Public radio is mission-driven, seeking to inform the public about crucial issues, with the purpose to inspire, inform, entertain and educate public and all citizens of Republic of Croatia. The essential feature of commercial radio stations is that it is primarily motivated and driven by profit. It may have additional aims, but a commercial radio station has to follow the same basic principles as any other company. The media content of commercial radio is created in accordance with the public interest, but on the other side the media content should be in accordance with the interest of the public. As the public interest is more important then economic or any other interest it raises a question of whether the public interest and interest of the public are in collision with each other, and whether the economic interest is in fact interest of the public? The purpose of this paper is to explore and to identifiy program preferences of local radio listeners considering content that is in the public interest as well as content of interest of the public. As commercial radio is making its profits from advertising revenue the problem is that ads usually cohabit with real news, and the line between journalism and marketing is increasingly blurry. One of the aims of this paper is to explore do listeners see distinctions between news content and advertising. The result from this study indicate that commercial radio stations are creating program that is in agreement with the listeners preferences, also content of public interest is in the interest of the public as there are no discrepancies in the listening and interestingness of these content. Even though listeners prefer entertainment and music content, there are topics of public interest that listeners are interested in and are not represented in the radio program. Significant percentage of listeners does not recognize product placement as advertising, meaning they don't distinguish advertising from news.