Maximizing Digital Revenue in Public Media

Public media stations are facing a perfect storm of revenue challenges. Membership is declining, federal funding feels uncertain, and corporate underwriting is getting squeezed by the same forces hitting all broadcast advertising. Meanwhile, digital giants like Google and Spotify are vacuuming up ad dollars while platforms like TuneIn monetize your content without cutting you in.

But here’s what we’re seeing in our work with stations across the country: there are real opportunities hiding in plain sight. Tim LaBelle, our head of sales, recently walked through some of these ideas in a webinar, and the response has been encouraging. Stations are hungry for practical ways to boost digital revenue without compromising their mission.

Challenges

Let’s start with what everyone already knows. The challenges facing public media aren’t going away anytime soon. Declining membership and donor bases are probably the biggest concern we hear about, especially since core audiences tend to be older. Federal funding reductions add another layer of stress, especially for the rural stations. Additionally, corporate underwriting is feeling the pinch from a tough advertising market.

We’ve seen revenue charts that would make anyone nervous – some larger market stations have experienced significant drops. And then there are the digital platforms. Facebook, Google, YouTube, Spotify – they’re not just competing for listener attention, they’re absorbing massive amounts of advertising dollars while offering sophisticated targeting and measurement that traditional broadcasters struggle to match.

Maybe most frustrating is what happens when someone asks their smart speaker to play your station. They might hear two commercial radio ads before your content even starts, and you don’t see a penny from those ads. We experienced this recently when listening to a public radio station on Alexa. TuneIn served ads promoting their other stations, essentially trying to pull listeners away from public media content that you’re distributing for free.

Opportunity

Here’s the thing though – public media actually has some significant advantages in the digital space that many stations haven’t fully exploited yet.

Your audiences are loyal, and they’re valuable. More affluent, more educated, and they stick around longer than listeners on other platforms. That extended listening time is gold when you’re thinking about monetization opportunities. Plus, most public media stations are running very light digital ad loads compared to commercial competitors, which means there’s room to grow without overwhelming your audience.

The bigger issue is that most stations are barely scratching the surface of their digital revenue potential. Many smaller stations still don’t run dynamic pre-rolls. Mid-rolls? We can count on one hand the number of public media stations doing them well. That’s a lot of untapped inventory.

Five Ways to Move the Needle

We’ve been working with stations on a framework that breaks down into five main areas. None of this is rocket science, but it does require some strategic thinking.

Get listeners back to your platforms. This might be the most important one. When people listen to you through third-party platforms, you don’t own that relationship. They’re not seeing your membership appeals, they’re not getting your newsletter signups, and somebody else is making money off your content.

The solution isn’t necessarily to pull your streams from these platforms entirely – that might cost you audience you can’t afford to lose. But you can make your own platforms the clearly superior experience. Use dynamic ad-insertion to run heavier ad loads on third-party platforms while keeping your website and app cleaner. Include messaging that specifically directs people to your owned platforms for fewer interruptions.

Some stations are getting creative with this. They’re implementing features like rewindable live streaming exclusively on their own platforms. It’s another reason for listeners to come directly to you instead of going through third-parties.

Actually understanding your audience. Radio has always had an attribution problem – you run an underwriting message and hope it works, but do you ever really know? Streaming doesn’t have to work that way. There are new technologies that can track what happens when someone hears an underwriting message in your stream and then visits that underwriter’s website. Real attribution data changes conversations with sponsors.

Beyond that, use every touchpoint you have – membership lists, event attendees, newsletter subscribers – to build a complete picture of who your listeners are and why they’re valuable to underwriters. The more you can tell that story with data, the more you can charge.

Expand beyond audio-only underwriting. If you’re only selling broadcast radio spots or basic streaming pre-rolls, you’re leaving money on the table. Once listeners are on your website, you can offer display advertising, video pre-rolls, newsletter sponsorships. Each additional touchpoint increases what you can charge underwriters.

The advertising market has shifted significantly toward video and digital display. Audio is still important, but it’s a smaller slice of total advertising spend than it used to be. Smart broadcasters are figuring out how to tap into those other revenue streams.

Mid-rolls are where the digital revenue is. This is probably the biggest untapped opportunity in public media. Pre-roll ads – those spots that play when someone first starts listening – represent maybe 10-25% of your available digital inventory. Mid-rolls make up the other 75-90%.

Think about it: someone listens for 20 minutes, you get one pre-roll opportunity. Someone listens for eight hours at work, you still only get that one pre-roll, but you could have dozens of mid-roll opportunities.

Now, your sales team might not be able to fill all that inventory, and that’s fine. For out-of-market listeners especially, programmatic advertising can generate substantial revenue. We’re seeing this work well in podcasting – major NPR stations started embracing programmatic in 2024 and haven’t gotten listener complaints.

The FCC regulations that govern public media advertising only apply to over-the-air broadcasts anyway. Your digital streams have more flexibility, and listener expectations are evolving. People are used to hearing ads on YouTube, on podcasts, on streaming services. The key is not overdoing it.

Sell bigger campaigns without a bigger audience. Your audience size doesn’t have to be the ceiling on what you can sell. Even a medium-sized NPR member station with 500,000 monthly TLH might only represent 0.1% of national audio consumption. There’s a much bigger audio market out there, and a lot of that inventory is available for purchase.

Audience extension lets you sell campaigns that are partly on your platforms and partly on third-party inventory. It’s common in commercial radio, and there’s no reason public media can’t use the same approach for larger campaigns.

Execution

The technical stuff is mostly solved. Mid-roll insertion works best with metadata triggers from your automation system, but there are workarounds if you don’t have that set up. Geographic targeting is straightforward – you can run different campaigns for local versus out-of-market listeners. You can set up waterfalls so your direct sales always take priority and programmatic only fills unsold inventory.

The bigger questions are strategic ones. How much additional advertising can you run without alienating listeners? How do you maintain brand alignment when you’re using programmatic ads that you don’t directly control? What’s the right balance between revenue opportunity and mission protection?

Based on what we’ve seen with podcasting, the answers are more encouraging than you might expect. Quality content matters more than perfect ad-mission alignment. As long as you’re not overwhelming listeners or running genuinely objectionable ads, most people adapt pretty quickly.

Vision

You don’t have to implement all of this at once. Start with the easiest wins – maybe that’s driving more traffic to your own platforms, or implementing basic mid-rolls for out-of-market listeners. Add attribution tracking as you’re able. Experiment with display advertising or newsletter sponsorships when you have bandwidth.

The stations that are going to thrive in the next few years are the ones that figure out how to diversify their revenue streams without losing what makes them special. These digital opportunities aren’t going to solve every financial challenge facing public media, but they can make a real difference.

And honestly, they’re opportunities that won’t be available forever. Listener expectations are changing, the advertising market is evolving, and the platforms that are currently monetizing your content for free aren’t going to stay generous indefinitely. Better to get ahead of these trends than to react to them later.

Interested in exploring these opportunities for your station? Our team works with public media organizations on streaming technology, dynamic ad insertion, and revenue optimization. Reach out to discuss what might make sense for your specific situation.