As publishers diversify further beyond advertising with subscriptions and other audience revenue streams, they are thinking carefully about how to prioritize monetization opportunities to extract as much revenue as possible from their audiences.
This holistic approach to audience monetization — often referred to as “total revenue optimization” or “total monetization” – seeks to understand and optimize revenue generation across a range of sources including subscriptions, advertising, e-commerce, licensing, events, and more. The goal is to enable various revenue streams to work alongside each other in a way that maximizes publishers’ overall revenue and ultimately squeezes as much revenue from individual audience members as possible.
Efforts to optimize total revenue are in their infancy, but publishers’ changing business needs and priorities, advances in artificial intelligence and analytics, and the availability of more robust data have all helped accelerate interest in recent months. As a result, conversations about “balancing” different revenue lines are quickly evolving into ones focused on boosting revenue instead.