The Total Monetization Mandate

Introduction

The role of the chief revenue officer has evolved from overseeing a single revenue stream to orchestrating an increasingly complex portfolio that spans advertising, subscriptions, branded content, events, commerce, and more. The new mandate: Total monetization.

This expansion reflects structural changes to the environment, as traffic from Google has dropped and Big Tech performance advertising systems take even more share of the ad market. In such an environment, publishers have little choice but to do more with less. That mandate goes beyond internal efficiency mandates to business strategy. As People Inc CEO Neil Vogel likes to say, the math is mathing. And the math says when you have lower ad demand for fewer visitors, you need to make more money from each audience member.

That’s made the CRO job even more complex, as the typical tension between advertising and subscriptions is complexified with revenue lines in affiliate, events, licensing and more. Persistent internal organization challenges around silos with conflicting goals – often manifested by the battle of the overlays on webpages that ask visitors to take several different actions at once – have become existential threats. Territorial battles are luxuries few publishers can afford as they reorient their businesses from the traffic era.

That’s forcing CROs to rethink not just their revenue mix but how they define success, structure decision-making, and align teams to shared goals.

“Publishers are going to have to create a direct, more engaged, meaningful relationship with readers. Brands are going to matter more than ever,” said a CRO at a major consumer media company.

This report is based on a survey The Rebooting conducted in July 2025 of 65 revenue leaders at leading publishers. Respondents included CROs, publishers, and senior executives overseeing advertising, subscriptions, and other revenue streams. To deepen the findings, we conducted in-depth interviews with revenue leaders at five leading publishers as well as executives from Piano, whose platform and data inform many of the monetization strategies discussed in this report.

Key Findings

Fragmented authority slows decision making. Only 47% of publishers say one executive owns all revenue streams. Even with unified titles, operational control is often split, making cross-line tradeoffs difficult.
No common language of success. Just 17% of publishers use ARPU as their primary KPI. 35% have no single North Star metric, leading to conflicting departmental priorities.
Tradeoffs between ads and subscriptions are largely ad hoc. 70% lack a consistent process for managing the tension between growing subscriptions and protecting ad inventory, with most decisions made through internal negotiation.
Alignment is the top barrier to growth. Only 11% describe their organization as “very aligned” on shared goals, with the most common internal obstacles split between misaligned incentives (29%) and cultural resistance (17%)
AI and search disruption Is already impacting revenue. 29% report a 10-20%-plus decline in revenue tied to AI/search changes, with most shifting investment toward branded content, direct-sold ads, and contextual targeting.

The CRO Role Has Expanded, But Authority Is Still Fragmented

Publishers now make money in more ways than ever. The old distinction in the CRO role used to be whether the remit covered advertising alone or the entire revenue picture. That divide still exists on paper, but the reality inside many organizations is far messier. Titles may be consolidated, but responsibility is often split across multiple leaders and departments.

A CRO at one major publisher described being accountable for the company’s overall revenue performance, but spending most of their time on advertising and events. Other areas, like subscriptions, affiliate commerce, or licensing, are managed by separate executives, even though all of them roll up into the same topline number. That means “owning” total revenue without having full control over the biggest levers, a structural gap that complicates planning and slows decision-making.

Even among organizations that have formally unified leadership, real decision-making power is often dispersed. Advertising and subscription teams often operate with their own separate targets, incentives, and planning cycles, which limits their ability to make tradeoffs in real time and makes coordinated campaigns a challenge.

Publisher POV:

“If you were spinning up a sales org from scratch today, it probably wouldn’t look like the one at the Financial Times… It would probably be structured differently—around key account groups and broader partnership opportunities beyond advertising.” — Brendan Spain, Financial Times
“I’m accountable for the whole company overall and compensated accordingly, but my day‑to‑day responsibilities are really focused on advertising and events.” — a CRO at a major publisher

Piano POV:

“Teams are too often siloed. Ideally, there should be ongoing conversations between the reader monetization team/the direct-to-consumer team and the advertising team/the B2B monetization team, and the newsroom. Those discussions should focus on where the biggest opportunities lie, how to capitalize on them while maintaining editorial independence and standards, and how to balance the needs of the direct-to-consumer business with the B2B business.” — Michael Silberman, EVP Media Strategy, Piano

No Common Language of Success

Publishing businesses are often more complex than ideal for their scale. One of the biggest barriers to unified monetization is the lack of a shared success metric that spans all revenue lines. While many CROs talk about the need for audience-centric KPIs, in practice most teams are still measured on channel-specific goals: CPMs for ads, subscriber counts for consumer revenue, tickets sold for events. This means each business line can claim success on their own terms, but leaders frequently struggle to reconcile performance-wide organization, and lack the data to make strategic tradeoffs between revenue priorities. Cue the battle of the overlays.

The reality of digital publishing today is that publishers are being asked to produce more revenue with less traffic. The old formula was based largely on volume: revenue and traffic scaled more or less in tandem, since advertising represented the lion’s share of the business. That model has broken down. With referral traffic on a steep decline and search increasingly under threat from AI, the formula has grown significantly more complicated. Publishers are under pressure to make more money from each audience member, as opposed to simply trying to reach as many people as possible. Without a unifying metric, that pressure often translates into a chaotic mix of conflicting approaches across departments.

That’s where ARPU (average revenue per user) has distinct advantages. It provides a single number that reflects the combined value of subscriptions, advertising, events, commerce, and any other monetized touchpoints for each person in the audience. ARPU focuses teams on growing the yield from known users, rather than chasing scale for its own sake. It forces cross-departmental conversations about how to maximize value from each relationship, aligning monetization strategy to long-term, holistic audience health rather than short-term wins in individual channels.

Only 17% cite ARPU as their primary KPI.
35% say they have no single guiding metric for monetization.
23% calculate ARPU across the total audience, not just subscribers.
About a third (34%) rely solely on channel-specific metrics like CPMs or subscriber revenue.
Only 11% have a “North Star” metric that is used consistently across teams.

When metrics differ by team, tradeoffs become harder to model. Decisions that should be guided by shared data are instead influenced by instinct, whim, or short-term departmental priorities. In some organizations, ad teams optimize for impressions while subscription teams push for harder paywalls, with no unified measure of what drives the most value over time. Adopting ARPU as the universal North Star radically simplifies this problem: it aligns incentives, clarifies tradeoffs, and forces the organization to think beyond isolated transactions to the lifetime value of each audience member.

Piano POV:

"Alignment requires three things. First, the right data to understand trade-offs across teams—without it, it’s impossible to make informed decisions. Second, a single shared metric for measuring total revenue growth. At Piano, we often look at average revenue per user (ARPU) as a “reader monetization” metric, where the denominator is total website visitors, not just subscribers. (Average revenue per subscriber—essentially a price metric—is useful too, but it tells a different story.) Finally, there need to be shared KPIs that keep every group focused on the same business goals.” — Michael Silberman, EVP Media Strategy, Piano

The Ads vs. Subscriptions Tradeoff Remains Unresolved

Media companies are built on tension. Everyone knows about the push-and-pull between editorial independence and commercial demands. On the commercial side, there have long been tensions between advertising and subscriptions. Historically, ad sales teams have viewed subscriptions as a constraint by reducing the pool of impressions to sell. The industry’s strategic focus has tended to swing sharply on this front: one year the rallying cry was private marketplaces, the next it was video, then it was branded content, and today, for the most part, subscriptions are being heralded as a savior.

But subscriptions are hardly a cure-all. Publishing has always been about a mix of revenue streams, with the balance historically tilting toward advertising-supported access rather than an all-or-nothing subscription model. The success of The New York Times in attracting 11.3 million digital subscribers notwithstanding, most publishers are aware that they cannot operate a sustainable business if they only monetize 5% or less of their audience. The real issue has always been finding workable tradeoffs between ad monetization and reader revenue.

The tension is sharper today, because the old volume-based advertising model no longer works the way it used to. Tightening access to drive subscription growth can cut into pageviews and reduce ad inventory. Loosening paywalls to boost impressions can slow subscription momentum. Managing that balance has become one of the defining challenges of the modern CRO.

For many publishers, the problem isn’t just the tradeoff itself, but the lack of a consistent, data-driven process for managing it. Most decisions are made through internal negotiations between departments, rather than by modeling the long-term value of a reader across both revenue streams. This means the “winner” in any given decision is often whichever team has the more urgent quarterly target, not the choice that drives the greatest lifetime audience value.

70% lack a consistent process for making tradeoff decisions.
Only 11% use real-time data modeling to guide decisions.
45% use or plan to implement dynamic access models.
52% still use fixed rules with no audience-based variation.

Dynamic access models, like propensity-based paywalls or rules based on reader behavior, offer a potential path forward, allowing publishers to optimize for both revenue streams simultaneously. But adoption remains uneven, and even when these tools are in place, their potential is often limited by incomplete data integration or misaligned incentives.

Publisher POV:

“We very much see it as an ‘and’—a mixed model—and we’re proud of that. At first it was one or the other, but now we design strategies to extend our subscription base without undercutting ad performance.” — Chief Advertising Officer at a major global newspaper
“There is a narrative in media that paywalls can hurt audience growth. It’s actually helped us, because our aggressive subscriber strategy has pushed us to make more strategic bets on off-platform inventory.” — Alice McKown, The Atlantic
“Even though our CPMs are relatively high… we know we can’t make up for lost subscription revenue by squeezing in another impression or unlocking an article.” — Brendan Spain, The FT

Piano POV:

“I spoke to a publisher that had an exclusive, investigative story that went viral. When they analyzed the traffic they realized that if they’d added just two more ad units to the page—because it was in a feature template instead of their standard layout—they would have made thousands more dollars from that single article. The problem was, they just didn’t have the tools to quickly run that kind of analysis. In fact, most publishers still don’t have the data or team alignment needed to make these decisions effectively.” — Michael Silberman, EVP Media Strategy, Piano

Alignment Is the Top Barrier to Growth

Publishing in the digital era has been a story of misalignment. Shifting business models have pulled publishers in multiple directions, simultaneously trying to serve advertisers, audiences and algorithms. Look no further than the “jump to recipe” button for a tangible example: it exists not because it’s the best reader experience, but because it satisfies the demands of search algorithms. That external misalignment is mirrored internally.

The need to make money in so many different ways means that relatively small organizations end up with internal operations that are self-defeatingly complex. Advertising, subscriptions, events, commerce, branded content, and affiliate revenue all demand attention, but they often come with conflicting priorities and goals. Revenue, editorial, product, and audience development teams may have overlapping but uncoordinated objectives. Incentives tend to reinforce these silos, pushing each group to optimize for its own metrics rather than for a shared outcome.

This hybrid structure is partly by design: editorial and commercial have historically been separated to protect journalistic independence. But the modern revenue environment requires a level of cross-functional collaboration that didn’t exist when most of these companies’ “church-and-state” structures were set. Without shared dashboards, unified KPIs, and clear ownership, execution suffers—and misalignment becomes one of the most persistent drags on growth.

Our survey shows that most publishers see alignment gaps as a core limitation. Only a third describe themselves as “very aligned,” and the most common obstacles are rooted in internal structure, not external market forces.

Only 11% say their organization is “very aligned” on shared goals.
29% point to misaligned incentives as a top challenge.
Editorial scores just 3.1/5 on alignment with revenue strategy.
47% say editorial operates independently or resists commercial involvement.

This lack of alignment is especially problematic when new opportunities arise or external conditions shift. Without the ability to quickly align on priorities and coordinate execution, organizations risk moving too slowly, or in different directions, while competitors capture the advantage.

AI and Search Disruption Are Already Here

“Google Zero” has gone from an abstract conference talking point to a looming reality for most publishers. Nearly every publisher has seen declines in traffic from search, which for years has been the backbone of digital distribution. This isn’t solely an AI issue. Google has been keeping more traffic on its own properties for years. More broadly, the open web has shown signs of terminal decline as the tech platforms that occupy the commanding heights of digital media deprioritize links entirely. Silicon Valley’s early embrace of open models has given way to walled gardens and zero-sum strategies, with publishers cast aside as collateral damage.

The numbers tell the story. At People Inc, one of the most successful digital publishers at scale, traffic from Google has dropped from 52% to 28% over the past two years. For an audience business that once depended on the search traffic firehose for more than half its reach, that is an existential shift. According to a July 2025 Pew Research Center study, users who encountered an AI-generated summary in Google search results clicked on a traditional link just 8% of the time, nearly half the rate (15%) of those who saw results without an AI summary.

29% report a 10–20%-plus decline in revenue from AI/search changes.
35% report a slight decline (<10%).
59% are launching or expanding branded content offerings.
58% are reducing reliance on open-market programmatic.
11% are enhancing contextual targeting and brand safety tools.

This shift requires not just new ad products but a mindset change. For years, publishers optimized their content and distribution for maximum search visibility. Now they must think about how their content is consumed, summarized, or repurposed by AI tools. Several CROs noted the urgency of organizing as an industry to negotiate with AI platforms, much as they’ve done in the past with search and social giants.

Piano POV:

“No question, publishers are absolutely worried about declining traffic. But publishers who have more diverse businesses—with multiple revenue streams—are going to be less vulnerable than those that are entirely dependent on advertising. The publishers that have pivoted away from a mass-attention model toward a deeper engagement strategy are going to be more resilient. Engagement, rather than raw reach, is the key to sustainable growth. With the big platforms no longer delivering a reliable firehose of traffic, the focus has to shift toward building direct, lasting relationships with readers.” — Michael Silberman, EVP Media Strategy, Piano

Conclusion

The total monetization mandate has arrived. CROs are expected to orchestrate all revenue lines into a coherent, sustainable growth strategy. But as the data in this report makes clear, core barriers remain: structural misalignment, metric fragmentation, and ad hoc tradeoff management. Solving those issues is now table stakes for competing in a market where external shocks are both more frequent and more severe. Polycrises are the norm.

The playbook going forward is not about choosing between ads and subscriptions, scale and engagement, or reach and loyalty. It’s about managing those tensions with a unified strategy, clear decision-making authority, and shared measures of success. That means breaking down internal silos, aligning incentives, and using data modeling to make tradeoffs explicit.

Publishers that can simplify around a shared North Star, reduce dependency on intermediaries, and invest in differentiated products that deepen audience relationships will have leverage in a platform-dominated ecosystem. The next era of digital media will belong to operators who can match strategic clarity with operational discipline—turning the messy reality of today’s revenue environment into a competitive advantage.

The Total Monetization Mandate

In partnership with

The Total Monetization Mandate