The influence of money
How types of revenue affect publishers’ operations
The views expressed in this column are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Reynolds Journalism Institute or the University of Missouri.
Dorian heads Teeming Media, a thought leadership communication consultancy focused on media technology, as well as The Verticals Collective group of media company founders and operators. He teaches media business at Columbia University’s J-school and the Zicklin School of Business at CUNY/Baruch.
Money is money, right? When you’re running a media business, not exactly.
The way a news organization earns revenue can deeply affect its operations and how it manages its business, from editorial decisions, to content presentation, to when bills can get paid.
Let’s look first at advertising and subscriptions, which provide the largest shares of revenue for publishers, as shown by recent surveys.
Advertising
For a publisher, advertising can seem like “free” money. Put in an ad spot. Serve automated ads. Get cash.
But automated advertising is usually a volume game. Publishers have to create and template content to get the highest number of views (or listens). That might mean cutting articles into multiple pages to try to get more pageviews, or placing lots of ads in-stream or on a page. The user experience can suffer.
Another issue is that publishers have to wait for payment — usually a month or more after the ads appear. That means you’re not getting paid for what you’ve done for quite awhile after you deliver it. That’s true even for ads sold directly to sponsors. Publishers can try to negotiate to shave a few days off the pay cycle, often by working with a larger affiliated group of media organizations, such as the Local Media Consortium, RJI’s partner in the Digital on Demand Services project.
One more solution is to ask sponsors for some payment up front, especially for specially created sponsored sections (“NCAA Basketball!” “Summer Vacations!” etc.) or events. Some publishers charge a flat rate for some ad spots, no matter the traffic, and collect at least some of the fee up front.
In the current climate, I feel obligated to also note that ad revenue fluctuates according to economic conditions. This year’s uncertainties have caused advertisers to lower their planned spending. So, in sum, advertising can force a media company to do things that require more and more views, cause more interruption, have to wait for payment, and it is susceptible to the economy’s ups and downs.
Subscriptions
Subscriptions tend to be less susceptible to economic swings. Also, since publishers collect the fees up front, they have the cash in hand to pay for operations. Another advantage for subscription-based orgs can be that they usually don’t have to generate as many views or listens as ad-supported media. (So, no need to cut articles in half just to get more pageviews, and no need to stuff a page or video full of ads.)
Attracting paid subscribers, though, can be tough. Subscription products have to consistently provide whatever types of content gets people to subscribe — and keep providing it to get them to renew, increasing the average “lifetime value,” a very important metric. That means the journalism has to stay on target, often go deeper than any competition, and provide stories and assets that subscribers really want.
Affiliate marketing
Some media organizations make some, or the preponderance of their revenue by earning a percentage on purchases that their readers and viewers make after clicking to buy from their pages. The New York Times is one notable mainstream publication that gets paid for book and ticket sales generated from its review pages.
Trustworthy publishers who go this route have to transparently manage the ethics. Most legitimate journalistic organizations disclose that they receive a percentage of sales, and they work to keep the review process editorially independent.
Publishers, meanwhile, are at the mercy of their so-called “affiliate marketing” partners. Amazon has repeatedly changed the percentages they pay publishers. And the e-commerce platform offers very different amounts for different product categories, which can affect a publisher’s decisions about what types of products to write and talk about.
Platforms
Many publishers today earn significant chunks of revenue from partnerships with aggregators such as Apple News or Smart News, which pay based upon how much a publisher’s content is accessed by their subscribers.
The upside is that publishers can get tremendous reach — to many millions of people. But some publishers skip the opportunity, finding that platforms like Apple News cut into their ability to sell subscriptions on their own. They find that people reading their content may not know which publisher is providing it.
Publishers who do opt in bear the cost of preparing and maintaining feeds to match the platforms’ technical requirements. And they have to live with little control over how their material is presented, how much it’s surfaced to users in the platform, how many ads appear, what they can link out to, how the platforms use data collected, or what the fees are.
Publishers also have been doing deals with AI platforms looking to access content to train their language models. “They’re using us for scraping, so we might as well get paid,” one publishing executive told me recently in a resigned tone. Doing such deals may not affect daily editorial operations but can influence the ability over time to attract people to a media property, especially for archived or evergreen content.
Voluntary contributions
Asking people in a community to charitably support a news organization can work, especially for original coverage of local news or of special interest topics such as climate and the environment. Seldom do such contributions provide a majority of revenue — with a few public broadcast stations as notable exceptions.
Foundation grants can help, too, but can come with a lot of overhead. I plan to talk about foundations in my next column on the influences of funding sources.
Side businesses
Side businesses — cafes, web or marketing consulting services, digital media training, even selling branded products — account for 15% of news orgs’ revenues, according to a Reuters Institute study released in January. Those businesses can be a way to help support an operation. They’re also entirely different businesses, and so require different kinds of overhead, management, and work processes. That can be a distraction, and so staying focused on managing the media business is crucial.
There are other types of revenues — selling data, gating access to paid feeds such as via APIs, licensing, and more — all of which have their own influences, costs, and considerations. There is no one right or wrong way for a news organization to earn revenue. It is important for their leaders to have some understanding of how the type of revenue can affect their operations.
Cite this article
Benkoil, Dorian (2025, April 24). The influence of money. Reynolds Journalism Institute. Retrieved from: https://rjionline.org/news/the-influence-of-money/