• by Wayne Friedman , Staff Writer, March 14, 2025

Local TV advertising -- which for years has put much of its focus on those every-other-year gains of political ads -- did not perform all that well in 2024, according to Madison & Wall.

What happened? Much of it moved to digital-first owned local media.

Brian Wieser, media analyst/founder of Madison & Wall, says digital media platforms posted a significant share gain of political advertising revenue -- 43%, up from a 32% share in the fourth quarter of 2020, the last Presidential election period.

All this pulled down local TV station’s share of political dollars -- to 40% in the fourth quarter of 2024, from 50% in the same quarter of 2020.

This happened even as total media-placed political advertising dollars rose by 13% during 2024 to $16 billion over the four-year Presidential cycle.

For the full year, political -- as a percentage of total media owner advertising revenues -- slipped to 4% from 5.5% in 2020.

For the big fourth-quarter period, political advertising share was 7.1% down from 9.6% in the fourth quarter of 2020.

There was one major local TV station group outlier -- E.W. Scripps, which witnessed 54% of its fourth-quarter advertising revenue coming from political.

Still, the overall political advertising market is seemingly seeing slower growth. Currently, Wieser points to a “relatively un-competitive primary environment (which led to limited growth in fund-raising in 2024 over 2020) and perhaps because of the very high plateaus realized in 2020 and 2022.”

So going forward, should local TV now worry that one of its key dominant ad business areas over digital media for years is fading?

It depends how much local TV owners, who are moving quickly into the local streaming video space, can amass in the next several years in packaged ad deals with their slow declining local linear TV platforms.

Add in this: Local TV efforts around owned digital content-based platforms -- which had been growing with modest growth pacing -- has stalled.

BIA is projecting that these local TV station digital businesses will slip 9% to $2.1 billion, from $2.3 billion in 2024.

From all this Wieser now says that -- as anticipated -- political advertising growth ended up somewhat “muted.”

In other words, nothing to shout about.