Radio’s Digital Revenue Halftime Report

June 30, 2025/Fred Jacobs

Welcome to the second half…of 2025, that is. Hard as it may be to believe, the year is now halfway in the books. And while anything can happen in these last six months of 2025, chances are we have a pretty solid look at the lay of the land—more than enough to plan, predict, and actually DO.

Paul and I have each worked in radio for a half century now, and while he’s traditionally been on the sales/revenue side and I’ve repped programming and content, we work in tandem on just about every project Jacobs Media takes on. And over the decades, we’ve witnessed a disheartening and troubling pattern. Sales almost always lags programming, often making it challenging for companies to progress and grow. Today, many are fighting for their survival.

While slow sales don’t always explain broadcast radio’s travails, more often than not, the quality, training, and mindset of the sales department plays a big role in the end result. To that end, Paul has grabbed the keyboard from me to get this holiday week off to a provocative start. His guest post today sets the table for the rest of the year, and for many companies, perhaps the foreseeable future.

How does this post sit with you? Please use the “comment” section below to speak your mind. – FJ

Radio’s Digital Revenue Halftime Report

By Paul Jacobs

Late in 2023 , Fred and I made a big decision for our company. While we have long talked a big digital game, it came time to walk the walk. And we decided to go all-in on digital revenue consulting. Why? Frankly, the evidence was overwhelming that we were in the middle of a significant shift in the ways and where advertisers were spending their budgets. And unfortunately, they weren’t shifting dollars to radio (or any linear media). Instead, most were accelerating moving money into digital advertising—everything from OTT, SEO and display, to audio/video pre-rolls and more.

Gordon Borrell captured this movement in 2025 in his company’s Annual Benchmarking Local Digital Media Report and the results are stark and conclusive—you don’t need to be Wayne Gretzky to see where the puck is going.

When we look back at the swirl radio’s been in this past quarter century, the industry’s fate has been inextricably tied to world and national events that go well beyond radio broadcasting’s boundaries. In fact, these “economic triggers”—as Borrell calls them—are the macro moments that have altered the media business, and with them, radio’s fate. And don’t they seem like they’re coming with more frequency and ferocity in recent years?

As we wrote blog posts about these landscape shifts and spoke with clients and other broadcasters about what they’re feeling, what was startling to us was the number of broadcasters who hadn’t even gotten to the starting line with a digital revenue strategy. Yes, they might be selling banner ads on their websites, but way too many stations are “still trying to figure it out” or have been having trouble convincing their sales teams it’s time to get serious about selling and marketing digital solutions.

Now, we’ve all heard the jokes about radio being an industry of “C” students, but c’mon salespeople, I thought you were “results-oriented.” (OK, greedy.) How could so many be reluctant to go where the money is, and what their advertisers really want?

Honest admission: while I’m a veteran media salesperson, I’ve never sold a banner ad in my life. I’m like so many of you, and I felt in order to continue to provide value to our clients, I needed to go to school on digital revenue.

At that time, we had recently brought Chris Brunt on our team. He had deep experience as a digital content creator and sales manager in a major market, so he knew the landscape…and the mine fields. And Chris also started his career as a radio station P.D., so he understood the business from many different aspects. Our thinking was that he could provide stations with what they need most to get a digital revenue program off the ground or build on to of what they were already doing.

So we took the plunge, launched “Jacobs DR,” and today, we are working with a rapidly growing number of commercial, public, and Christian stations in big and small markets, collaborating and developing a digital revenue strategy that is effective, adaptable, and sustainable.

We’ve experienced a lot, so at this halfway point of the year, I want to share some of the key lessons that have emerged to help you and your efforts:

Leadership is everything. If top management isn’t 100% behind a digital initiative, it will likely fail. Or, if the GM is supportive but the DOS isn’t, you’ll have the same lackluster result. To be successful, everyone needs to buy in. Everyone. That includes programming, production, and even the accounting department.

Yes, change can be difficult and even at times, painful. But take another look at the Borrell chart. A fourth grader will tell you that standing pat and just focusing on radio is the shortest distance between your company and the “death spiral.”

Digital revenue produces pretty remarkable data. For decades I’ve watched radio reps start tap-dancing the moment a client talks about ROI or attribution.

Yes, radio works. If you’ve held pretty much any job on the station level, you just know it because you’ve seen audiences respond time and time again to on-air messages, whether a produced ad, a live read, a station promotion, or a fundraiser. If you’ve been around for more than a minute, you’ve no doubt witnessed radio lead the charge during a civic emergency, providing vital info to area constituents, or generate a significant amount of money during a radiothon.

When it comes to radio’s continued efficacy as an advertising medium, the problem is, we just don’t know specifically how well it’s working, with exactly whom, actually where, or precisely when. In other words, we’ve got an intrinsic belief it’s working, but radio’s success is mostly anecdotal. We often cannot connect the dots to prove its value.

Digital is the polar opposite of linear advertising. It’s trackable, accountable, targetable, and measurable. We have a much better fix on exactly how it’s working.

It’s also flexible—each digital platform, whether it’s social media, OTT, SEO, or re-targeting each—solves a specific problem and can be utilized at the right stage of a client’s strategy.

Radio + Digital = Fill The Funnel. In every market, there are many different providers of digital solutions. Television stations and newspapers all offer broad digital offerings, as do some of the radio stations you compete against. There are also digital advertising agencies and “one-man shops,” usually comprised of former media sellers who’ve hung out a shingle. In other words, there’s lots of competition out there.

But radio (and yes, local television, too) provides something no one else can offer—the ability to help a client build a brand and fill the top of the sales funnel. We can drive the audience to a piece of digital content or a social media platform. We can build awareness, so when they encounter the brand online, they’ll be more likely to click, watch, or engage.

This needs to be at the core of every digital sales strategy.

Ratings don’t matter . . . much. I’m not here to bash Nielsen—they continue to provide a valuable and credible service to help market radio to radio advertisers. But if revenue is shifting away from radio, the ratings become relatively less important. Radio sellers need to wean themselves off embracing only the ratings and rankers, and instead, doing business with a whole new world of metrics.

Once again, this is going to take traditional sellers outside their comfort zones, but it’s also going to bring them closer to what’s important to their clients.

Salespeople don’t own their account lists – nor do they own the station. Enough already with the tired mindset they think of themselves as “radio sellers, and not purveyors of digital.” And let’s once and for all dash the idea that station reps just don’t want to present digital options to their precious clients. When we ask the sales manager why they allow this to happen, they say they are afraid of pushing their veteran salespeople too hard out of fear of losing them.

Even in 2025, we’re seeing seasoned sales pros stunned to learn their orders are being pulled from their clients’ smallest slice of the pie (the client’s radio sub-budget) while the real money, often many times larger, is the digital budget and it’s going to the media company across the street who provides digital solutions.

It’s time for those salespeople to get on board, or go to work elsewhere. Or hire a digital sales team to market digital to their clients and keep the commission.

The worst question you can ask a client is . . . . Representative of how traditional radio sellers are missing the moment is when they ask a client, “What’s your radio budget?” Why ask about 6% of their budget when such a large percent is being spent on digital platforms the station could/should be offering? This is indicative of the kind of thinking that needs to disappear if radio is to expand its revenue footprint.

When digital is offered many salespeople are excited (and relieved). Across the spectrum from commercial to public to Christian, salespeople want to help their clients successfully address their marketing challenges, but if they only have radio and a couple digital tools, they’re not going into battle with a complete set of marketing artillery. Salespeople have told us their clients are going elsewhere, and they’re excited when they can finally offer comparable digital resources.

Stop calling on “radio” clients. The beauty of digital selling is you can get well beyond the small percentage of businesses that advertise on radio and start talking with every business in your community—the odds are good many of them are spending in digital advertising.

Digital marketing opens stations up to the B2B category (which is huge), out-of-demo clients (rock stations, for example, can now actually deliver women to the media plan), and even consumers who live outside of the listening area, or the market, or the state are fair game.

This mindset shift is pretty daunting for traditional sellers, but once they understand the power and breadth of what they are selling, the opportunities and revenue start flowing.

Lower margin business still pays the bills. A well-deserved complaint some have about digital is the low margins, especially compared to what they are used to from radio. I get the argument, but if this is an excuse not to create a digital revenue program, get ready for rocky days ahead.

With digital advertising, certainly there can be a significant hard cost, but on the other hand, that’s the ONLY major expense—there’s not the minutiae of costs, from music licensing to power to keeping the transmitter on—that cut into broadcast margins. That’s why companies like Townsquare are pulling in 25% margins on their digital business (as of Q1 2025).

Yes, the margins are lower, but the volume of business is undeniable. I’d rather have lower-profit digital revenue that’s growing by double-digits annually, than higher-margin business that’s slowly fading away.

Radio is fortunate. It used to be that in order to grow revenue, you had to have a great ratings book or invest heavily in marketing. With digital, the barriers to entry are low, the cost to get started is also relatively cheap, and the results can happen fairly quickly.

Radio has a history of adapting when it wants to, but it also shows it often moves too slowly. When we started our mobile app business—jacapps—in 2008, we were successful, but business was initially slow (“why do I need an app???”). The industry has gradually come around, but there are times like today as revenue is declining that this is a no-brainer and stations shouldn’t wait. The money has shifted—and will continue to shift. I hope stations are in position to capture it.

If you are interested in learning how your station can start a digital revenue program, or grow what’s already in place, reach out to me at paul@jacobsmedia.com.