The NAB made another run at Commissioner Anna Gomez’s office last week, delivering fresh audience and revenue data in support of eliminating local radio ownership caps to the lone FCC Commissioner to publicly and repeatedly oppose consolidation.
NAB Senior Vice President and Deputy General Counsel Jerianne Timmerman, along with Rick Kaplan, Erin Dozier, and Nandu Machiraju, met April 9 with Gomez aides Deena Shetler and Harsha Mudaliar, the same staffers who heard NAB’s deregulation pitch in September. The 2022 Quadrennial Review remains pending at the Commission.
The centerpiece of NAB’s argument was Edison Research’s Share of Ear data showing AM/FM radio’s share of total audio listening time fell to 32 percent in 2025, down from 53 percent when the ownership caps were last updated in 1996. Streaming music, YouTube music content, and podcasts now collectively account for 50 percent of consumer audio time.
Revenue tells a parallel story. Total radio ad revenues, including over-the-air and digital, declined more than 30 percent from $17.4 billion in 2007 to an estimated $12.17 billion in 2025, with the gap driven largely by digital platforms capturing local advertising dollars. According to Borrell Associates data cited in the filing, local digital advertising reached $103 billion in 2024, with roughly 85 percent of that spending flowing to companies like Google and Facebook rather than local media outlets.
The disparity is most acute outside major markets. In 2024, the average full-power commercial station in the smallest Nielsen Audio markets earned just 8.2 percent of the ad revenue generated by the average station in the top ten markets.
NAB framed deregulation not merely as a financial remedy but as a programming benefit, citing a 2007 FCC-commissioned study finding that more concentrated markets produce more format diversity and that common ownership results in more variety in actual programming aired. A 2025 BIA Advisory Services report submitted with the filing found that format growth stagnated after 2006, the last year with high transaction volume under the loosened post-1996 rules.
The audience NAB is trying to convince, however, has been publicly skeptical. Gomez has repeatedly warned that consolidation risks repeating the mistakes that hollowed out local newspapers, and at a congressional oversight hearing in January described the caps in direct terms: “The caps ensure that we have multiple voices in every market.” At the FCC’s June 2025 open meeting, she was more pointed: “This FCC proposal to unleash a new era of unregulated media consolidation is only about helping the largest broadcast companies grow even larger.”
While Gomez has acknowledged the competitive squeeze broadcasters face from digital platforms, she has suggested ownership rules might be tailored to specific markets rather than eliminated outright, and has stressed that national groups seeking further roll-ups are not the ones in need of regulatory relief.
