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Snapshot of digital media trends: In 2014, 94% of @TPM's revs were from advertising and 6% memberships. In 2019, advertising makes up 25% of revenue and memberships 59%. In absolute terms, ads revenues account for 30% of what they did in 2014. Membership revenues have grown 991%.
@TPM 2/ So one question might be, is the digital ad biz really that friggin' bad? Short answer, YES! Longer answer is a bit more complicated. In the course of growing our subscription numbers we show subscribers fewer ads and some no ads. That obviously cuts into revenues.
3/ We also have a significant but still small amount of what we publish restricted to subscribers. That reduces page views which reduces revenue. Importantly, we also made a key strategic decision in mid-2017 to essentially pull up stakes from one part of our ad business.
4/ We took the money we spent on that part of our business and redeployed all of it toward spending on various dimensions of our subscription business. That was a substantial hit. But it made sense to absorb that hit in order to redeploy spending from a faltering to a growing ...
5/ part of our business. What all of that amounts to is that is that a non-trivial/significant part of a drop in advertising revenues is tied to conscious and strategic decisions aimed at growing subscriptions. But I would say majority of it, probably the great majority is ...
6/ the digital advertising industry itself.
