Last Thursday, Paragon hosted the first of three webinars that introduced programmatic advertising for public radio streams and podcasts as a method to monetize unsold digital inventory. This is a relatively new and hot revenue topic for public radio professionals, as evidenced by over 140 registrations and many questions from attendees for “Unwrapping Public Radio’s New Revenue Stream.” The first webinar replay is here.
The highly-attended webinar blended historical lessons from WBEZ Chicago’s digital monetization (2009–2020) with current practices and technical guidance, clarifying legality, operational control, and revenue optimization aligned with public media values. Panelists from Public Media Company, Paragon, SoundStack, and Buffalo Toronto Public Media outlined six core areas:
- Public Radio’s Challenges & Opportunities
- Programmatic Advertising Legality
- Revenue Potential vs. Cost Benefits
- What Is Programmatic Advertising
- How Programmatic Advertising Works
- What Options Do Stations Have Right Now
Public Radio’s Challenges & Opportunities
Carlos Barrionuevo, Director at Public Media Company, set the table as to why public radio must take advantage of all unsold inventory across all platforms. Barrionuevo asserted that public media under-monetizes digital compared to commercial while sustainability is critical post-precision funding. He suggested that public radio stations maximize inventory through local, regional, national, and programmatic channels while aligning with their mission and values. He reminded viewers that integrating programmatic sales into broader digital revenue strategies to avoid leaving inventory unsold on all platforms.
“Post-recission it has become more important than ever to continue to find sustainability strategies. Public media has struggled to monetize its digital inventory, even in a way that commercial media has previously done. It is more important than ever to understand the different opportunities for monetizing digital opportunity, to take a step back, and to understand what the role is between what you’re doing locally, what you can do with regional collaborations or conversations, what you can do with the national sales networks that exist or dialing up, and also what you can do with programmatic.”
“Opportunities exist to make sure that you maximize your inventory. I think that the greatest mistake that public media can make at this point is to continue to have so much unsold inventory. We need to look at every opportunity we can to maximize the stream and to do it in a way that does reflect public media’s values, but that also just recognizes the different opportunities with sales networks. And then I think part of that is also learning about how to integrate those options into your overall digital strategy.”
Programmatic Advertising Legality
FCC attorneys confirm what we should all know to be true, which is that the FCC has no jurisdiction over non-broadcast activities. If you’re wildly successful with programmatic revenue, the caveat is that any non-commercial business must be careful not to do too much commercial business to risk their IRS tax-exempt status and incur an UBIT tax, so there may be tax implications to consider with your tax accountant if you exceed very high revenue thresholds.
Revenue Potential vs. Cost Benefits
Geary Yonker, Sponsorship Director at VuHaus Group & Sponsorship Consultant at Paragon, talked about many uncomfortable steps (at the time) that have led to the point where public radio is prime for new revenue from digital sources.
“What Mike referenced is, yeah, we know it’s legal, but a lot of us are going to be doing that sort of cost benefit analysis of like, is it worth it? And kind of overcoming some of our fears about it. So right now, as Carlos mentioned, we’re going through an unprecedented time in public media. We face external pressures like unlike anything we’ve ever faced before with the rescission of CPB funding and our federal government to put it mildly, that is suspicious of our motives and of our mission. But if there’s one thing I’ve learned in 17 years of working in public media, it’s that our industry is just filled with extraordinarily bright forward-thinking people who care deeply about the fate of our stations.”
When he joined Chicago’s WBEZ in 2009, they were working on the next iteration of WBEZ.com. They updated their digital sales policies by standardizing ad sizes and the ability to run rich media creative. WBEZ was concerned about how their thousands of daily website visitors would react to these new additions and we were concerned about paying a UBIT tax. A UBIT tax applies when non-profit organizations earn a certain amount of income from activity that’s not related to our non-profit status. They fielded a few calls from listeners that didn’t like the interstitial ads, but they explained why this revenue was essential to the station. At this point, the revenue wasn’t enough that they had to pay a UBIT tax.
In 2014, WBEZ was at the forefront of creating podcasts nationwide with This American Life and then Serial, which changed the landscape of podcasting in many ways, really defined podcasting for years to come. They were selling millions of dollars in podcast sponsorship for This American Life. At that point, they did have to pay a UBIT tax, but it was more than worth it. Sponsorships started off as 15 second messages that were following the same FCC guidelines as the broadcast. Over time, they expanded into 30 second spots and broadened the language that they used, but still maintaining some guidelines that would sound like our stations and still had the choice to not work with certain organizations that weren’t aligned with their values. Again, they were concerned with how these millions of listeners would react to these new ads, these new messages that sounded like commercial ads. These programs became the most popular shows in the world. And the sound of our podcast messages changed. They did sound a bit more commercial, but their audiences and the revenue kept growing.
In 2019 they made enhancements to their email program by adding a sponsored content box to our email, which is something that many other leading news organizations had done nationwide. They still had final say over the editorial language and could still choose not to work with certain sponsors. Their concerns were the same. How would their email subscribers react? And would they have to pay a UBIT tax? Their email web revenue went through the roof and it became one of the leading drivers of station revenue. They fielded a few calls from people’s concerns about the sponsored content box, and they did not have to pay a UBIT tax.
Geary concluded by bringing us to the present day. “And here we are again in 2026 and now we’re faced with another new technology, the option to run programmatic ads on our streams. And our concerns are exactly the same. How will our listeners react? And if it’s successful, will we have to pay a UBIT tax? Now, I don’t want to be cavalier about these questions. They matter enormously. Our listeners are everything to us. They’re our lifeblood. They’re the foundations that our stations are built upon. They’re not just our listeners, they’re our members. But I’m walking you through this history to make a simple point that every time that we face new technology like this, we’ve had the same concerns. And every time our listeners and our members have stayed with us, they’ve grown with us, they’ve evolved with us, and they’ve understood why we make these changes that we make.”
What Is Programmatic Advertising
Scott Klass, Chief Marketing Officer at SoundStack, described programmatic advertising as “an open marketplace where each individual impression is being auctioned off in real time” for efficiency and scale. Modern controls include geo-targeting, brand safety, private marketplaces, and CPM pricing. Publishers set ad category blocks, URL-level exclusions, and keyword-based filters to protect brand.
Klass continued, “Publishers, if they want, can open up as much as possible to generate as much revenue as possible. If you want to be more controlled, you can do that too. And you can apply more targeting. You can apply private marketplaces where there’s only a limited set of buyers that can access your inventory. But it’s, again, it’s a give and take. How much do you want to narrow? If you narrow, you’re actually diminishing the number of buyers that can bid on your inventory. So it’s all about whatever the publisher’s comfort level is. I think part and parcel of this is the ability to have choice and control. You’re the publisher. You decide what you want to do. You decide what you’re comfortable with. But as others have said, programmatic is a strong avenue to generating this new incremental revenue.”
Regarding the station’s brand safety, Klass noted, “The publisher’s brand is your show, your podcast, or your radio stream, or your station, or whatever. There are controls that publishers can use, for example, if there are certain words or phrases in certain ads that you don’t want running across your streams or your podcasts or whatever, we actually have a product that’s come out recently called Ad Control that does exactly that, where you can get a transcript and you can isolate certain words.”
Jerry Urban, Senior Radio Broadcast Engineer at Buffalo Toronto Public Media, brought this point home with personal experience. “We made a conscious decision leading up to the Super Bowl that we were going to allow Draft Kings ads to run. Draft Kings was very active in the marketplace leading up to the Super Bowl, and there was revenue to be generated by allowing those ads to play. Once the Super Bowl was over, we blocked those.”
How Programmatic Advertising Works
The Selling Process
Yonker described the selling process succinctly: “It’s not selling, it’s setting.” Meaning, it’s up to the sales department to decide the digital inventory to sell and to establish the controls, but it’s an internal ops or engineering role to create those settings that follow the sales department’s criteria. For example, local spots should always run first in a stop set, and the sales department should identify where and when the programmatic national ads fall within the stream or podcast. Stations can belong to multiple programmatic marketplaces that will fill the unsold inventory through a process called “waterfalling.” Meaning after the first marketplace sells what it can, the second marketplace can then sell the remaining inventory, and so forth.
Yonker described the “setting” process this way, saying, “You go into a dashboard and set the price structure, and your price parameters of what you would like to receive from the supply side. On the demand side, the advertiser is doing the same. They’re going to set what their maximum price is and what types of formats that they would like to be heard on. There’s going to be a regionality to it also where they can, if they’re looking to run ads in a certain region or of the country or in a certain market. So again, it doesn’t compete with your local digital sales. Your own local salespeople can keep selling your stream and podcasts. You can also work with multiple streaming networks because there is a cascading effect, and it’s all based on CPM. The higher the CPM, that ad is going to be delivered first. Inventory that comes in at a lower CPM will be at the back end while your locally sold inventory with a higher CPM would be the first ones to deliver.
What It Sounds Like
Klass played a Progressive Insurance add that ran on one station’s stream, and then said, “No great surprises there. I’m sure we’ve all heard and seen a million Progressive ads in our lifetime. With full respect to the public radio space; it is different. If you are used to the more typical sound of a public radio ad on broadcast or if you listen to NPR like I do every single morning, you know, it’s a little bit different, But in the universe, we’re all sort familiar with this ad. Again, you can control against any ad that you want to, but this is just a regular ad in the flow of the WBGO stream.
How Does It Work Technically
Urban, the engineer at Buffalo Toronto Public Media, talked in depth about the technical aspects of dynamic ad insertion. He explained that stations control pre-, mid-, and post-roll positions, and recommended that stations start conservatively and adjust. Properly timed mid-rolls do not interrupt programming, and programmatic ads should be placed at the end of stop sets so local underwriting airs first. He uses RDS/PSD metadata to trigger cue points and then the playout systems pass audio and metadata to your streaming partner.
“I cannot stress enough the level of control that each station is going to have when they do this. I am also going to give you a piece of advice. If your technology or your engineering department sets this up for you, they shouldn’t be the ones managing it. You don’t want engineers in charge of revenue when you are putting your plan together. You are going to involve your engineering or your IT teams in setting all of this up between your playout system. After that, it’s got to go to somebody else to make sure that the care and feeding is taken care of by someone in sales. At BTPM, we identified an analytics person we have on staff, and they’re the one that is going to look at the dashboard, the CPM, and the impressions, and they’re going to look at what shows. It is not a heavy lift.”
What Options Do Stations Have Right Now
Yonker concluded by telling stations that there are several public radio marketplaces that offer different levels of service and different revenue splits.
“The first place to start is to contact the provider you use to deliver your ads within your podcast. NPR and PRX are also in this field, too. We have intimate knowledge of what it’s like to work with these organizations, their ins, their outs, their pluses, their minuses. When it comes to streaming, there are many different organizations in this field. Jerry mentioned Triton. We’ve probably all heard of the APM/StreamGuys programmatic network that’s launched. And there is Scott’s employer, SoundStack. You know, the one thing I will say about SoundStack — I am not being paid by SoundStack, I am only here as a consultant — is that SoundStack does allow you to be within different multiple marketplaces at the same time. Find out what the advantages are. Find out what’s the right fit for your station. It’s going to vary based on how much inventory you want to put out there to the programmatic marketplace, and it’s probably going to be based on what your existing relationships look like. Do your homework, meet with everybody, and find the service that is right for you and your station.”
It’s also important to understand best practices before you dive in, which Paragon is happy to share directly with you and will be presenting later in this webinar series.
Next Webinar: A Public Radio Station Case Study
The second webinar on programmatic advertising will be a case study from a public radio station that started down this road just six months ago and has already put well over $10k on their books. We’ll announce a date soon and I hope to see you then.
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