Applying Commercial Radio Digital Revenue Benchmarks to Public Media
RAB’s 13th annual digital revenue benchmarking report (prepared by Borrell and Associates), which surveys both radio ad buyers and radio managers, offers some helpful insights into commercial digital media advertising operations and trends that can help inform our own digital underwriting practices.
Highlights from the 2025 survey’s executive summary show that:
- At the local level, the radio industry now sells more video advertising than audio advertising – at least on the digital side of the business.
- Digital revenue is no longer a sideline business for commercial radio, as it now accounts for upwards of 25% of ad revenue.
- Stations are increasing their focus on selling digital products to existing customers as well as creating a base of digital-only customers that can be farmed for radio sales. This strategy has helped grow the percentage of radio industry ad revenue attributable to digital sales to over 26%, an all-time high.
How does public media compare with this? Well, we are going in the right direction but pacing behind:
- While many markets allow rich media ad units on their websites – which can include online video – most public radio stations are not necessarily seeing growth in direct online video underwriting sales, but are instead working to optimize their digital audio stream and more traditional digital inventory (display ads, mobile, e-news etc). That said, some AAA stations are selling online video sponsorship successfully in connection to the live stream of their station-hosted music events and several news stations have had success with online video embedded into e-mail/e-blasts sent to listeners and members in the sports and arts/entertainment business categories.
- While digital revenue continues to grow, for public media the percentage of revenue attributed to digital tends to hover around 10%-15%, vs. the 25% of total revenue reported as part of this survey.
- There is a growing list of successful examples of public media stations offering new digital products to existing listeners/members and using popular digital products as an incentive/introduction into the broadcast side of the business for their underwriters. Perhaps the most common examples of this to date are sponsored email blasts and email newsletters which include some sort of tangible ticket or other discounted offering from the underwriter to station members and are only made available to an underwriter if they also buy broadcast.
So how can we continue to improve? Let’s look more closely at what the RAB survey tells us about spending trends and practices in place at our commercial counterparts. We can then work to apply what makes sense to our own operations.
Digital spending for 2025
The RAB/Borrell survey found that 58% of radio ad buyers plan to increase spending on something this year, and the top six areas are:
- Social media
- Search engine marketing (SEM)
- Website ads
- Events/Sponsorship
- Streaming video
- Streaming audio
While the top two here can be challenging for public media to leverage – we are not search engines, and social media sponsorship can be especially difficult given our editorial firewall – we can and should be at the very least working to optimize the display ad and streaming opportunities we already offer to our underwriters.
Where to start? Website, rich media and streaming audio
- Ensure you are making the most of all that the Grove platform offers when it comes to digital sponsorship, including rich media.
- Work to include at least two pieces of digital inventory in every underwriting package that goes out the door.
- Leverage public media’s trust factor to make the case for radio vs. social media and the unique quality of our digital media environment when compared to commercial.
Where next? Event sponsorship
Event sponsorship revenue not only continues to grow both for public and commercial radio, but for public media it is a space particularly ripe for experimentation and creativity. We would do well to:
- Continue our focus on annualizing event sponsorship vs. selling events in a piecemeal fashion.
- Create mutually beneficial experiential connections between our underwriters and our audiences within our events, as well as part of any pre- and post-event digital marketing campaigns, including online video and social media.
Consider these tips and examples to maximize event sponsorship growth
And finally? Online video
Collaborate internally to see what you might be able to leverage the increased interest in online video. Talk with your editorial and marketing teams (and others) about ways you could at once further engage your audiences and offer value to your underwriters. For example:
- Do you film and post videos of your podcasts? Or your live events or concerts? How do you include sponsors?
- Are there some timely opportunities for sponsor-related videos to be used to engage audiences on your social media feeds in ways that don’t compromise your editorial integrity?
- Are there station-produced online video clips that could be offered to your sponsors to enrich their own social feeds?
- Can you post any “behind the scenes” footage of station personalities that could be sponsorable?
- What online video opportunities can you work into your live events?
Radio station manager insights for 2025
The RAB/Borrell survey also gleaned feedback from commercial radio station managers on the relative health and sophistication of their digital revenue strategies:
“While confidence among station managers seems strong, the survey found evidence that strategic plans may need revisiting, as for the first time since 2018, most managers believe their digital strategy to be no better than ‘fair.’ Coinciding with the strategy issue, most managers rated their sales department’s digital abilities to be no better than fair, which is an issue that has persisted since 2022.”
Perhaps not surprisingly then, the survey shows an uptick in digital sales training, with 40% of station managers pointing to regular digital sales training (the majority doing this weekly) as a key driver of digital sales. In addition to digital sales training, managers also point to the following as regular practices within their digital sales operations:
- Include digital in every pitch
- Still lead with radio in most cases
- Try to convert digital-only customers into radio buyers
- Adjust compensation plans as makes sense to incentivize digital sales
Much of the above resonates true for public media as well. All of us working in corporate support are continually striving to become more digitally savvy while embracing the unique strengths and value of radio, working to employ a multi-platform strategy to maximize and grow our underwriting revenue and motivate our reps accordingly.
Sources of digital revenue 2025
The RAB/Borrell survey also looked at the largest sources of digital revenue for participating radio stations in 2025. Here’s how that plays out for commercial, showing the growth in online video products previously mentioned:
By comparison, here’s how digital revenue by source looks for public radio (taken from a recent informal survey of high-performing public radio stations). For us, display, streaming audio, and e-news/email lead the pack, followed closely by podcasts.
Conclusions
The RAB/Borrell report concludes that the radio industry continues to register long-term gains on the digital front. It points to formal training, a stronger sales force, and the practice of stations routinely including digital products in sales pitches as reasons why. The report also highlights the growth in and market demand for online video advertising, even from radio-first stations. Notably, the survey also points to what it calls the radio superpower of “marketing panache,” with both advertisers and agencies perceiving radio sellers as possessing greater expertise than other local competitors.
And while public media is not generating as large a percentage of digital revenue as our commercial counterparts, we are clearly positioning ourselves for more digital growth with some of the best practices highlighted in this report long-touted by Greater Public and already in place at many stations.
Best of all? In addition to the “marketing panache” super power associated with radio reps that the report mentions, when it comes to public media digital underwriting reps, we can also count trust, no clutter/high recall, and brand safety among an arsenal of super powers that we can draw from to deliver real benefits to our sponsors – benefits they simply can’t get anywhere else online, least of all from commercial radio.
It’s a bird… it’s plane … it’s digital public radio!
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