that that man was for me and to see him evolve and to see him doing FAST channels is amazing.”
Monty would later mention 670 The Score in Chicago, 95.7 The Game in San Francisco Brand Manager Matt Nahigian and John Kurtz, who does college football coverage out of Kansas City, as a few he sees thriving with digital content.
“There’s so many people in sports and news/talk today who should be doing it, and they’re not. There’s not a lot out there that is great in my opinion.”
As for what’s next for ‘The Monty’ show and his digital empire, he said 2025 is all about expanding their reach. “We just got back from CES and had some great meetings there with a lot of important people. We’re certainly working on better distribution. You have to find people where they live. We have a lot of people who watch our show on a TV already, more than half of our viewership is on a television and the other part obviously is on a telephone or smartphone, so our goal in 2025 is to grow that distribution.”
As much as ‘Monty’ loves radio, he is also a realist. Being out in front of the content revolution happening on YouTube has paid off more than he ever could have imagined.
Barrett Media produces daily content on the music, news, and sports media industries. To stay updated, sign up for our newsletters and get the latest information delivered straight to your inbox.
Dave Greene is the Chief Media Officer for Barrett Media. His background includes over 25 years in media and content creation. A former sports talk host and play-by-play broadcaster, Dave transitioned to station and sales management, co-founded and created a monthly sports publication and led an ownership group as the operating partner. He has managed stations and sales teams for Townsquare Media, Cumulus Media and Audacy. Upon leaving broadcast media he co-founded Podcast Heat, a sports and entertainment podcasting network specializing in pro wrestling nostalgia. To interact, find him on Twitter @mr_podcasting. You can also reach him by email at Dave@BarrettMedia.com.
