Three data sets, published within weeks of each other, tell the same story about local media's economic future. The Local Media Consortium's 2025 Industry Insights Survey, covered by InsideRadio, found that 72% of local publishers reported digital revenue was up or flat in 2025, and 85% anticipate similar performance in 2026. The top successes cited: video, OTT, and CTV products. The top challenge: a 383% year-over-year increase in publishers citing subscription growth as a problem, echoing a Medill survey indicating only 15% of consumers are willing to pay for news.
Meanwhile, BIA Advisory Services forecasts that core over-the-air TV ad revenue is declining year-over-year excluding political spending, as dollars shift to CTV and digital. As Senan Mele, VP of Forecasting at BIA, told TV Tech: "Agencies and advertisers want to be able to report the ROI on ad investments, and it's easier to do that with a digital platform compared to TV over the air."
And from the content distribution side, Johnny O'Neill, VP of Customer Success at VideoElephant, told The Brand Beat that publishers losing search traffic to AI-generated summaries must "move away from a single point of entry and embrace a more holistic brand presence" — citing CTV, vertical video, and out-of-home as the channels where audience growth still exists.
The structural shift underneath: 2026 is an election year. Midterm political advertising will pump significant dollars into local media and local broadcast. That influx will mask an uncomfortable truth: the underlying economic model is eroding. Advertisers need to reach viewers no matter where they are, and to do that they need a cohesive video plan spanning linear, digital, social, search, and IRL.
The publishers who reported success in 2025 share a common thread: they invested in video-first digital products before the revenue model demanded it. The question for the rest of the industry is whether the remaining window is large enough to make the same transition.
The creative infrastructure gap: The strategic conversation about local media's digital transformation typically focuses on distribution (how to get content onto streaming platforms), measurement, and sales training retooled for cross-platform selling. These are all necessary. But there is a prerequisite that is consistently overlooked: creative production at the local level.
A local broadcaster pivoting from linear to CTV ad revenue needs advertisers with CTV-ready creative. The national brands already have it. But the local businesses that represent the growth opportunity from car dealerships, medical practices, restaurants, and service providers that sustain local media typically do not.
As LMC CEO Fran Wills stated in the survey release: "Publishers are responding with new, innovative cross-platform ad strategies." But a cross-platform ad strategy is only as good as the creative that runs on it. If a local publisher can offer CTV inventory but the advertiser has no video ad, the sale stalls at the same point it always has.
The path forward is video-first and creative-inclusive: The local media companies best positioned for 2026 and beyond are the ones building video production capability directly into their sales process, either through internal creative teams, AI-powered production tools, or partnerships that eliminate the creative barrier for local advertisers. Subscriptions have plateaued. Linear revenue is declining. Political spending is cyclical. Video and CTV advertising is the revenue model that local media's future depends on, and it requires creative at a scale and speed that the industry has not yet built.
