With the dissolution of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and President Trump including zero federal funds for PBS or NPR Member stations in the FY2027 budget, every dollar matters for the noncommercial secular radio and television properties found across the U.S.
That’s why noncommercial station licensees may have great interest in a private underwriting and sponsorship marketplace purpose-built for public media.
The platform comes courtesy of a partnership between American Public Media and StreamGuys, giving these noncomm radio stations a national sales network to drive digital underwriting revenue.
The network currently includes over 30 public media organizations, representing more than 55 million monthly impressions reaching over 6 million unique listeners across podcast and livestream inventory, StreamGuys notes.
Dubbed “Inform Media Network,” the offering is designed to boost public radio broadcasters in filling unsold digital inventory with compliant, public radio-quality underwriting through APM’s centralized national sales reach.
For StreamGuys, this allows public radio stations to benefit from a tool allowing it to sell local underwriting to their market’s listeners of APM’s podcasts, including those from Marketplace, This Old House Radio Hour and The Slowdown.
StreamGuys will manage the network’s technical infrastructure and deliver onboarding services and payment processing for publishers. Measurement from listening to conversion is delivered through the Magellan AI platform and is provided to stations at no cost.
“Programmatic ad networks sometimes come with creative that’s less suited to public radio audiences, but this is not an automated, algorithm-driven programmatic ad network,” said Tyler Huggins, Director of Advertising at StreamGuys. “Inform Media Network underwriting will be FCC compliant and sound just like local underwriting sold by public radio stations.”
The network already includes such entities as KPCC and its “LAist” products, KQED, KERA, WHYY, Minnesota Public Radio, KALW, Baltimore Public Media, WBUR, WOSU, Cincinnati Public Radio, West Virginia Public Radio, Alaska Public Media, WLRN, WBEZ, KUER, WETA, Houston Public, WGBH and music-driven KEXP, among other noncommercial secular radio enterprises.
