our local NPR station has a ton of ads. Not sure why they are still considered to be non commercial.
Nitpick: NPR is the radio service, PBS is the television service.
The short answer is because the audience is too old.
Advertisers in gneral want people in the broad 18-49 age group. Older people, while they may have money, tend to already have all the stuff they want to buy, which makes them an unattractive target.
On the surface, NPR doesn’t look so bad. A little better than half (52%) of its audience is under age 50. That puts it on a level with daytime talk radio in general. However, 63% of* New York Times* readers are under 50, and even they are having trouble getting advertisers.
NPR claims an audience of21 million. Of course, advertisers will discount 48% of that, leaving an advertiser-friendly audience of just under 11 million.
Still not a bad number, but advertisers tend to stay away from controversy. And even successful talk radio shows (Limbaugh, etc.) have trouble attracting high-quality, national sponsors. NPR stations, by contrast rely on direct listener donations for more than 1/3 of their income.
Do you think people here don’t know NPR is a radio network?
Ours mentions their supporters, which does amount to almost a advertisement.
my NPR station goes way beyond just mentioning supporters names.
They even admit they are basically running ads now. The FCC doesn’t care , all the old rules are basically gone now for the “non commercial” stations.
Radios don’t have dials anymore? 
Indeed. We still have two radios, and the dials change the stations. One has a sort of slide device for the volume, the other a knob. To change the station, you use the dial.
I too don’t see why someone can’t compete with NPR. Seems hard to believe they necessarily have a lock on all the good programming. Surely someone else could do the job too.
The tone of some posts in this thread reminds me of the alleged Pauline Kael quote about how she couldn’t believe Nixon had been elected President, since no one she knew had voted for him.
While it’s discouraging that inane “reality” shit has taken over TV, it’s not much worse than watching/listening to the over-educated discussing Great Ideas.
As noted, public TV and radio can barely support themselves with subsidies. Competitors would be competing for a very small audience, many of whom would turn up their noses at a “commercial” alternative.
I thought that conservatives had figured out that there were options already out there and years ago.
“I don’t understand why they call it public broadcasting. As far as I am concerned, there’s nothing public about it; it’s an elitist enterprise. Rush Limbaugh is public broadcasting.” - Newt Gingrich (1995)
Those 2 are largely incompatible. People like that don’t make good targets for the lies of advertising.
So does PBS (TV). Worse, is that they show the exact same “commercials” every half-our until I want to pull my hair out. I used to listen to PBS live, but now I record it so as to skip the XFINITY ads that are stupid, stupid, stupid.
Also, PBS is largely becoming like TLC, in that they increasing show, weekend after weekend, “Sounds of the 50s” or “Great moments in Big Band”, with pledge-breaks year 'round.
Sure, there’s lots of good stuff, but no better than HBO or Showtime. At least in the drama department.
Seconded. John Batchelor may be a neocon, but just as conservatives like to listen to intelligent liberal radio (which is pretty much just NPR), liberals should like to listen to intelligent conservative radio (Batchelor is the only known specimen in the wild, but they do exist)
P.J. O’Rourke- he even shows up on NPR.
memory check
My radio knob turned to the *left *to turn off.
Maybe he meant to change the channel? 
P.J. isn’t your John Bircher great-granddaddy’s conservative. He’s out of the running fro that crew by writing for Rolling Stone, including essays like “How to Drive Fast While on Drugs and Getting Your Wing-Wang Squeezed and Not Spill Your Drink”, and making fun of fundamentalist Christianity. The man has a sense of humor!