Welcome to the 2023 NZME Investor Day.
Kia ora, everyone. Hello, and welcome to New Zealand Media and Entertainment's Investor Day for 2023. Thanks for joining us today as we provide you with details of the progress we've made towards the strategic targets that we set for the business back in 2020 as part of our three-year strategy. We're proud of what we've achieved through what has been an extremely challenging economic operating environment during and post the pandemic. We are now at the end of the three-year period, and myself and members of NZME's executive team look forward to sharing details of how we fared in meeting those targets. We'll also share the details of our revised strategy to ensure future growth for NZME. On the following pages, I will provide an update of our strategic targets for the last three years. I'll then provide some further context on our short-term outlook.
We'll then move to cover our revised strategy for the next three years. I'll then hand over to David Mackrell, our Chief Financial Officer, who'll provide you with an overview of our business performance. Following that, Jason Winstanley, our Chief Audio Officer, will provide an overview of our audio business, which includes our many radio brands, our digital audio platform, iHeartRadio, and NZME's high-performing podcast network. Carolyn Luey, our Chief Digital and Publishing Officer, will then outline our publishing business, which covers both our print products and our digital platforms. And finally, Greg Hornblow, our Chief of OneRoof, will then provide details around OneRoof's performance and plans as the fastest-growing property platform in the country. Our chairman, Barbara Chapman, will then join us and will be happy to take any questions you may have.
First, I'd like to set the scene for today's presentation by sharing with you the phenomenal scale and reach of NZME's platforms. These are enjoyed by our loyal readers, listeners, and our audiences each and every day. We reach more than 3.5 million people across the country, with more than 91% of the people living in Auckland engaging with our platforms each month. We reach almost 90% of people living in the North Island and 72% of South Islanders. That's a growing audience for us. You'll see a number of our market brands highlighted in the slide under each of our divisions of audio, publishing, and OneRoof. Our brands are identifiable. They're well known and popular. They engage audiences across the country, and they reach hundreds of thousands of Kiwis each and every day.
These brands and platforms deliver exceptional content to our audience and reach to our advertisers. At NZME, we're incredibly fortunate to be governed and supported by an engaged and independent board with diverse experience and backgrounds. Our Board Chairman, Barbara Chapman, will join us a little later for the Q&A section of our presentation today. I'd like to say a big thank you to you, Barbara, to Carol Campbell, David Gibson, Sussan Turner, and Guy Horrocks for their support of myself, the executive team, and our wider NZME team over these past three challenging years. Thank you for your ongoing passion and commitment to NZME. We very much appreciate your ongoing guidance, extensive knowledge, and your support. We have a powerful team of more than 1,200 committed team members here at NZME. NZME's employer promise, "This could lead anywhere," highlights the limitless growth and development opportunities available at NZME.
In addition to an external advertising campaign to attract new talent to NZME, we also have a number of new initiatives to help inspire our team right across the country. This includes a new leadership program, an induction for new starters, and ongoing reward and engagement activities. These come under three pillars: IInspire Me, Coach Me, and Develop Me . We remain committed to fostering an innovative, engaged, and inclusive workplace. Having initiatives to support a great workplace culture, providing learning and development opportunities for everyone, and creating exceptional leaders further ensures the future growth and sustainability of our business. We are really proud to see that NZME's employee engagement is now ranked within the top 10% of media companies globally. At NZME, we're committed to protecting the craft of journalism and broadcasting.
We do this by making a positive impact for our communities, our people, and playing our part in protecting the environment. We strive to connect and empower our communities right across New Zealand, including our audience of 3.5 million. We provide diverse, balanced, quality, trusted news, and we facilitate conversations about the topics that matter most to New Zealanders. As I just noted, we are also committed to providing a workplace that fosters innovation, engagement, and inclusion. We're committed to reducing and mitigating our environmental impact, and we believe we have a critical role to play in utilizing our platforms to grow community connection and engagement on local and global environmental issues. NZME sustainability program is aligned to the guidance set out in the UN Sustainable Development Goals.
We also benchmark our efforts against global sustainability standards, industry trends, our media peers, both here in New Zealand and globally. Turning now to look at the three strategic priorities that we set in 2020, these had clear targets for the business to meet by the end of 2023. I know many of you will be very familiar with these by now, as we are at the end of our three-year strategy. Shortly, I'll speak about our strategic focus, but first step, let me recap. Our three strategic priorities were: to be New Zealand's leading audio company, for the New Zealand Herald to become New Zealand's Herald, and for OneRoof to become your complete property destination. Under each of these three key pillars, we had a number of focus areas. They also had measurable targets, which I'm really pleased to be able to update you on today.
Over recent years, we've had a large focus on growing digital revenues. This is a key part of our digital transformation. Digital revenues have shown strong growth over recent years across each of the three pillars. It's pleasing that this has continued during the tougher economic climate. You'll note from our presentation that we are committed to growing digital revenues, and it is a core part of our future improved profitability at NZME. With the digital growth that we've just discussed, every business is showing a change in the digital mix of revenue. Digital audio is making inroads. You'll hear later today that we have more than 70% market share versus our key competitor, and that we have significant potential for further rapid growth. Digital revenues within both our publishing, advertising, and reader revenue now have significantly changed the mix of print versus digital revenues.
Finally, with the growth in OneRoof.co.nz, a transformational change is happening within this business. Across NZME, total digital revenues have more than doubled as a percentage of total revenue since 2019. Digital revenue now represents 29% of NZME's total revenue. So let me now take you through the scorecards versus the targets that we set ourselves in 2020. Audio has delivered a very strong performance over the years. We've seen audience share growth over the last three years. However, we're not quite to the levels we set. We've got plans to improve this. Radio revenue share has also grown well and continues to do so in the second half of 2023. More on that a bit later. And digital audio has outperformed our expectations and will feature strongly in the years ahead. Finally, EBITDA margins are expected to reach the target levels.
Overall, this is a pleasing result for the audio business. The publishing business has made significant progress in its digital transformation also. This is clearly highlighted by the strong growth in subscriptions, with 56% of subscriptions now being digital. Additional digital advertising revenue has become a much bigger portion of total advertising revenues. The percentage of household subscribing target was not quite met. That reflects a growth in the number of households within the country. While profitability has been very strong over recent years, this year has been impacted by the economic downturn and lower overall market advertising revenues. While EBITDA margins are stronger in the second half of the year, they will not be enough to hit the strategic targets that we set just three years ago. The publishing business will continue with its strong digital transformation, though, in the years ahead.
So finally, let's turn to the OneRoof scorecard and its endeavor to be your complete property destination. While there's still a gap in total listings to Trade Me, you'll see later in the presentation how this looks right around the country and versus other competing platforms. With the real estate market quieter in the first half of the year, we did see some overall audience down slightly. However, the gap to Trade Me continued to close. We've seen strong growth in listings upgrades, and we've been achieving records in the second half of this year. This will result in OneRoof continuing to see more and more of its revenue being digital, increasing the digital versus print revenue mix. As signaled last year, we did not expect to achieve the OneRoof EBITDA margin target this year, as we continue to invest in OneRoof's growth.
We are currently on track, though, for OneRoof to be profitable in the second half of this year. OneRoof.co.nz is currently delivering record revenue results on a regular basis. So let's now talk about 2023 specifically, the environment we're operating in, and the three years ahead. The charts on this page will not be new to most of you. NZME has operated amidst a backdrop of difficult trading conditions over the last year. A number of outcomes from this were clearly evident in the scorecard that we just discussed. Market commentators note that we've some time to go before we'll see significant improvement on some of these key metrics. However, improvements are likely to be on the horizon. We've seen improvements in confidence levels. While business confidence has been at lows over the last year, it has recovered well and is now in strong positive territory in October 2023.
This bodes well for future advertising revenues. However, consumer confidence remains under pressure. High interest rates and increasing unemployment will hold consumer confidence lower for some time. As Westpac notes, New Zealand remains on course for a period of subdued economic growth. We've been pleased to see business confidence improving, as per the last chart. It's a great barometer of what we expect to happen to advertising revenues. We've seen a trend of advertising revenue improvement in the second half of this year. However, it has not yet returned to consistent growth. In addition, we've seen advertisers being extremely cautious, with many expected bookings just not turning up in the month. Given this inconsistency, last week, NZME updated its earnings guidance for 2023. As just noted, the economic environment over the past year has been difficult.
While first half advertising revenues were down 7% year-on-year, the second half has seen improvements in advertising revenues, with some months even in growth. Given this, NZME amended its guidance for EBITDA to be between NZD 57 million and NZD 59 million for 2023. As I noted earlier, we are seeing some strong results from OneRoof off the back of an improving real estate market. Quarter 3 saw OneRoof digital revenues grow 16% year-on-year, and October saw an increase of 23%. The board regularly turns its mind to capital management. As noted here, the board wishes to reiterate it remains open to returning any excess capital. It will review the company's capital management options in February of 2024. Let me now turn to focus on the next three years. Global platforms continue to demonstrate the value that they are creating for shareholders.
Digital transformation is at the heart of these businesses. On the left, iHeartMedia now delivers 26% of its revenue via digital audio. NZME is leading in the market in this category in New Zealand. The New York Times has proven itself as a leading publisher globally, with significant digital subscription growth. NZME is the leading digital news subscription business in New Zealand. And finally, Domain has delivered strong shareholder value creation as the number two real estate listing portal in Australia. OneRoof has grown quickly and is achieving record growth in real estate classifieds here in New Zealand. These three global platforms showcase clear pathways for shareholder value creation for NZME in the years ahead. Over the last month, we've organized our publishing business into separate digital and print units. We are operating as a truly digital-first business.
This now allows us to run the businesses with a focus on understanding the key drivers of audience, performance, and profitability within these two units. Let me now, for the first time, overview the profitability of each unit. I'm delighted to report that NZME has a profitable digital business that can fund journalism. The print business currently delivers the majority of the profitability and a 21% EBITDA margin, with the digital business margin at 13%. However, it's worth highlighting that the digital business and EBITDA includes our fully loaded editorial and newsroom costs. Only a small amount of print content production and editorial costs are allocated to the print business. This is a core part of running a digital-first newsroom.
This is a testament to the fact that the digital business is now funding journalism into the future, with the print business focused on maintaining profitability and delivering strong cash flows for many years ahead. The implementation of the new operating model provides clear line of sight within these businesses and the crossover of profitability that will occur in the years ahead. This clear line of sight is critical to understanding the profit pools from these businesses. As I just noted, we're pleased to have a profitable digital business that has ability to fully fund New Zealand's leading journalism. The digital business now has autonomy to make decisions that are right for its audience and its subscribers and allows it to clearly consider the opportunities and the investments for the digital business's success. The print business can clearly focus on its products and profitability.
We believe that this will extend the runway for the print business. At some point, there will be decisions to be made between print and digital. This separation allows us to clearly understand this inflection point and provides clarity for future decision making. The separation of the digital and print businesses is a key strategic move for our audiences, our customers, and importantly, for NZME. Let me now introduce you to the three strategic pillars that have evolved as we focus on our strategy for the coming three years. We want to be number one in audio. This means that we will create the most listened to and loved content. We will monetize this by delivering customer solutions that grow revenue share, and we will capitalize on our leading position in the podcast market. We want to be New Zealand's leading news destination.
We will be that by scaling digital audiences and monetizing them through our news platforms. We will use our expert journalism to grow our digital subscription revenues, and as just noted, we will run a high quality and efficient print business. Finally, we want OneRoof to be your essential property platform. To do this, we will provide a superior listings experience and performance. We will monetize this audience and listings while also accelerating growth of our non-listings portfolio. You'll hear more on each of these shortly. We believe today we are outlining a digital-led strategy that is focused on delivering superior returns. This strategy will set us apart from our competitors, and we expect it to drive returns for shareholders. Our audio business has significant opportunities that are improving our audio profitability. In publishing, we are investing in our digital publishing platform and a new business of journalism operating model.
As just noted, we have a profitable digital business that will fund journalism for the future generations. Our OneRoof business is at a tipping point. It is now profitable, and we remain confident of the significant shareholder value that can be created within this very large profit pool. We also believe the competitive and economic environment support and are conducive to NZME delivering superior returns through its digital-led strategy. I'll now pass over to our Chief Financial Officer, David Mackrell. David has been with NZME as CFO since March 2019, and he'll be well known to many of you. He has responsibility for our finance, technology, legal, and strategy functions right across the business. Thanks, David. Over to you.
Thanks, Michael, and kia ora, everyone. It's great to have you all joining us today. Let me now update you on how we've traveled over recent years. The chart on the left shows revenue by division over the last 5 years. It shows the impact of COVID on 2020 and 2021, and then the impact of the challenging economic environment on 2023. You can also see the changing revenue mix, with the growth in digital publishing revenue offsetting the decline in print-related revenue. The chart on the right shows the resulting earnings impact, with EBITDA and NPAT improving in 2022, but expected to be lower this year as a result of a weaker demand environment. We are focused on improving these results in the years ahead. We implemented a number of initiatives in 2020 to permanently reduce the cost base by NZD 20 million.
A continuous focus on the cost base has been maintained, ensuring that the 2023 cost base is forecast to be below the 2019 level, despite the inflationary pressures that have been evident during this time. Investment in the growth of OneRoof, together with the acquisition of BusinessDesk, have increased the core cost base, albeit partially offset by the disposal of GrabOne in 2021. People costs, which is the most significant expense category, have increased due to wage and salary inflation. Print volumes have reduced significantly, resulting in lower print and distribution costs, albeit higher paper prices and distribution rate increases have partially offset the volume rate related reductions. We remain focused on containing the cost base moving forward. Capital expenditure has now stabilized at around NZD 10 million per annum, following reduced spend in 2020 and 2021 in response to COVID.
This level of spend is similar to 2019, adjusted for the change in accounting treatment of software as a service related development spend. The majority of annual capital spend is on product development of our digital platforms, in line with our strategic priorities. Spend on broadcast and technology infrastructure is reasonably consistent year-over-year. Alongside the annual capital expenditure, there is typically NZD 1-3 million of software-as-a-service development costs, which are treated as an operating expense. We envisage maintaining this level of spend as we progress over the coming years. As part of our capital management program, we are very focused on cash flows. The chart on the left shows that the group continues to generate strong free cash flows and has done so over the last 5 years.
Reducing net debt was a key focus from 2019, resulting in the business achieving a net cash position at the end of 2021. This enabled our capital management program to return substantial excess capital to shareholders. The company's target leverage ratio remains at 0.5 to 1 times EBITDA, pre-IFRS 16. However, with the current economic uncertainty, the company intends to operate at the lower end of this target leverage ratio, with leverage expected to be around 0.3 times by the end of the year. As Michael mentioned, the board will continue to monitor this carefully. I just noted the substantial return of excess capital to shareholders in 2022.
The company returned NZD 43 million to shareholders in 2022 through the payment of NZD 25.4 million in dividends, including a NZD 9.7 million special dividend and NZD 17.6 million through the repurchase of shares. The bars on the left of the chart show the dividends declared each year, with last year including NZD 0.09 per share of ordinary dividends and a NZD 0.05 special dividend. On the right of the slide, the bars show the dividends paid and shares repurchased each year. As you will note, there have been significant cash distributions to shareholders over recent years as part of NZME's capital management program. We expect significant changes in the earnings mix over coming years.
The pie charts on this slide highlight the transformation of the business that has occurred and the expected continued transformation over the next three years. Moving from the 2019 chart on the left to the 2023 chart in the center, the growth and share of earnings from audio is evident in the purple segment. The emerging relevance of digital publishing is shown by the dark green segment now that we are splitting it from the print publishing in light green. Looking forward to 2026, the right-hand chart shows the expectation that digital publishing profitability will exceed print, and that OneRoof will be making a significant contribution to group profitability. We expect that this transition and earnings profile will significantly improve the valuation profile and metrics of the business. It really is an exciting digital transformation. Let me now hand you back to Michael to introduce the team.
Thanks, David, for taking us through those trends in both revenue and profitability. I'd now like to introduce you to Jason Winstanley. Jason took up the role of Chief Audio Officer two years ago. Before that, he was NZME's Head of Talk, leading Newstalk ZB to a record audience growth and continued commercial success. With 25 years of experience in music and talk radio, Jason is one of New Zealand's most experienced audio executives. In his role, Jason has responsibility for the content delivery across our audio business, including our news and music radio networks, and our digital audio platform, iHeartRadio, to support audience and revenue growth. Before Jason speaks, please enjoy this short clip on our audio business.
Live radio is a lot of fun because anything can happen, and that sometimes gets me in trouble. She's ready.
There is something for everyone, whether it's comedy, whether it's inspiration, whether it's news.
Anything can happen, and we can talk about it in a second. You're on our podcast. Where did it all go wrong for you?
It went wrong. I didn't come sooner.
Yes, I love this.
This is a shared moment with our listeners, with each other.
The audience choose to engage with us. They have invited us into their phones. They're listening to every word of what we're saying.
It's so easy to consume. It's just constantly there.
Any station you like, at the touch of a button.
I think podcasts are probably the way of the present. If you're not on board, it's gonna leave you behind.
We hit the ground running with flames at our feet here and now.
Being able to do my thing is as joyful as it gets.
Thanks for sharing this little bit of time with us.
Thanks, Michael. I'm delighted to be able to present NZME's three-year strategy for audio. We have built great momentum over the last three years, and our ambition is to capitalize on this and to be number one in audio. To do this, we're focusing on three pillars within our strategy. Firstly, creating the most listened to and loved content. Secondly, delivering customer solutions to grow revenue share. Finally, to grow podcast engagement and monetize these podcasts. I'll now take you through each of these pillars, showing you the current trends we are seeing overseas and locally, and then providing you insight into our three-year strategy. Let's start with the first pillar, creating the most listened to and loved content. Internationally, we continue to see radio consumption remaining high.
This chart shows total audience for the 18-49 demographic in the USA, with terrestrial radio as a percent of live and time-shifted TV. Terrestrial radio's audience in this demographic is now 5% higher than live and time-shifted TV. This demonstrates that radio continues to be extremely important to listeners in the USA. If we now focus on the overall audio consumption in the USA, terrestrial radio remains extremely important, and digital continues its strong growth. On this graph, you can see the dark purple bars, the smaller ones on the chart. They are the percentage of Americans who have listened to a podcast in the last month.
The lighter purple is the percentage that have listened to any form of online audio, in the last week, and the lightest purple, being the largest bars, are the percentage of Americans that have listened to terrestrial radio in the last week. Within the audio ecosystem, terrestrial radio in the USA is still the primary platform for consumption. It is the same within New Zealand. Digital continues to display robust growth across both podcasting and streaming and is adding incremental listeners. The audio landscape is categorized into two primary segments, subscription-based platforms and ad-funded platforms. The left-hand graph here is showing total audio consumption by platform, including subscription and ad-funded in the USA. AM and FM radio on this graph includes both terrestrial and streaming radio and commands a substantial 37% share of the overall audio consumption market.
On the right, we're looking exclusively at ad-supported platforms, where radio continues to maintain its preeminent position, claiming a commanding 69% share. Podcasting has grown rapidly to reflect 19% of all ad-supported consumption. We see significant potential to continue to grow this. Let's focus further on the ad-supported listening for now. On the left graph here, you can see that this reinforces that AM/FM radio, which includes terrestrial and streaming radio, still reaches the most people as an ad-supported platform. A significant portion of this listening takes place on digital platforms. On the right here, you can see that in the USA, nearly 20% of radio listening is now consumed digitally. This has the advantage of content being available to audiences on more devices and in more moments, and technology is enabling these moments.
Hearables are the cordless headphones or in-ear buds that are now the societal norm.... They have made audio accessible like never before. On the left chart here, you can see the size of the global hearable market is forecast to increase substantially in the coming years, as people use these to stream audio as they go about their day. The right-hand chart reflects the trends of smart speakers and connected devices, whether that be your car, your TV, or even your refrigerator; these are increasing the moments where audio is easily accessible. While those owning a home radio is slowly declining, smart speaker ownership is increasing, with the net effect being more opportunities for audiences to engage with us. Now, let's take a look at some trends in New Zealand. The 2023 Infinite Dial study has just been released.
The study tracks mobile behaviors, internet audio, podcasting, social media, smart speakers, and more. This is the second year we've had the study here in New Zealand, and it provides us great insights and allows us to compare trends to international markets. The latest report shows that 92% of New Zealanders listen to audio each week. This matches consumption of free-to-air TV and video streaming services and far exceeds the use of social media. We have a significant opportunity to further capitalize on this audio reach. Let's now focus on commercial radio's reach in New Zealand. 3.4 million New Zealanders listen to commercial radio each week. This has remained incredibly consistent over the last 5 years and shows the power of the medium.
The chart you can see on the screen demonstrates the consistency across New Zealand's major markets, with the purple bars here showing commercial radio audiences in those markets and the black line illustrating the total population in those markets. Radio remains highly engaging, with audiences listening for over 15 hours each on average per week. Digital audio consumption has experienced significant growth in the last 6 years. On the chart on the left, we have online audio consumption in the USA, Australia, and New Zealand, and as you can see, we are in line with these international markets. On the right, the chart shows that we have the highest rates of consumption among individuals aged 16-34, where a remarkable 94% engage with either digital radio or exclusive streamed audio content on a monthly basis. It's pleasing to see younger audiences engaging with audio content.
Here at NZME, we are well-positioned across all parts of the audio ecosystem when compared to our local and international competitors. The chart on the screen has NZME at the top and our competitors below. We have noted where each of the brands has an offering across radio, music streaming, and podcasting. We also note the audio app that is used. At NZME, we have offerings across terrestrial radio, digital radio, ad-funded music streaming, and podcast. No other competitor matches us with the breadth of offering. Spotify is a large player in the market due to a telco in New Zealand providing subscriptions as part of a mobile bundle. This audience is unable to be reached by advertisers and therefore provides an opportunity for us. NZME's product breadth and multiple touchpoints allows us to not only engage with audiences, but also provides extensive opportunities for advertisers.
NZME brands extend across broadcast and digital as we look to develop more content across all audio channels. We're active in 27 markets around New Zealand, with 147 commercial radio stations. NZME has launched 18 new original podcasts so far this year, adding to our catalog of more than 30 catch-up radio show podcasts and an extensive selection of international podcasts. The Mike Hosking Breakfast podcast is all of the key content from New Zealand's number one radio breakfast show and is currently New Zealand's number one podcast. Sex.Life is an original comedy podcast created by NZME with two of New Zealand's leading talent and has gained a loyal audience base. We have Season Two on the way next year. As you can see, NZME has a diverse content offering for both our audience and advertisers.
Our award-winning brands target all the key demographics, ensuring a wide and varied content offering to meet the needs of New Zealand's audiences. On the chart here, our brands are displayed by target audience, youngest on the left, oldest on the right. Our news and talk brand, Newstalk ZB, on the top right, with a target demo of 45-59, remains the leading station in New Zealand, with the biggest radio audience share and cumulative audience. Our top forty brand, ZM, on the top left, with a target demo of 18-39, actually has the most audience in the commercially attractive 25-54 demographic. Our digital-exclusive content includes the NZME Podcast Network, our newly launched ad-funded music service, iHeartRadio Playlists, and the Alternative Commentary Collective, New Zealand's leading sports entertainment offering.
With all our brands, we ended up being the leading company at the 2023 New Zealand Radio Awards, winning six of the eight premier awards. Let's look at the performance of our brands, both terrestrially and digitally. Two million New Zealanders listen to an NZME radio station each week, either terrestrially or via iHeartRadio, as seen here on the chart on the left. The middle chart shows our station share, with the dark purple representing our music brands and the light purple our talk offering. While our talk audience has normalized post the strong news cycle generated by COVID, we have seen growth with our key music stations, which is part of our strategy. On the right chart, you can see our digital audio total listening hours. The dark purple part of the bar is podcasts, and the light part is streaming.
We're pleased to see continued growth with now more than 9 million listening hours per month. We aim to grow all of these metrics, but more on that later. Now let's take a look at the devices that our audience are using to listen to our brands. Mobile devices continue as the dominant device for audio consumption of NZME's brands, while connected devices now have surpassed desktop listening, as you can see on this chart. Connected devices includes TVs, gaming consoles, watches, and smart speakers. In New Zealand, ownership of smart speakers lags behind global markets, currently standing at only 22%. This presents a great opportunity for NZME as ownership increases in the coming years. Let's take a look at the entire commercial radio market and the audience for each brand on our bubble chart. The horizontal axis on this chart is the average audience age of each brand.
The vertical axis is the percentage female versus male, and the size of the bubble represents the cumulative audience. NZME stations are highlighted in purple here, and our direct competitor, MediaWorks, in gray. A key area of focus for us is closing the gap in the 40-50 demographic with our brands, The Hits and Coast. We want to see the average age of The Hits grow slightly older and the Coast average to grow slightly younger. We also want to see all of our bubbles grow in size, resulting from bigger audiences. Speaking of The Hits, it's one of our priority brands with music and content targeting 30-49-year-olds. It is pleasing to report our strategy is working and has delivered audience growth throughout 2023, as shown here on the left-hand chart, with the total New Zealand station share growing over recent years.
On the right, you can see the performance of Jono and Ben, who are our network breakfast show. They've gone up six audience surveys in a row. We're really pleased with the show and how it is performing. We're gonna be launching a new afternoon drive show next year on The Hits to continue the brand's growth. We're excited about the growth opportunity that we see with The Hits. Now let's take a look at Coast. Coast is focused on the 40-59-year-old demographic and is our easy listening brand here in New Zealand. We have made a number of changes in the last two years, introducing new talent and making some content changes. We're now seeing the positive impact of those changes as Coast delivers audience share growth. The three charts at the bottom here show the three biggest cities in New Zealand: Auckland, Wellington, and Christchurch.
We've seen solid growth in each market over the last two years, demonstrating our strategy is working. The Coast team are producing some excellent podcasts as well. This includes We Need to Talk with Toni Street. These are getting great audience engagement and advertiser commitments. It's also pleasing to note we have seen 30% growth in iHeartRadio total listening hours for Coast when you compare it 2020 versus 2023. Speaking of iHeartRadio, it is, of course, our digital audio platform that we license here in New Zealand. It's a one-stop shop for radio, music, and podcasts. On this slide, you can see the functionality that the platform provides us. iHeartRadio gives us market-leading functionality for both consumers and advertisers. This year, we've launched Playlists.
It's an ad-funded music streaming service offering themed and curated playlists across multiple genres, while allowing listeners to build their own playlists, all for free. We continue to make great use of the talkback function, allowing for real-time feedback and engagement with listeners via the iHeartRadio app on smartphones. Again, this is a market leader and one of the benefits of being on the iHeartRadio platform. We have 1.3 million registered users and integrations across more than 250 different devices. We are working hard to ensure we can access and utilize the data and personalization capability that the iHeartRadio platform affords us, but more on this shortly. Let's now summarize the key areas of focus for us over the next three years as we create the most listened to and loved audio content. We want to grow market share with The Hits and Coast.
We've seen good results in recent years and know there is more to deliver. Further leverage the iHeartRadio functionality and roadmap. It represents a competitive differentiator for us in the market. Grow our total digital audience even further, and be seen and heard on all platforms and devices. This aids discoverability and allows us to then bring the audience back to our own platforms. Now let's move to our second pillar: to deliver customer solutions to grow revenue share. First, let's take a look at what is happening globally. iHeartRadio is the leading audio media company in the USA, reaching nine out of ten Americans each month. On this page, you can see iHeart's financial results, where in the first six months of this year, total revenue was $1.7 billion.
Digital revenues now make up 28% of the total revenue at NZD 483 million. That's up from 26% in 2022. Podcast revenue continued to grow, up NZD 19 million to now be 10% of total revenue, which is NZD 173 million for the first six months. These figures clearly demonstrate the strength and growth of digital audio. This is why we see iHeartRadio as the foundational platform for NZME's digital audio growth. Research from the USA shows a continuing issue with advertisers and agencies. They have a very different perception of platforms when compared to the reality of the actual audience behaviors. In these charts, you can see advertisers' and agencies' perceptions of various audio platforms, and then the actual share of time spent with each platform.
The perception advertisers and agencies have of AM/FM radio is well below how much audiences are actually using it. Advertisers and agencies perceive that 26% of time is spent on ad-supported AM/FM radio, where in reality it is a massive 69%, a huge variance in opportunity. Pandora and Spotify ad-supported platforms, on the other hand, have a far higher perception level. We have an increased focus on audio advocacy. This is providing agencies and advertisers with clear facts and research, allowing them to make the best decisions on where to spend their advertising dollars. As you'll note, it's important that we change perceptions with reality. Now let's take a look at the radio advertising market revenues in New Zealand. On this chart, you can see the total radio advertising revenues back to 2016, and a forecasted figure for 2023 of NZD 231 million.
2022 revenues were an increase on 2021's revenues, heading back closer to pre-COVID levels. 2023 has been a challenging year for revenue so far, but we are seeing signs of the audio market recovering in the second half of this year. Our direct sales channel represents approximately 70% of our revenues for audio, with media agencies delivering the other 30% of revenue. As we've noted previously, this is the opposite of the Australian market, where agencies' revenues are dominant. This provides an opportunity for NZME to deal directly with end user clients. Now, let's break down the total New Zealand radio market revenue by month over the last three years. The bars on this chart show the total radio revenue per month, with the dark purple segment being NZME's revenue, the light purple being the rest of the audio market that is measured.
The black line on this chart represents our NZME market share each month. While 2023 has been challenging due to economic conditions, we have increased our market share, which is one of the key metrics in our three-year strategy. This year, we have begun measuring the digital advertising revenue market share against our key competitor. This confirms the strength of our proposition, with NZME achieving over 70% revenue market share. Growing total revenue and market share will continue to be a focus over the next three years. Digital audio revenue continues to also be a major focus for us at NZME. On this chart, you can see our total digital audio revenue over the last seven years with the purple bars, and the black line shows the percentage digital makes up of our total audio revenue.
NZME's digital revenue continues its strong growth and is forecast to be more than NZD 8 million this year. It'll end up around 7% of our total audio revenue for 2023, which is well ahead of our 3-year strategic goal. Podcasting is forecast to make up 30% of our digital revenue this year and is a key area of focus for us, which I'll speak more about shortly. NZME is able to commercialize podcasts on any device or platform, but again, I'll take you through this shortly. This growth in digital audio is delivering the revenue market share success that I noted on the previous chart. With increased digital consumption comes increased data. Increasing our utilization of this data for both content recommendations and personalized advertising will aid monetization going forward. We will provide audiences better content recommendations, ensuring they are more engaged.
As you can see here, using iHeartRadio, we can recommend more of NZME's content to audiences based on their listening habits. There is now more demand from advertisers to buy specific audiences. We can use the data available across all our NZME digital platforms to better personalize advertising for our commercial partners. First-party data is a key area of focus for us, ensuring we know more about our audiences and how they're using NZME's products. As I mentioned earlier, NZME is well positioned in the audio ecosystem, with capability to deliver advertising across digital radio, music streaming, and podcasts. On this page, you can see all our offerings across audio and the audiences we are able to deliver to our commercial partners. With digital radio, we have all of our key brands, as well as international radio stations.
We've got music streaming, including artist radio and our new playlist functionality, and then the NZME Podcast Network, with our own original podcasts, radio station catch-up podcasts, and podcasts from our international partners. One of the strengths of being with iHeartRadio is that we are able to engage with audiences on multiple devices and platforms. Consumption on the iHeartRadio platform represents 49% of our podcast listening. The other 51% is delivered on other podcast platforms. This capability enables us to have offerings in the places where our audiences are consuming. However, we promote iHeartRadio as the preferred platform within all content, with a focus on growing our share of podcast consumption. To summarize now, here are the key areas of focus for us over the next three years as we deliver customer solutions to grow revenue share.
We want to grow the total audio market revenue, accessing TV revenues that are in decline. Audio advocacy with agencies and customers is a key component of this. Deliver integrated campaigns utilizing NZME's wider assets, a differentiator from our competitors. And increasing data capability by accessing NZME's touchpoints across its multitude of leading digital platforms. Let's move to our final pillar now to grow podcast engagement and monetize. Podcast revenues continue to show strong growth in the USA. On the chart, you can see here the actual revenues for the last three years in black, and then the estimated revenues in red. Last year, podcast revenues in the USA were up 26% to $1.8 billion. If you take the USA population of around 330 million, for 2023, that is around $7 per person in ad revenue.
If we extrapolate that out to the New Zealand market, that would give us a $35 million podcast market opportunity here. We estimate we're around 3-5 years behind the USA market in maturity, but this is definitely a real growth opportunity for us. The great thing about podcasting is it provides incremental audience to the audio category. On this chart from the USA, you can see what 12- to 54-year-olds are giving up to consume podcasts. In this research, social media, the likes of TikTok, Facebook and Instagram, and video streaming, YouTube, are the two biggest activities audiences are giving up to listen to podcasts. This reinforces that podcasting is bringing new and incremental audiences to the audio category. If we now look at New Zealand podcast consumption, we can see that New Zealand is following international markets.
In the chart on the left here, you can see the latest research from the Infinite Dial Survey. It shows the percentage of the population that have listened to a podcast in the last month. New Zealand is now ahead of both the USA and Australia, with 46% of New Zealanders 16+ having listened to a podcast in the last month. This is led by younger audiences who are more engaged with podcasts. 60% of 16-34-year-olds in New Zealand have listened to a podcast in the last month. We believe that many of these are incremental listeners within the market. The top podcast genres in the USA can be seen here on the left. Comedy, news, true crime, sport, and health and fitness are the top five.
NZME is well represented in news and opinion, comedy, and sport in New Zealand to ensure that we are delivering podcast content that we know resonates with our audiences. As well as that, NZME has a major advantage over our competitors, and the fact that through our broadcasting and digital channels, we can support the promotion and discoverability of podcast titles. We will continue to test and learn with content so that we can fulfill the needs of our audience. Our podcast audience is showing significant growth in 2023. On this chart, you can see here the monthly downloads over the last three years. Year to date, we are up 56% on 2022 and had a record 4.8 million downloads of our own produced content in September. This strong and market-leading growth in podcast downloads is allowing us to offer unique opportunities for advertisers.
We continue to celebrate that NZME is the largest podcaster in New Zealand. On the Triton NZ PodRanker, we have held the number 1 position for 25 consecutive months. On this chart, you can see the PodRanker for September 2023 by network, showing our strength in podcasting. We're also the sales house representing Audioboom and SiriusXM podcast offerings here in New Zealand, which gives us a huge commercial network, 14 times that of our nearest competitor. This scale allows us to offer compelling propositions to our customers. With podcasting, we're able to distribute and commercialize our offering on all platforms. This includes iHeartRadio, Spotify, and Apple. We're also able to represent other producers' content across these platforms. This chart displays our podcast downloads by quarter. The gray part of the bar is the content produced by NZME. The purple is the downloads from the partner content that we represent.
Having scale in podcasting is essential to enable advertisers to reach audiences. We have our own content and our partners' content that we can monetize on platforms that we own or others that we use. The key areas of focus for us over the next 3 years as we grow podcast engagement and monetize them are: firstly, to produce new content in line with international genre preferences. We're already doing really well with this, but have some further areas to focus on. Continue to utilize NZME's platforms to grow podcast awareness and consumption. As I noted, we are already the leading podcaster, and we know we can continue this momentum. Increasing podcast consumption on our owned iHeartRadio platform will allow us to gain more insight into audiences via the data capability and personalization of the platform.
Finally, leveraging all of NZME's assets, including sales teams, will allow us to drive incremental audio revenue. We are really excited about the opportunities that our market-leading podcast proposition provides. Now I'll share with you our targets for the years ahead. Consistent with the last 3 years, we want to increase audience share in radio by 1 percentage point each year for the next 3 years. In addition, we want to increase revenue market share by 1 percentage point each year for the next 3 years. This will see a very strong business built over this time. Given the strong share and growth aspiration we have for digital audio, we want 12% of our total audio revenue to come from digital audio by the end of 2026. Finally, we want a profitable audio business with EBITDA margins of between 15%-17%.
We believe that these levels of growth will make NZME number one in audio. I look forward to answering any questions you may have after some of my colleagues have spoken. Let me now hand you back to Michael. Hey, thanks for that, Jason. As you will have seen, there's some really positive momentum in our audio business, despite a pretty challenging environment. It's great to also hear about some of the exciting future opportunities we have for that area of our business. We believe the future is really bright for audio. Now I'll ask Carolyn Luey, our Chief Digital and Publishing Officer, to provide an update on our publishing business. Carolyn was appointed to the role in August of 2021. She has extensive experience as a strategic business leader in large New Zealand telecommunications, technology, and media companies. Carolyn has responsibility for our publishing business.
This incorporates our national, regional, and community print publications, as well as our digital channels, including our subscription platforms, such as New Zealand Herald Premium, Viva Premium, and BusinessDesk. Before Carolyn speaks, please enjoy this short clip on our publishing business.
I became a journalist. I became a journalist.
I became a journalist.
I became a journalist.
I became a journalist.
I became a journalist, quite simply, because I believe that by telling people's stories, we can help change the world for the better.
Prime Minister-elect Christopher Luxon will make his way down to Wellington today to start building his new government.
Our prayers are with the people of Hawaii, it's not over.
Grave concerns as the death toll rises in the wake of Cyclone Gabrielle.
Like all players, Springboks will wear Alice-
This is the biggest female sporting event in the world.
We are concerned with the situation will escalate in the coming days.
I became a journalist because I wanted to be a part of history and to tell people's stories.
I became a journalist to keep people informed.
I became a journalist to hold big money to account.
I became a journalist to give a voice to those whose stories would otherwise go unheard.
If it's news you can trust, it's news worth knowing.
Thanks, Michael, and kia ora, everyone. We've had a big year in 2023 as our final year of delivering our previous 3-year strategy. I'm excited today to share with you our publishing strategy for the next 3 years and our new strategic priorities. I thought I would start by providing some context by talking through some of the big macro trends that have shaped our thinking and strategy. The news media landscape will continue to rapidly evolve over the medium to long term, where many global publishers are preparing for a digital-only world. We're anticipating that the news media landscape will converge across newspapers, magazines, and TV. The key differentiator for audiences and advertisers will no longer be the channel, it'll be about the different types of media, like text, image, audio, video, and multimedia.
As NZME already operates across different media types, due to our continued focus on innovation and diversifying our platforms, we are well placed to take advantage of this convergence. New York Times continues to be the gold standard in the global publishing market, so is a useful benchmark to measure our progress against. NZME is now in its 5th year of our digital subscription journey, with digital subscriptions revenue now representing 9% of revenues. At the same point in the journey, New York Times is slightly ahead at 12% of revenues. New York Times now has more than 40% of revenue in digital subscriptions, and a key focus for NZME over the next 3 years is to continue to grow digital subscription revenues alongside digital advertising. We think we have a strong momentum and competitive advantage in being New Zealand's leading digital subscription business.
In 2023, we have shifted into the next horizon of our digital transformation focus to further accelerate our digital growth in both subscriptions and advertising while maintaining our print business. We moved over recent years from being a print-centric digital model to one which is digital-centric hybrid model. We've transformed the operating model this quarter to create separate digital and print teams to ensure we have dedicated focus on each. The biggest change has been for our newsroom, where our news gathering teams are now fully focused on being truly digital-first. While we now have a separate print content hub, which turns the digital content into a portfolio of high-quality newspapers. The new model simplifies the publishing part of our business and creates a streamlined end-to-end focus on each, setting us up for a digital-only world in the long term.
We recently completed the Google News Initiative Publishers Sustainability Diagnostic. This tool is designed to help benchmark the performance of our publishing business with the global community of publishers across four key drivers. NZME scored 82 on the diagnostic, which placed us higher than 90% of publishers across the world. This confirms that we are well-positioned for long-term sustainability. Across the four drivers of sustainability, we scored well above the median benchmark for financial, monetization, and foundations. The key area of focus for improvement was in product and audience, where we have an opportunity to increase focus in editorial and product to grow audience reach and engagement. This is a key area of focus for the next three-year strategy, and our new operating model will accelerate progress in this area.
Our vision is to be New Zealand's leading news destination, and we'll achieve this through the three pillars of our revised strategy: scalable digital audience and advertising news platform, expert journalism that grows subscriber lifetime value, high quality and efficient print business. Each of these pillars is focused on the core commercial drivers of our publishing business, the digital advertising business, the digital subscriptions business, and a print business. Firstly, I will start with our first pillar, scalable digital audience and advertising news platform. Our goals are to deliver trusted journalism for all New Zealanders, to expand audience through audience-first focused content and personalized experiences, to create distinctive, high-quality advertiser products and environments, and to build our first-party data to enable audience and revenue growth, to modernize the platform foundations for future growth.
Our newsroom of more than 300 expert journalists deliver nationwide coverage that reaches more than 3.3 million Kiwis each month. Our award-winning journalism is enjoyed by Kiwis across a wide range of brands, including the New Zealand Herald, our regional dailies and weekly community publications, Newstalk ZB, and our four subscription products, Herald Premium, Business Desk, Viva Premium, and ZB Plus. These brands and journalists are well known across New Zealand or within their community. They are some of the key foundations of our growth ambitions. We have some of the best journalism talent in New Zealand, and every one of our journalists across our newsroom is committed to our mission.
We are here to inform, explain, and entertain, reporting without fear or favor, acting with dignity and respect, always at the center of the debate, agents of positive change, and unswerving in our pursuit of truth for all of Aotearoa, New Zealand. Our journalism is focused on telling New Zealand's best and most important stories that are engaging and trustworthy, producing breaking news that is accurate, timely, and provides valuable context. We will inspire and champion our communities and be an important advocate on issues that matter. Be a broad church, offering analysis and opinion that challenges thinking and provides a contest of ideas. Every one of our stories looks to deliver on one or more of these key focuses.
2023 was like no other, and some of our biggest stories that connected with our readers and with the nation were: our coverage of the devastating impact of Cyclone Gabrielle, where we partnered with the Red Cross to raise more than NZD 27 million to those impacted. The New Zealand Herald Health Investigation, In Her Head, revealed how our health system is failing women and exposed the continuing misuse of surgical mesh in operations of childbirth injuries. In the wake of the investigation, Te Whatu Ora announced that these operations would be suspended. New Zealand Herald political reporter Thomas Coughlan broke the story that Transport Minister Michael Wood did not declare the shares he owned in Auckland Airport when he became an MP. Wood was dropped as Transport Minister and later resigned after it was revealed he had been asked to sell the shares several times.
Our coverage of the All Blacks in the Rugby World Cup, well-known Kiwis like Simon Barnett, and New Zealand's places to visit demonstrate the breadth of our journalism. Last year, we launched the New Zealand Herald's new brand positioning, News Worth Knowing, aimed at changing perceptions to be a modern, trusted source of news across New Zealand. The focus for 2023 has been to build out a distinctive brand code and experience across all touchpoints. The brand campaign has successfully driven recall to 55%, increased propensity to subscribe, and our key brand mark, the Gothic H, is now recognized by 88% of people. This provides a strong platform for the next phase of the brand strategy. Over the next 3 years, we plan to build on the brand platform that has been created in 2023.
We will continue to grow brand preference as the main source of trusted journalism in New Zealand. Owning this position in market will become even more important against the backdrop of the growth of generative AI-driven content with hallucinations, misinformation, and deepfakes. The next phase of our brand strategy is to expand the brand to bring engaging lifestyle to life through our fresh, creative platform, leveraging the Gothic H and new positioning like Reviews Worth Knowing and Destinations Worth Knowing. As we look to expand our audience reach across New Zealand, we'll adapt our positioning to be locally relevant, to grow brand preference alongside increased local journalism and a local product experience.
To build a scalable audience and news platform, we have six priorities and building blocks to amplify our trusted journalism. Firstly, it starts with creating the right data foundations that will deliver deep audience and content insights for our newsroom. Secondly, we have four key audience expansion focuses: regional, lifestyle, next generation, and diverse. For each of these, we will produce stories and perspectives for each of these key segments, create a relevant product experience, and then tell readers about it to drive brand preference. Our third priority is content planning, product and programming, which is focused on being audience first and delivering the right mix of stories at the right time and in the right channels based on user needs and behaviors. Our fourth priority is to enhance our storytelling by creating immersive content experiences that leverage technology-enabled production to meet different user preferences.
Our fifth focus is to build deeper reader relationships. As we know, one of the highest correlated publisher metrics to long-term sustainability is logged-in users. The more you know about users, the deeper the relationships you can build with them, leading to higher subscription and advertising revenues. Our last priority is to modernize the platform foundations to create a scalable platform for the future. As the media ecosystem continues to evolve, so do the technology enablers. Over the next section of slides, I will dive deeper into each of these priorities. In a modern newsroom, having strong data foundations is critical to building a deep understanding of audience and content to inform editorial decision making. These insights are used to decide what types of stories to commission, the optimal channel and time to distribute stories, and which reporter stories are converting the most subscribers.
We have three layers of data insights being used across the newsroom. Our daily editorial scoring report and monthly reporter scorecard are embedded across our newsroom as a tool to help improve quality and highlight what is performing and underperforming. The editorial monthly dashboard provides holistic audience traffic and competitor insights, while the user behavior heat map provides insights on the optimal publishing times for traffic and conversions. We also have specific content-driven dashboards based on key content strategies. A recent focus has been growing evergreen content, which has a longer shelf life than breaking news. The data insights have helped identify which content has evergreen value, so it can be resurfaced again to drive traffic. One of our biggest opportunities over the next three years, as per the Google News Initiative Publishers Diagnostic that I talked about earlier, is to expand our audience.
We have identified three strategic segments for audience expansion. Regional audiences. We will build a deeper relationship with regional readers by having a dedicated digital-first reporter hub, producing relevant local stories that will be showcased through our regional product experience, supported by local business advertising. We have experimented with the setup in the Waikato, where we have seen strong results, so we have a solid proof of concept to roll out progressively to other regions. Lifestyle and travel audiences. With the change in operating model, we have shifted from a print magazine-first focus model to one focused on digital-first readership. We will expand the topics and report-arounds to grow audience and will realign the product experience to our digital-first lifestyle brands, like New Zealand Herald Lifestyle and Viva.
Our next generation audience has been a focus throughout 2023, with the launch of What the Actual, which has successfully engaged a Gen Z audience across TikTok and Instagram. The next focus is to expand into a newsletter format and then a podcast to grow engagement and monetization potential. We now have a better understanding of Gen Z news consumption, so we'll translate that insight into new formats across existing platforms. Our successful Te Rito Cadet program has driven a more diverse newsroom, with many of the cadets now fulfilling roles in different parts of the newsroom. Over the next three years, we want to continue to expand the diversity of our journalism, so we will explore the next iteration of the Te Rito program alongside building on the success of Kahu.
We're pleased that NZME and the Te Rito program has just been recognized as a finalist in the Diversity Inclusion Leadership category of the Deloitte Top 200 Awards, which take place in the next month. Kahu now has monthly audience of 600,000 and has doubled in size year-over-year, driven by the expansion of content offering and the growing interest in Māori perspectives and stories. Our vision for Kahu is for it to be one of New Zealand's leading mainstream platforms for Māori storytelling by further building out quality content through identifying new talent, building partnerships, and community engagement. One of the biggest shifts we are making in becoming a truly digital audience-first newsroom is to embed a user needs planning framework to lure on stories through an audience lens. There are four key user needs.
Update me: This is the traditional breaking news updates and makes up the largest proportion of our stories today. Educate me: These are explainers that provide the reader with greater context to drive understanding. Inspire me: This is emotion-driven stories designed to engage the reader to feel something. Connect me: This is action-driven stories that are focused on how to do something, journalism that is of service and provides useful information. A large language model leveraging generative AI has been built and trained to categorize all stories into one of the user needs.... This means that the framework will be actionable and measurable and can be adopted across the newsroom. The main benefit of the shift is to unlock new story angles and shift from commoditized update-me type content to stories with stronger performance that resonate with readers.
One size fits all no longer delivers to the broad range of reader needs. Creating more immersive content experiences will be focused on delivering different formats based on reader preferences. Here are some examples of different content experiences that we are rolling out. Live news experience. This was launched this year to provide a richer timeline-driven experience for big news events and a clear visual indicator of which stories are live and evolving. Summaries created by AI. Many readers want a summary of the article before they commit to reading the whole article. Global publishers have seen an uplift in engagement when summaries have been provided. Vertical video experience. With 80% of content consumed on a mobile device, a vertical video player will provide a more seamless experience and grow storytelling in a new format, particularly for the younger generation. Text-to-speech.
With a phenomenal growth in podcasting, text-to-speech provides the ability for users to listen to the news while they are multitasking and improves accessibility for those that are sight-impaired. Generative AI has opened up the opportunities to deliver new formats efficiently, and we will continue to explore further formats to engage readers. Building deeper reader relationships is critical to future-proofing the business. Knowing who our users are provides us with the ability to surface more relevant content and deliver a more personalized experience. Our newsroom produces over 200 articles per day. A shift to a segmented homepage that balances editorial rules-based curation with personalization will deliver the trusted journalism of most interest to each individual reader. 80% of the top 15 stories on our redesigned homepage will be curated for different segments to improve relevancy.
One-to-one personalization will also be expanded, leveraging our browsing and location models to deliver recommendations into new modules and touchpoints across the site. We will leverage and extend our award-winning data capabilities to build out the segmentation model and journeys, alongside new ways of working to test, learn, and optimize the experience for readers. Our first-party data strategy is a critical driver of building deeper reader relationships and unlocking more subscriber and advertising revenue. One of NZME's strategic advantages in the local publishing market is the depth and diversity of our platforms and data. The New Zealand Herald, combined with our subscriptions data from Herald Premium, Viva Premium, and BusinessDesk, listening affinity data from iHeartRadio, and pictures intent data from OneRoof, Driven Car Guide, and Travel, gives us access to rich audience insights.
We can then ingest the declared and inferred data insights into our data platform and then enrich it with offline data or third-party partnerships. Over the next three years, we will continue to build out our first-party data, with our initial focus being on driving more known users that you can see on the left-hand side of this slide. By growing logged-in users and capturing more behavioral data, we will grow out the datasets we can use to build machine learning and predictive models to understand propensity to buy, propensity to churn, and next best action. These models will be activated to drive the audience engagement funnel and grow the subscriber base. On the right of this slide, we will be focused on building richer user profiles through progressive profiling to understand the user's intent, trends, and tastes.
This data will enable look-alike and predictive models to be built out to scale audience targeting. These models will drive advertiser activation through enhanced audience targeting and deliver deeper audience insights to advertisers, growing overall advertising revenue. As technologies continue to change, we need to continue to invest to modernize our platform foundations and create a scalable platform for the future. There are three key foundational technology areas which will help accelerate our digital growth as digital audiences scale. Development of a single NZME identity that will provide a privacy-safe, frictionless experience across all platforms and devices. This will be a key driver of first-party data in delivering a more personalized experience across all of NZME's brands like New Zealand Herald, OneRoof, BusinessDesk, Driven Car Guide, and our radio websites. Our in-house recommendations engine, Karma, has been highly successful.
We now need to transition it to a scalable service that can operate across different domains and platforms to drive audience engagement and recirculation across NZME's digital ecosystem. Consumers now expect a fully personalized customer experience, which is driving the need to build a dynamic engine that can deliver the right message in the right channel at the right time to drive audience engagement and increase conversion across the funnel. Modernizing and scaling of the platform will enable greater agility and rapid extensions in the future. NZME's audience and platform delivers the digital advertising revenue opportunity as a premium publisher in the New Zealand market. The total digital display market has grown strongly post-COVID. However, revenues have been softer in FY 2023 with the economic downturn. NZME's share remains stable, with strong demand and market for quality audience.
We believe that we can continue to grow overall digital display market revenue and share. NZME's key differentiator in a cluttered digital market is being a well-known local New Zealand brand, a brand that delivers trusted content that is independently measured and delivers transparency to advertisers. With the growth in generative AI and made-for-advertising sites, advertisers are increasingly seeking out quality, brand-safe, scalable environments that deliver client results. There is growing awareness from advertisers that not all digital inventory is equal, and that different types of campaigns demand the right mix of active and passive attention to be successful and deliver results. Digital media planning is shifting to consider attention goals, and NZME is well-placed to take advantage of this trend. Advertisers have started to consider climate change and are seeking out low-carbon media options.
A key channel of focus is programmatic buying due to the large number of intermediary technology platforms and data centers involved in the value chain. NZME is actively managing its programmatic supply chain to offer lower carbon footprint option. One of the biggest disruptions coming to the digital advertising ecosystem is the deprecation of third-party cookies in 2024. Advertisers' campaign targeting will shift from third-party cookie-based to targeting individuals, groups of people with similar characteristics, or contextual environment-based targeting. NZME is well positioned to take advantage of the disruption with a rich portfolio of targeting solutions across the spectrum, like customer data matches via clean rooms to enable advertisers to target NZME's logged-in users. Industry-driven shared ID solutions that NZME is integrated with, like LiveRamp or Unified ID 2.0. NZME's first-party data segments that enable targeting different segments by profile, location, interest, or intenders.
Third-party interest topics, which will target 350 board topics, and quality intent-based contextual environments that offer a 100% privacy-safe way of targeting users based on the content of the page, whether it is context, sentiment, or affinity driven. NZME is able to operate across each of these solutions. With the continued growth in e-commerce, a key strategic focus is to build out a portfolio of ad solutions that will deliver immersive, shoppable experiences that are aligned to the path to purchase. Awareness-driven products include interactive content video, which enables a user to select path of interest. This can be used by advertisers to engage users and understand their interests. Live shopping was launched earlier this year and provides advertisers with a platform to engage users and drive awareness of a product in a unique and interactive way.
Discovery mid-funnel products include Shopping feed-driven ads that can be served out across NZME's platforms to drive discovery of new products and offers. The selection product reviews are specifically targeted at driving product evaluation and then conversion through to buy. We have also introduced ad solutions that will shorten the path to purchase, like shoppable pre-roll video that enables users to interact with pre-roll video and purchase directly from within the ad unit. Shoppable content, which enables users to buy from within the content without leaving the site, delivering a frictionless buying experience. We have already trialed a number of these solutions in market and are ready to capitalize on the customer demand as it increases. The next pillar I would like to cover is expert journalism that grows subscriber lifetime value.
Our goals are to expand expert journalism that resonates with key reader segments, build out subscriber-centric product and vertical value propositions, and grow subscriber lifetime value through our connected customer experience and dynamic paywall. The total addressable market for new subscriptions in New Zealand is significant at 1 million subscribers. NZME subscriptions is now at 221,000 inclusive. This includes 179,000 digital subscriptions, of which 128,000 are digital only. As the category in New Zealand continues to mature, there is significant growth opportunity for NZME. With the growth of corporate subscriptions since the acquisition of BusinessDesk, this has put downward pressure on yield. Over the next three years, it will be increasingly important to balance volume and value to continue to grow subscription revenues and profitability.
The graph on the left highlights the change in mix in volume and yield in Herald Premium. The black lines are corporate. You can see as volume has grown, yield has declined, driven by unlimited user plans for large corporates and upsell to bundles with BusinessDesk with lower yields. The green is individuals. The volume has flattened, with cost of living impacting cancellations, while yield has remained stable, with the price increase from NZD 5 to NZD 6 per week flowing through during Q3. The graph on the right highlights the changes in BusinessDesk. The black lines are corporate, which has seen strong volume growth while yield has remained stable. The green lines are individuals, where volume has grown slightly and yield has dipped with the big price promotion in Q4 2022. This was followed by yield improving with a significant price increase in Q3 this year.
Our go-forward pricing strategies for Herald Premium and BusinessDesk will be differentiated to optimize revenue growth. For Herald Premium, we will focus on individuals' growth through dynamic offers based on propensity to buy and ongoing annual price increases. While with corporate, we will adjust the pricing ladder to remove unlimited user plans and reduce bulk user discounts. For BusinessDesk, we will focus on corporate growth and lifting yields year-on-year as user activation and engagement grows. With individuals, we will focus on acquisition on the annual Wall Street Journal bundle and upsell to Herald Premium bundle. Pricing and yield has become a significantly bigger focus. Herald Premium subscriptions continue to perform well versus global benchmarks. The global benchmarks are provided by the International News Media Association, who collate subscription data from publishers across 35 countries.
The key insight from the benchmarks is that NZME's subscriber penetration of audience is above the top quartile, meaning one of the key focus areas to drive growth is to expand audience and the subscription funnel. The two potential areas for improved performance is paywall stop rate and monthly churn, which are both performing at the medium benchmark level. We have a number of initiatives to address these to lift performance as part of our three-year plan, which I will be covering in the next few slides. NZME's reader revenue strategy has reached the next phase of growth. Our digital subscriptions was introduced in 2019 with a new paywall as a minimal viable product that was marketing and technology-led, with a big change in the newsroom to shift focus from audience to conversions.
Over the last three years, we have focused on growing the volume of subscribers through focusing on product market fit and expanding into verticals. The newsroom have developed a clear view of the types of content that converts and engages, and we have shifted to a cross-functional squad model to manage increased complexity. To continue to scale subscription growth over the next three years, we will need to invest and reinvent our approach to be more sophisticated, to grow recurring revenue and optimize volume. We will need to invest in our technology platforms to build out a dynamic paywall engine that will enable us to optimize conversion and yield at scale across a portfolio of subscription verticals. The newsroom will focus on user needs and developing new formats and methods that drive value perceptions and engagement.
We will reinvent the operating model and add new talent and capabilities to truly embed being a subscription-led business and deliver our reader revenue strategy. Continuing to lift the depth and breadth of expert journalism is critical to the ongoing growth of our digital subscriptions. The more that our journalism resonates and engages our readers, the greater value they will see in their subscriptions, which will increase subscriber retention across the board. Here are some examples of our expert journalism that engaged our subscribers this year. Investigative journalism, like BusinessDesk's Business of Health, deep dive into the health sector, funding and different parts of the value chain. Power lists that lift the lid on the big players across different industries, like the top McDonald's franchise owners across New Zealand. Analysis of the big events like the All Blacks Rugby World Cup journey and unpacking the 2023 general election.
Finally, regular features like Jesse Mulligan's restaurant reviews and Shayne Currie's weekly Media Insider column. We have a broad menu of journalism driving our subscriptions, and over the next three years, we will double down on growing successful formats and going deep in key topics that resonate with readers across our different subscriptions. Since acquiring BusinessDesk in early 2022, we have grown its subscriber base 80% and have built a strong pathway for further growth. Our big focus has been to leverage NZME's assets to grow BusinessDesk brand awareness. Over this period, it has grown from 44% to 54%, along with strong growth in top-line audience, which is close to 400,000 users each month.
Podcasting has become a key part of the strategy to open up the audience funnel and engage with new audiences and getting them to sample BusinessDesk content. We have invested in growing the utility of the product offering with the launch of the new mobile app and building out the content offering using generative AI to summarize NZX announcements and developing new data visualizations like the FundSource KiwiSaver comparison tool. We see significant opportunity to continue to grow the subscriber base and refined our reporter rounds to align with key growth industry verticals. While the Wall Street Journal bundle has delivered additional value to our high-value annual subscriber base to drive both acquisition and retention. ZB Plus is our most recent addition to our subscription product portfolio.
A recent Curia Market Research poll highlighted a gap in the market for a publication targeted at a business audience that was craving clear, constructive analysis and opinion. The proposition is focused on leveraging the strength of Newstalk ZB brand and opinion from the breakfast and drive shows, drawing its content from the key issues and topics from two of NZME's most popular radio shows. ZB Plus will be offered as a standalone subscription that can be bundled with NZME's other subscriptions. Our focus over the next 12 months will be to enrich the content offering and build out features like commenting and newsletters to drive subscriber engagement and value. To broaden the addressable market and drive growth of subscriptions, we will continue to build out subscriber-centric products and verticals. We have successfully deployed a build, partner, and buy verticals strategy.
We now have three subscriptions we have built from our own brands: Herald Premium, Viva Premium, and ZB Plus. We have acquired BusinessDesk, and in July this year, we launched the Listener subscription in partnership with Are Media. We plan to continue with this approach to verticals over the next three years to add further breadth to our portfolio. To increase value perceptions and retention, we plan to deliver greater subscriber utility with the expansion of our puzzles and quiz proposition, build on the success of the live streaming events we have run this year, and new features like article gifting. We also will explore introducing new product types aligned to specific user needs, like an international subscriber offering targeted at expat Kiwis living abroad, app-only subscriptions, and the addition of podcasting and other multimedia. Subscriber lifetime value is a key commercial driver of growing recurring subscription revenues.
So we plan to invest in deploying a new dynamic offers engine, and when combined with a connected experience layer, will enable us to deliver the right offer in the right channel at the right time. Taking a multi-channel, multi-product view of the customer experience will enable us to deliver a highly personalized experience that will maximize subscriber lifetime value and ensure we optimize every touch point and interaction. For example, our lowest value users are unknown users that hit the New Zealand Herald website, and we know nothing about them. Our goal through the dynamic connected experience layer will be to recommend them the next best article based on the article they have landed on, serve up a registration gate so that we know more about them, or to have them subscribe to a newsletter, so we open a new channel to engage with them in.
Once a user becomes a logged-in user, we know more about their browsing behavior, so we can give them a personalized story recommendation. From there, we can target them with a more relevant ad, which attracts the higher advertising CPM, so lifts the advertising ARPU of the user. Once a user is converted into a subscriber, we can then tailor the experience to focus on reducing propensity to churn by getting them to download the app or look to cross-sell them an additional subscription vertical with a discount to reward their loyalty. Orchestrating the experience layer over time and leveraging a dynamic offers engine ensures that every customer interaction has the potential to grow subscriber lifetime value and maximize value for NZME. The final strategic pillar I would like to cover today is our print pillar, focused on delivering a high quality and efficient print business.
Our goals are to focus on creating a standalone end-to-end print business that maximizes reader and advertising revenue, delivers a simplified product portfolio, and streamlines print production to optimize contribution from the print business, and looks for strategic synergy opportunities through partnerships and collaborations. NZME's print business has strong audience reach with 1.54 million readers each month. Our print publications serve our readers across the North Island and include the New Zealand Herald, with over 1 million readers each week, our five regional dailies with over 280,000 readers each week, and our 15 community papers with 223,000 weekly readers. Newspapers play a really important role in keeping our readers in the know and connected to what matters. Overall, the print revenue trend continues.
On the first chart, you can see that print reader revenue is forecasted to decline 6% year-on-year. FY 2023 revenues has been impacted by cost of living and weather events. The second chart shows that despite the volume of print subscribers declining, this has been offset by strong growth in yield, driven by cover price increases in H1 and the ongoing annual subscriber price reviews. Current subscriber yield per copy is NZD 1.95, leaving significant headroom for further increases. The third chart shows the print advertising market, with the green highlighting the market revenue trends, which we predict will decline further in 2023 due to the challenging economic market conditions. While our share has remained stable at 47%. Our print business over the next 3 years will be focused on 3 key areas to optimize print contribution.
Print subscriptions continue to be a significant part of our business, and we'll look to maximize revenue through the yield improvement program, creation of a unique proposition to drive digital activation to future-proof revenues, and explore third-party relationships to drive acquisition cost effectively. We will look to maximize print advertising revenues by packaging it up to be easy to sell, align, yield, and reach across the week, and deploy a print-focused sales model in areas like classifieds. Our new operating model is focused on delivering a streamlined, efficient, end-to-end workflow that delivers high-quality newspapers every day. We will continue to explore further opportunities to optimize and automate in this area. We have started to explore strategic synergies with industry print collaborations, as many New Zealand publishers face similar trends and challenges.
An example of this is that we've started to work closely with a regional publisher to help reduce their print and distribution costs. In return, helping to spread the fixed cost burden that NZME carries. We have a strong print business, and we are well-positioned to manage it through the next phase of the life cycle. There are three key components of the print business that we have future state plans for as volume continues to decline. Print supply chain. We have actively diversified our print supply chain and aligned ink and plate suppliers with industry, so we are well-placed to negotiate and manage these for continuity of supply in the future. Our print plant and equipment located in Auckland is maintained by a team of in-house experts.
The lease on the print plant expires in 2029, and we have options to extend in line with the life cycle of print as required. We also have an option to decommission parts of the plant as volume declines. Our distribution franchise network is managed by our expert in-house team, and we are actively growing third-party volume to offset decline and managing our distribution contracts to give us maximum flexibility in the future. We continue to develop options to ensure the print cost remains highly variable to volumes as we move forward. In summary, our vision is to be New Zealand's leading news destination, and the three strategic pillars are focused on driving the achievement of this vision: to build a scalable digital audience and advertising news platform, focus on expert journalism that grows subscriber lifetime value, and maintain a high quality and efficient print business.
Each of these pillars is focused on the core commercial drivers of the publishing business, a digital advertising business, a digital subscriptions business, and a print business. Our new operating model sets us up to be agile and nimble to rapidly adapt as the market evolves in the future. The three-year scorecard for 2024 through to 2026 is aligned to the delivery of our three strategic pillars. For the digital business, we are targeting growth of subscriptions from 123,000 to 190,000, to increase our digital advertising mix from 48% to 60%, and to grow the digital standalone business EBITDA from 8% to 14%-16%. The EBITDA includes our fully loaded editorial and newsroom costs, with only a small amount of print content production and editorial costs allocated to the print business.
For the print business, we are targeting to retain more than 65,000 print subscriptions, to represent 40% of total publishing advertising revenue, and to deliver a solid contribution of 13%-15% EBITDA from a standalone print business. Achieving these targets will deliver a strong publishing business over the next three years, with a strong future outlook of being a digital-only business in the longer term. I'll now hand back to Michael, and we'll be back with you again shortly for any questions you may have.
Thanks, Carolyn, for that really informative and extensive presentation on our publishing business. There are some really big opportunities to expand our offering even further to ensure we are New Zealand's leading news destination, whether audiences choose to engage with us through our digital platforms or through one of our print products. Now, I'd like to introduce you to Greg Hornblow. Greg started as Chief of OneRoof in February this year. He came to NZME with a wealth of experience in real estate, having held senior positions in a number of New Zealand's largest and top-performing real estate companies. Greg's responsible for our OneRoof business, which is New Zealand's fastest growing multi-channel real estate and property platform. The platform includes real estate listings, property valuations, and real estate news, a one-stop shop for all things property. It's a real growth opportunity for NZME.
Before we hear from Greg, please enjoy this short clip on OneRoof.
Thanks, Michael, and kia ora, everyone. It's my pleasure to take you all through the OneRoof three-year strategy. There are three pillars to the OneRoof strategy, best described as being an evolution rather than a revolution. In pillar one, we are committed to giving a superior listings experience and performance. This sees us delivering quality inquiries for our clients that other portals can't, through our extensive passive audience. In pillar two, our focus is on growing our revenue across all listings by maximizing the number of packages we sell and the yield we receive for those packages. We have great plans to accelerate the already strong gains made. And in pillar three, we will look to substantially grow our non-listings portfolio of products and services to further help OneRoof establish itself as your essential property platform.
Let me now take you through some background information before we delve into these pillars... In our next slide, we have highlighted four international portals that have developed clear roadmaps for business growth, embracing the total marketplace model. These will likely be familiar to you all. Firstly, realestate.com.au, founded in 1995, and the clear number 1 in market in Australia. Its focus for many years was to drive revenue through its core listings for sale. It has now further diversified into other brands, including marketing insights and mortgages, a strategy accelerated through acquisition. Domain is number 2 in Australia and has had great success in introducing a more diverse marketplace model. View is the next challenger, recently the benefactor of increased investment. It too has a marketplace model but also focuses on off-market property sales.
Last but not least is Zillow, the USA's number one site, publicly listed in 2011, again, with a wide range of property services. We do look to these portals for inspiration and also note the significant valuation multiples that these organizations achieve. This highlights the opportunity for OneRoof to create significant shareholder value. Our next slide talks to New Zealand's fascination with real estate. It clearly highlights real estate as one of New Zealand's preferred investment assets. The top left chart shows how New Zealand outperforms other leading countries in property investment. Moving to the right chart, which highlights the significant increase in New Zealand household asset values across the last 25 years and how it has outstripped other investment classes. On the bottom of the screen, you can see a number of statistics which once again highlight New Zealand's interest and involvement with real estate.
This fascination and investment in real estate creates an enhanced opportunity for OneRoof. The New Zealand property market is cyclical. This next slide highlights the historic cycles, together with the current and forecast metrics for the market. On average, New Zealand goes through a full property cycle every 7-10 years. If you look at the trend in the jagged line graph from 2016 until 2019, New Zealand's property cycle was in decline with regards to sales numbers. However, looking at the bars along the bottom, the median sale price continued to be resilient. We then saw a sharp, well-documented recovery through the COVID, where both volumes and values surged with the declines returning post-COVID.
Most market commentators believe that we are past the bottom of the cycle and that we will see growth in the market from here, both in volume and value. This creates an opportunity for OneRoof audience and revenue growth. So let's look more in depth at the three strategic pillars for OneRoof. Firstly, superior listings, experience, and performance. As we move into our sixth year, OneRoof continues to evolve and improve, with continuous product enhancements at the core of everything we do. The core functionality, including property valuations, personalization, and building a unique audience, are delivering results. It's been a great journey since OneRoof launched in 2018, with many significant milestones along the way, none more so than in 2023, seeing a complete back-end rebuild for our OneRoof desktop and mobile websites, resulting in some outstanding SEO improvements.
Our drive to get viewers to our listings has seen a massive increase in inquiries over the past 18 months, solidifying us in real estate agents' minds as an essential property platform. We have many more enhancements planned that we know will make a difference. We continue to grow our listings penetration across New Zealand versus our two competitors. Having the bulk of the for-sale listings inventory is critical to having a sustainable platform. In some areas, OneRoof is clearly outperforming realestate.co.nz and coming very close to Trade Me when private listings are taken into account. This continues to be a key focus for us. The next slide shows the extensive gains we have made in the last 18 months in closing the gap with New Zealand website audiences and our increasing brand awareness.
We are now a clear number two in the Nielsen Online Ratings New Zealand web audience measure, closing the average gap on number one to 139,000 in 2023. This has been a big focus for us over recent years. Of significance is the reduced reliance on the New Zealand Herald referral audience, down from 30% of sessions in 2020 to only 17% in 2023. This means that at a time when our audiences are growing, we are closing in on the number one player, and we have less reliance on the New Zealand Herald to achieve those growth numbers. However, this remains an advantage in delivering some of the passive buyer audience that OneRoof uses to differentiate itself. The chart on the right shows we are also now number two in market for brand awareness.
NZME's radio, print, and digital assets continue to play an important role in helping to boost brand awareness for OneRoof. To further support those impressive audience statistics, our next slide shows that the focus on key audience metrics has driven outstanding growth despite the challenging housing market we have been experiencing. Our strategic move to drive more audience to listings is paying off. This year alone, average daily listing users is up 36% and inquiries at the same period are up 106%. These metrics are vitally important as there is a direct correlation between average daily listing users, inquiries, and the ability to deliver future revenue. We will continue to drive hard in this area, given its strategic importance. Our ability to reach not only the active real estate market, but more importantly, the passive, is the focus of this next slide.
In summary, 16% of the real estate market is reached only by OneRoof.co.nz, and 32% of the OneRoof audience is not visiting a competitor. As you can see on the right, we are expertly positioned to pick up the passive and active buyer and owner markets through our extensive offerings of our digital, print, and radio platforms. To explain further, active are people in the market right now looking to buy or sell. They tend to search everywhere. The passives, a much larger group, didn't go to bed last night thinking about real estate, but something today across a news story, a radio interview, a podcast, or reading something in their local cafe, has piqued their interest in property and driven them to OneRoof. This is our unique value proposition. OneRoof can turn a passive buyer or owner into an active buyer or seller.
We will continue to drive energy into enhancing the OneRoof platform to leverage OneRoof's passive and active audiences, further increasing listing views and inquiries. With significant progress already made on our desktop and mobile web, 2024 will see a big focus on our app to improve our in-market experience. We will further differentiate with personalization and more features. We will continue to improve the offering to make finding a property and inquiring easier. We will also deliver more listing views and inquiries by leveraging our passive audience and attracting more of the active audience to OneRoof. We want to be top of mind for those considering to buy or sell, and helping convert them to inquiries by making property searches simple. We are committed to delivering a superior listings experience and performance for the audience and agents. And now onto our second strategic pillar: to grow listings revenue.
The number of residential listings coming to market over recent years has declined. Despite this reduction in new listings, as shown by the black dashed line, OneRoof revenue has gone against that trend. Both digital listings revenue and total OneRoof revenue have seen growth in the last two years. This highlights that OneRoof's unique multimedia approach is working. The decline in new properties coming to market has accelerated in 2023. This slide highlights the 16% year-on-year reduction to September 2023, with large reductions in Auckland, which has been OneRoof's initial market of focus. You'll see the bottom line in this graphic shows Auckland listings as a percentage of total New Zealand listings. Auckland averages around 35% of those total new listings. This highlights the significant opportunity that we have outside of Auckland. Pleasingly, the decline in new listings has slowed recently.
On the left, you can see that August and September 2023, new listings were in line with 2022. On the right, you'll note that the forecast of new listings for 2023 and the actuals for 2022 were well below the highs of the most recent cycle. This highlights the opportunity for growth should we return to prior levels of new listings coming to market. Many market commentators and analysts are reporting that the property market should improve. As you'll see, recent commentary on the market suggests that the downturn is over, with record net migration playing a key role in stabilizing the housing market a little sooner than expected. The Auckland market traditionally recovers first, followed by the other major centers and regions, and this is exactly what we are seeing. This bodes well for an increase in properties coming to market and selling.
The key way OneRoof monetizes the platform is to upgrade from a free or Basic listing to a paid or Package listing. A paid listing provides increased visibility and promotion of that listing. Our sales team's ability to convert Basic listings into Packages is highlighted here, with Auckland hitting 52% of for-sale listings being upgraded in September. As I previously mentioned, Auckland was OneRoof's initial area of focus. As highlighted previously, Auckland supplies approximately 35% of all new listings coming to market, meaning the opportunity presented by the rest of New Zealand is large. This will be a key area of focus in the next three years, and I will expand on this shortly. Along with converting Basic listings into Packages, another focus on our sales teams has been on increasing yield. Advertising Package prices, and therefore yields, tend to be higher where houses are more expensive.
Given this, Auckland Package prices and average yields tend to be much higher than outside of Auckland, as shown here. As the most recent entrant to the market, and given the competitive nature of the market, it means that we are currently selling the lower end of the packages that we have available to sell. This results in yields across the country achieving 36%-37% of the highest available packages that we sell. Accordingly, as we further establish ourselves as an essential property platform, the potential to increase ARPU by selling higher value packages is a significant opportunity for further revenue growth. So let me talk to what we are doing to achieve these lifts in conversions and yields we've highlighted. A large focus will be on the transformation of our national sales force. We are creating a dedicated OneRoof national sales force.
This will be based on regional market sizes, ensuring we realize the potential in each market across digital, print, and radio. These resources will come from within the wider NZME sales team. Key will be the increased customer service levels, particularly outside of Auckland. We expect to have that in place at the start of 2024. In addition, we are reconfiguring and simplifying our packages across all real estate and agent products. We intend to further strengthen agent relationships and tools. In short, we are activating a much larger, better coordinated sales force armed with the right tools to enable faster growth of packages, particularly as it relates to the rest of New Zealand. We really want OneRoof to be the preferred partner of the real estate industry. Which leads us to our last of the three strategic pillars: accelerate our non-listing portfolio.
This is a drive to becoming more of a marketplace, a strategy, as we showed earlier, that has been deployed with success internationally. It's about partnering with the right suppliers for consumer solutions and services and maximizing the available advertising inventory on OneRoof to grow incremental revenues. Mortgages, insurance, advisory services, rentals are just a few areas that we will look to grow. In positioning ourselves as your essential property platform, we will partner with key suppliers to provide opportunities for assisting people with all aspects of the property life cycle, not just the buy/sell. We see a focus on the non-listing components of OneRoof as real audience and revenue drivers. So what will success look like? The scorecard includes a number of key metrics that we think show that we are an essential property platform.
We want to continue to close that audience gap and, at the same time, grow inquiries to our real estate partners by 100%. Listings, upgrades, or conversions will stay as a key focus and a measure of success, with particular focus, as mentioned, on the rest of New Zealand. Revenue share between print and digital will continue to show digital as an increasingly dominant component of revenue. Finally, we will become a meaningful contributor to NZME's profits over the next three years. I hope you've enjoyed this outline of OneRoof's strategy to become your essential property platform. Let me now hand you back to Michael.
Thanks for that presentation, Greg. As you will have seen, OneRoof is still a relatively young business at just 5 years old, but it has delivered strong growth and key metrics over those years. It's really great to see the future plans to further grow listings revenue, but also expand the non-listings part of the platform, improving user experience to ensure it's the essential property platform for our audiences and our customers. Let me now conclude with how NZME can leverage its strength to deliver significant shareholder value. We believe that NZME is in a prime position to leverage its strength. As you'll note, NZME reaches 84% of the New Zealand population every month. It has impressive market shares in its audio and publishing businesses, and you've just heard the opportunities for growth.
It has a leading print business, which will deliver strong cash flows well into the future. The digital transformation is clearly evident, with strong revenue and clearly articulated growth strategies. As you've also just heard, OneRoof is currently breaking records, and it is a high-growth asset that delivers a key opportunity to realize higher multiples as a growth business. Finally, NZME has a strong balance sheet, especially when comparing to a number of its challenged local peers. We believe the future is bright for NZME, and we believe NZME can leverage its strength to deliver shareholder value over the coming years. That's the end of our presentation. We'll be back to you to take your questions right after this video.
Here we go, here we go. Put our hand up in the air. Here we go, here we go, from the front to the rear. 'Cause we be getting down when we come around. We be getting down, and I'm stepping this, better rock with it. Let it roll, baby, let it roll, baby. Let it roll, baby, let it roll, baby. 'Cause we gonna turn it up, we can get it up. When our time is up, we get tough, even the roughest ain't ready for us. We be getting down. When we come around, we be getting down, ain't no stopping it. Better rock with it. Get down! Get, get, get down.
We are now opening the webcast for questions from shareholders and analysts. If you wish to ask a question, please hover over the bottom of your screen and click Raise Hand. When it is your turn, you'll be prompted to unmute your microphone on screen, and you'll be invited to speak. To ensure everyone gets an opportunity, can we please ask that you limit your questions to one initial question and one follow-up? A reminder that this webcast, including our question and answer section, is being recorded and will be made available online by the end of tomorrow. Our first question is from Arie Dekker. Please go ahead, Ari.
Well, hello. Yeah, I'll just start with some questions on publishing, if I, if I can. I just wanted to just understand slide 79 and, and the Google News diagnostics a bit better. So, so from what that's saying, it, it looks like you're over-indexing in financial and monetization and sort of, you know, neutral or under-indexing sort of in, in product and audience, where you've, you've talked about increased investment being required. I mean, do these diagnostics suggest there's a risk that investment cost, investment and cost is going to outpace revenue growth to address that gap? Or, I mean, how are you thinking about that?
Hi, Arie. I think, thanks for the conversation and the question. I think firstly, we're really pleased to be, you know, so high up in the pecking order of publishers globally. We have talked about further investment in the publishing business, but that's actually obviously within the guidelines that we've already given and the capital we're already spending. Maybe, Carolyn, you might like to talk a little bit about some of the areas which, as you did highlight in your presentation, that we're specifically investing to improve in those key areas.
Yeah, I think, based on what we've discussed throughout the slides today, the main areas that we are already focused on is growing audience and audience engagement. That'll open up the funnel for subscriptions. It'll also deliver more advertising inventory, and so I think this is one of the key areas that we're really focused on: getting the product and technology right, as well as the editorial focus on kind of reader needs and making sure the mix of journalism is correct to grow overall engagement.
Okay, thanks. And then, just in terms of I appreciate the additional clarity that you've provided on what's happening with the subscription revenues and that. And you've talked about, you've been pretty open about a couple of things you need to sort of address. I mean, I guess, you know, the corporate subscription's obviously a big part of the BusinessDesk, and that makes sense. On the NZ Herald, if some of the initiatives you're looking at don't work, are you willing to remove corporate subscriptions for the NZ Herald, given, you know, just how low those yields are and the risks they have to individual subscriptions?
Yeah, that, that's right. I think, Ari, you're picking on a, a key thing there, which is, you know, something we're very focused on, is making sure that those corporate subs don't cannibalize the individual subs- subscriptions that we have. And again, Carolyn, maybe you'd like to talk a little bit to, you know, what we're doing there.
Yeah, sure. So on slide 103, you can see that we're really looking to balance volume and yield and take quite distinctive approaches for Herald Premium versus BusinessDesk. So from a Herald Premium perspective, we're very much focused on growing yield in line with volume for individuals, whereas with corporate, there's really just a few corporate subscribers with uncapped plans that are really driving the yield down at the moment, and so we plan to manage that much more carefully in the future, and really make sure that we're not cannibalizing the individual opportunity. Whereas on the flip side, with BusinessDesk, it's very much a corporate-focused product. And we'll continue to focus on lifting yields over time as we see in growing engagement with the product from those corporates.
And on that individual subscription, that we see there, like, what are your sort of objectives in terms to return that to, to sort of growth in terms of the number of subscribers? Like, you know, what are your targets sort of, say, in 12 months or, you know, 24 months? Do you see yourself. You know, 'cause as you outlined that, you know, the market's obviously very large, but it is a decent period in which, you know, the number of subs has been at reasonably subdued growth given how large the market is.
Yeah. Yeah, so what you can see is that we've set the target for digital-only subscriptions at 190,000 for 2026, and a big chunk of that will be driven by the investment in the technology platforms and the right capability. Because one of the key things that will change over the next 3 years is being more dynamic about the offers based on propensity to buy. And then we'll also look at annual price increases, which we started in July this year, and have been very successful in lifting yield with minimal impact to churn.
And that's right. And, Carolyn, you mentioned the target of 190,000. That is, as you said, the digital-only subscribers. Today, we have 123,000 of those, with the other 56,000 being print subscribers who have, you know, enabled their digital subscription, which brings us up to the 179 that you see reported. We've got a written question as well, actually, specifically with regards to the yields and the revenue growth that we are seeing in the digital business and how we might grow that moving forward. And so maybe, Carolyn, again, do you just want to talk a little bit about the things we're doing to grow overall digital yields? And, you know, at some point, they may well overtake print in total.
Yeah, so overall, I mean, the main thing is that we will grow digital yields through our bundling strategy. So, you can see on one of the slides, that we will sell you Herald Premium, and then we'll look to, cross-sell you one of our other digital verticals, whether that's BusinessDesk, ZB Plus, Viva Premium, or The Listener. So that's one key area where we'll be trying to grow ARPU of our digital subscribers. The second one is, as I said before, we will be looking to do annual price increases, as in line with what we've done with print subscriptions over many years. And then it'll just be about balancing the dynamic offers based on propensity to buy and then slowly stepping up that introductory pricing to kind of our retail pricing, which is NZD 6 a week at the moment.
If I could just have one final question. Just hearing a bit of reverb there. Just at a high level, is it possible to remove that reverb? That's better. Yeah. Thank you. So, just in terms of the plan, where, where, again, you know, I just appreciate all the detail that you've laid out here. It's really good. If you hit those FY 2026 measures sort of across the business, is your plan sort of telling you that, you know, in FY 2026, your overall level of profitability will be, you know, still holding broadly flat as it has over the last 3 or 4 years?
Or would achieving these objectives in normal market conditions, you know, see growing profitability under your plan, given obviously, you know, mix shift is a big part of what you're managing?
Yeah, that's right, Ari. This, this is absolutely a growth plan and, a profitability growth plan, you know, for the business, you know, and for our shareholder return perspective. You've, as you point out, quite a big mix change, and that was some charts that you will have seen, the mix change with OneRoof, becoming a significant component of the profits overall. And obviously, the digital publishing component of the business becoming, a much more significant. So that mix does change, but we'd be very disappointed, if and, if even within three years, we weren't, substantially back into a growth, operation. We have real aspirations for delivery there.
Thank you. Thank you.
Thanks, Arie. We now have a question from James Lindsay. Thanks, James.
Thanks much, and really appreciate the presentation today. I just one for Greg, and then Michael, maybe as well. The pricing discounts of OneRoof versus Trade Me, and just how quickly you could close those gaps?
Yeah, probably a couple of things, if I can just start on that, James, and again, thank you for dialing in. You would have seen on that chart there, we actually show the percentage that our ARPUs are for our packages, both in Auckland and outside of Auckland, versus our top overall yielding packages. So our initial focus actually is to actually move our existing clients through the products to get higher yielding overall. And so that is, you know, absolutely where we're focused, rather than increasing prices on current. Maybe, Greg, you'd like to talk a little bit about maybe pricing that we see in the market for Trade Me, as an example.
Thanks, Michael. Yeah, so Trade Me's highest package is around NZD 2,100, NZD 2,099, including GST. So there's a lot of room, there's a lot of area, and a lot of room for us to grow. We've done that extremely well in the last nine months, 12 months. We see next year as a major focus, as Michael says, moving them through those packages, and moving them up, you know, from package A to package B to package C. As I said, we've had a lot of success, and with Trade Me sitting at their highest package at NZD 2,099, there's a lot of room for us to grow.
Yeah, thanks so much. Maybe just one again for you, Michael, with regard to the debt levels that you've talked about in the financial position. So obviously, MediaWorks and Trade Me have reasonably large levels of debt. I was wondering if you just had seen any change in behavior with regard to their investment or how they're operating?
Look, obviously, I won't comment on their businesses, but can sort of talk about what we see in the market a little bit, and they're as competitive as ever. So we do see them in the market every day with competitive offers, with rebates to customers, and obviously trying to grow audiences as well. You know, we don't take them for granted. We're out using our best products, our teams, to win in the market, and you know, we fight in the streets every day.
Maybe this last one from me, just with regards to the success in cost containment, which has been commendable over the last few years, and just about how much harder it's getting now, or are there still good places for gains?
Thanks, James. So, in terms of the cost containment, we have a continuous process of ensuring that we're as efficient and as effective as we can be. We continue to find, you know, opportunities there, you know, but they are obviously, you know, more limited, perhaps, than they were a few years ago. But the focus is absolutely there, and we're looking to utilize all of the technology available to us to improve the efficiency of the business overall.
I think just to reiterate what you were saying, David, it is around efficiency and productivity, and we actually think that can actually give us better capability in the market as well. You know, so we still have a number of handoffs between systems. People are often the glue between some of those systems, and we'd really like to improve that over this next horizon. Thanks, James. We now have a question from Roger Colman . Roger, please go ahead.
Ladies and gentlemen, I'd like to congratulate you on a superb presentation package. It's a pity you guys can only concentrate this on 5.3 million people. First off, is congratulations on the net debt, fantastic strategy. That's the first thing. Now, Barbara hasn't had a chance to do anything, right? Here's a question for Barbara. With the net debt to EBITDA target of 0.3 at the end of the year, and assuming you go for a lower range of 0.5, on NZD 57 million, that implies a NZD 0.06 special dividend decision by the board in February. Is that the correct calculation or not?
Look, I'm not going to commit to that, Roger, and thanks for the question. What you've seen us do over the last year is to really focus on the operating environment that we've been in, and I think our best investment has been to stay strong in this operating environment. What we've said is that we're going to look at opportunities in the new year, and we'll be thinking about capital management, as we go into that. So I'm not gonna make a commitment now, but you've seen us use tools before, like special dividends and share buybacks, so those things are all on the board's mind.
We're also conscious that, you know, there just may be good investment opportunities shaking out of the market going forward, so we're, we're mindful of all of that, and we're going to pull it all together in February, and you, you'll be hearing from us more around that time.
Right. Just to follow up on what you just said a second ago, the investment opportunities in New Zealand for the company, given the position you hold, the dominating position, they wouldn't be major scale or not?
Look, I'm not going to foreshadow what might be coming along, Roger, so I'm just gonna keep quiet on that. But I mean, you can read the papers like we can read the papers. There's definitely things happening among competitors, and there might be bits and pieces that come around. So yeah, so we're just gonna keep an eye open for those kinds of opportunities without assuming that anything does come around.
Right. Okay, my second question to Greg, right? Greg, just looking at the visitation figures, right? When I compare you against, using Similarweb, total time on site and number of page views, you still lag significantly below realestate.co.nz. They don't, you know, separate the Trade Me figures, right? So I'm just using that as an example. You've still got a big gap to make up on total time on site, page views, et cetera. So what are you gonna do?
Well, Roger, thank you for the question. The focus over the last 12 months, particularly, has been driving people to inquiries, and we've had an incredible success at that. So we spent a lot of time and energy making people go through to the listings and hitting that inquiry button, and that's where we're having the great success in the marketplace. So we'll continue to drive people to site, but getting them to listings first and foremost is the key, and we've had a great success, as I said, in that, and as you can see in some of the numbers in the presentation.
So yes, we're, you know, we're all about closing gaps, but at the end of the day, we need this product to be successful for the agents and driving them to those listings, hitting that inquiry button, which has been a massive success for us over the last 12 months, is really the focus for, again, for the next 12 months.
Right. Just closing the gap, Greg. When I adjust the chart, you've got of about 540K versus 680K for Trade Me, and I deduct their rental proportion of their listings and then your 17%. I make the gap roughly 404 versus 504, so you got a 100,000 to make up. Looking at the advertising spend, indicatively at NZD 3.8 million in the first half, you declared in the results split up. Are you gonna take the foot off the advertising spend or not?
So, I think, what you will have seen there is we have continued to invest in the brand-
Yeah.
and in driving people to the site.
Yeah.
We're not planning on reducing that spend, but at the same time, we're not planning on increasing it either. You know, we, we want to continue growing that overall audience, and as Greg says, ensuring we're delivering for agents at the end of the day to ensure that they're having success.
Right. Talking about my shareholding and my client shareholdings, our recommendation is to keep the foot flat on the floor to make up that 100,000 EBITDA gap, and that's what we would like to see the company do, all the way back from 2019. So Greg, I hope you get past that small gap you've got to close now, okay? I'll let somebody else talk, and I'll come back with some more questions for later on.
Thanks, Roger, for that comment. As you'll know, and others on the call will know, you know, the last few years have been spent on making sure that OneRoof isn't a drag on the business. We've really been trying to invest all we can without it impacting overall business profitability. So, you know, we are profitable now from a OneRoof business perspective, and as you will have seen in the charts that we talked about earlier, by 2026, we expect it to be a significant contributor, and we think that's key for us for the future, a real growth engine for the business. We now have a question from Will Twiss. Thanks, Will.
Good evening, results.
Yeah. Hey, guys. So obviously, it's been a pretty weak year for residential listings in New Zealand, and that's obviously impacted OneRoof, but you've still managed to produce growth, which is an awesome result. If you zoom out a little bit, though, the kinda long-term trend for listings in New Zealand kind of appears to be downwards... What's your kind of internal view on where that might settle in the medium to long term? And how does that affect what OneRoof's trying to do?
Yeah, well, as you, as you pointed out, earlier this year, we were seeing listings down 20% year-on-year. In recent months, we have still seen listings down year-on-year. But as we pointed out in one of our slides, we've seen really strong growth, as much as over 20% in the last month. But to your point of longer out, and, you know, Greg's spent a lot of time in the industry.
Mm-hmm.
Greg will tell you it's a 7-10-year cycle, but maybe, Greg, you'd like to give it a little more on that.
Yeah. Thanks, Michael, and thank you, Will. Look, we've passed the bottom of the cycle, so we're on the way up. You know, we could all try and be Nostradamus and pick when listings are gonna get back to previous levels. But, we're seeing some really good growth in listings, and I'm hearing anecdotally from the marketplace, particularly about January, February, March next year, very strong signs that listings are gonna get back to decent levels. Whether we get back or how fast we get back to previous levels, I couldn't quite tell you, Will, but, I'm expecting
Some of the modeling I've seen, I think Tony Alexander, one of the economists, is picking 2025 for a time that listings will get back to where they were at their peak. So, if we wanna listen to Tony, we can go with that. I'm hoping we get there a little bit sooner, but the signs are in the market right now, and what we're hearing in the next six months is extremely solid.
Awesome. Thank you for that. And I guess if we could pivot now to the kind of the audio. There looks to be a pretty, pretty significant kind of digital audio opportunity that you've sort of spoken of at length. Do you think that your FY 2026 target of 12% digital audio revenue is conservative?
As you point out, it is a huge opportunity, and we look, you know, to some of our international peers and suppliers of our technology. So, Jason, you might like to give a little more update on that.
Yeah. Look, we think the number is pretty strong for 2026, and we do think that the terrestrial radio's, the AM/FM market, is gonna continue to be strong. One of the key elements of our strategy is not cannibalizing AM and FM radio revenues and ensuring that we bring incremental revenue. That's where podcasting, for us, is actually a really critical part. What we're seeing, and you would have seen in the slides today, is it's incremental listening. It's coming from social media. It's coming from watching video that brings new audiences into audio and gives us incremental listening time or hours, and then brings incremental revenue as well. So again, we want to see a strong radio market in terms of revenue and a growing digital revenue market as well.
As Jason pointed out, a market share of 70% versus our number one competitor, it's a really strong place for us to continue to grow that share overall.
Awesome. Cheers, guys. Awesome. Cheers, guys.
Right. We'll just switch now to some online questions. The first from Dennis Chua: "A great progress on the digital transformation and the publishing business. I appreciate the details on the advertising opportunity that digital affords, for example, better targeting and presumably higher ROI for advertisers. Can you discuss whether in the mid to long term, we should expect a higher revenue per subscriber for digital compared to print?
Thanks, Dennis, for that question. Hopefully, we answered that earlier, and that was actually the written question that I was referring to, when we were speaking with Ari. So if we haven't got that and you want some more, please do yell out, but maybe we'll move on to the next question, if that's okay, Kelly.
Another one from Dennis: "Michael, can you describe what the board intends to do with the significant cash flows over the coming years, given that net debt is basically zero in the new year? The dividend yield today is sizable at low double digits %, but what the market might be missing is the FCF yield is in the mid-teens %, despite being in a really tough year when advertising is challenged and OneRoof isn't contributing to cash flows. With a rebound in advertising and OneRoof growing to contribute what looks like 20% of EBITDA in 2026, based on slide 32, FCF yield will climb significantly. BusinessDesk and buying back the remaining 20% of OneRoof were both great investments, but the fear is that there may not be other deals out there that are better than NZME itself today.
Yeah, thanks, Dennis, and Barbara will have answered some of that, but maybe I'll pass to her again shortly. But you quite rightly point out, you know, a really strong dividend yield at the moment and even a stronger free cash flow yield, because of only a portion of those free cash flows being paid out as dividends today. You also note, as we continue to grow the business and as OneRoof begins to contribute, we only expect those to increase. So, that either results in bigger dividends being available to be paid or, as you point out, potentially NZME's actually best to invest its free cash flow and actually the buybacks as we've done in the past. So maybe, Barbara, again, would you like to give any further comment on that?
I think we've probably covered it, Dennis, but look, thanks for your comments around what we have bought with BusinessDesk and buying back OneRoof. It's those kinds of opportunities that the board's going to keep looking at. It has to be a quality thing for us to deploy our capital into any kind of acquisition like that. Otherwise, if the best answer is to distribute it back to shareholders, then that's what we've done in the past, and that's what we'd be doing again. But we're gonna wait, as I said, until February, and we'll come to a view on that then.
Thanks, Dennis. We now have a question from Nigel Jeffries. Thank you for the detailed presentation. Given the new three-year strategy, including the estimated NZD 30 million capital investment over that time period, can you provide commentary on the earnings growth that you expect to deliver over the period?
Yeah. Hi, Nigel. We may have covered some of that already. But as you say, we are planning on reinvesting NZD 30 million of the cash flows back into the business, you know, just as we have done actually, at NZD 10 million a year over recent years. As we talked about with Ari's question, we do expect our strategy to deliver earnings growth, which by default will be cash flow growth and, you know, dividends and/or, you know, other options from, from a capital management perspective. So yeah, this isn't a strategy around maintaining existing business or, a decline. This is a strategy all around, growing the business and growing shareholder value.
Thanks for that question, Nigel. We're just moving on now to one from Louie Joseph. Hello, thank you for the huge body of work that has gone into this presentation for shareholders. I'd like to ask the board to consider undertaking a sustained and disciplined buyback, with an emphasis on reducing shares outstanding, as it appears that the current market valuation barely ascribes any value to OneRoof. This need not be stipulated for any specific quantum of value, rather just with an aim of consistently reducing the share count when compelling valuation opportunities arise.
Barbara, is there any more you'd like to say on that?
Louie, thanks for the question. I think I've probably answered it in relation to where the board is thinking, and, I'll just, take you to February, and we'll be able to shed more light on things like that then. But thanks for the observation.
Louie, we'll take all advice from you as well, as to how we can have the market realize the value of OneRoof—because we too do think it's a fabulous asset that we've, you know, created over recent years. And, you know, as we mentioned, we're right on the cusp of really delivering earnings from that business.
Thanks, Louie. We're just now moving on to some further questions from some of our shareholders. Arie Dekker, please go ahead.
Yeah, just a couple of follow-ups on OneRoof. I guess the first one is, in terms of normal market conditions, you know, what is the FY 2026 revenue ambition for OneRoof? You know, just saying, you know, mid-cycle levels of activity. And then also, and obviously, Roger's given you a vote of confidence on just, you know, going for it in OneRoof, so probably don't need to do the six-cent special. But just costs, like, where's the cost base gonna be on OneRoof in the next couple of years? Is it pretty much fully in there now, or are you planning on spending more in terms of, you know, OpEx on OneRoof over the next year or two?
Yeah. So Ari, maybe there are a couple of things I can point you to. Firstly, obviously, the chart that shows the mix of earnings, which shows OneRoof as a substantial contributor in 2026. So that may well be helpful, you know, as you do your modeling. Similarly, the percentage increases that we're showing for the sell-through of OneRoof into Auckland and outside of Auckland, and, you know, obviously, you'd be able to make some assumptions around number of properties. And then overall, you know, we're giving some guidance again on EBITDA margins there. We think the business is actually, you know, fully costed.
The only thing we would expect to maybe see some increases is, as we sell some of the very high packages, they do come with an external cost of content or, or marketing involved in them onto third-party platforms. And those come as you move up from the lower, package values that we have today to some of those higher packages. But again, that still allows us with margin expansion and allows us to get much deeper, into the customer base overall. Greg, I'm not sure if there's anything else you want to add to that?
You've answered it perfectly, Michael.
You've answered it perfectly. Sorry, Ari, one other thing I might just point out on that, which Greg did mention in his presentation, is we are looking to have a national OneRoof sales team, just so that we get a laser focus on it from a sales perspective, right across the business. So a number of real estate or OneRoof roles are part-time of people outside of Auckland currently, and so that's an area we're looking to put more focus and make sure that while it won't be increased investment, we'll have increased people's attention spans and dedication, specifically to OneRoof, so that we can grow it quicker.
Thanks, Ari. We'll now move to another question from Roger Colman . Thanks, Roger.
Barbara, I just note the issue, the discussion buybacks versus dividends, right? Obviously, the institutions prefer buybacks versus shareholders who want to have dividends. Shareholders are sticky. You've had major problems with institutions holding 15%-20% of capital moving in and out of the register. It's a small register. It introduces volatility, which is unattractive for all investors, by having any sort of encouragement to the institutional point of view. I also note that, you know, a few companies in Australia over the many decades have got a substantial amount of shareholder benefits.
You've got subscriptions you can put into the shareholder holder scheme, and any way to increase the private shareholder group in New Zealand for stickiness, compared with the major movements and damaging movements you've had in and out of the register, should be the number one concentration.
T herefore recommend you don't do any more buyback. Don't make the capitalization of the company even smaller. There is major EBITDA multiple damage that comes from going to smaller and smaller capitalization. You have trouble finding analysts to follow the company as you get smaller, relatively speaking, by gearing up for the institutional buyback package. Just stick to something which is dividend based. So that's my recommendation to you, Barbara, and I certainly think the company should consider a shareholder benefits scheme with whatever assets you've got you can give away, although I won't use it in Australia.
Roger-
Although, say something.
Thanks for that. I think-
Okay, say something.
We're definitely aware of the different preferences from different types of investors. I expect my next question will be from one of the institutionals, suggesting the opposite to what you've just said. But rest assured, we are cognizant of those differences in and around our register. I'll leave Michael to think about opportunities for packages for some of our shareholders. Thanks for the comment. Yeah, we're very alive to that, Roger, so thank you.
Well, I was gonna say something quick.
We have another-
I was gonna say something quick. Oh, about packages. Sorry, I rang off. Sorry, I didn't know you wanted an answer on that now, so... Well, Roger, we'd love you to be a premium digital subscriber, so maybe we could talk to you about that. It's something we absolutely can be providing you in Australia. But I take your point on something we can do wider across all of our shareholder base.
Right. Thank you.
Thanks, Roger. We have another question from Will Twiss . Thanks, Will. Sorry, guys, didn't realize I had put my hand up, but, I do have a question. Can you talk a little bit about, I guess, a bit of an elaboration on the OneRoof pricing strategy? So you've kind of got there, the difference between the Auckland and then the ex-Auckland, I guess, New Zealand pricing. Are packages priced for individual markets? Is there different pricing for Wellington or Christchurch or Dunedin? Or is it simply Auckland and then ex-Auckland?
Greg, maybe I can-
Thank you, Will. Thank you, Will. Yes, the packages are set around the pricing, the average pricing in the market. So obviously, as you move out of Auckland, some of the average house prices fall, so the packages likewise fall. So you would expect the yield outside of Auckland to be less than Auckland. But nonetheless, as we stated earlier, we wanna move people through the packages. And we're starting on that journey. As I said, in the last 12 months, we've made a lot of ground, but the real focus with that team that Michael talked about, we get that extra team, on the outside of Auckland, focusing on those packages, growing them through the packages, we can get those yields up.
One of the things we are seeing from our competitors is they are bringing more regions outside of Auckland into those top pricing tiers. Whereas if we currently just have Auckland in that pro's top pricing tier, so again, something to be reviewed in the future.
Perfect. Thank you. Thanks, Will. We'll just move to another online question from Dennis Chua. I had another question on OneRoof: compared to Trade Me, how much of a competitive advantage is the ability to share data across OneRoof, New Zealand Herald, and Digital Audio? And do advertisers or real estate agents care, and/or are there ways to enhance the experience for customers themselves?
Thanks, Dennis, and so that is a key differentiator for us, whether it be the type of audience we bring or obviously the advertising we do or actually where we place the listings. For example, a listing that is on OneRoof can appear also on the New Zealand Herald website. But, Greg, is there more you'd like to share on that?
I think yes. As we spoke about in the presentation, Dennis, we're. There's two markets here: There's the active market, there's the people that are in the market. When they're active, they're looking at everything. It's that passive market that's where that's what we're after. It's generally twice the size of the active market, and the NZME product of services and look, really helps us there. So, again, it's about driving inquiry, it's about being effective, it's about working, as far as the real estate industry is concerned. And, you know, don't underestimate the part that print also plays in this. Print is a massive passive tool. It's often one of those things that people pick up.
You didn't think on Saturday morning you were about to go and look at real estate, but you sit down and you have your Weet-Bix or whatever you have on Saturday morning. You have a look through the paper and, "Oh, look, I'm going to that open home." So, don't underestimate the part that plays, but we also do a lot of that across the digital platforms as well.
Thanks for that question, Dennis. Now we have a question from James Lindsay.
Thanks. Just seeing today's, you know, record integration, just wondering if, with regard to segmentation and demographics, if you're catching your share of that? I know you've talked about more addition as well, but is there anything more that could be done here?
Sorry, James, just to be a bit of a pain there. We didn't quite pick up the question. Could we get you to have another go? Is that okay?
Yeah, there's quite a bit of feedback it sounds like. Just with regard to net migration, it hit a new record today. And just to talk about, are you getting your share of that 118,000-odd that has come into the country? And I know you've talked about having an international paper, but is that, is there a segmentation that could help and develop that?
Yeah, I'll pass over to Carolyn shortly, but one of the things which unfortunately, you will have seen in our scorecards for the last three years, we didn't quite hit, was there was more houses built than we expected to be. So our penetration, household penetration of subscriptions, didn't quite get where we wanted to be. Part of that, obviously, with immigration and a few more houses being built. But maybe, Carolyn, you want to talk about, you know, how we are looking to capture those.
Yeah, absolutely. So if you look at slide 102, you can see that we've added the New Zealand expat audience to that, total addressable market. So, you know, there's over 1 million Kiwis living overseas, and so a big part of our next three-year strategy is targeting those international readers with subscriptions. We haven't had the ability to do that, in a really granular way, with our current platform, but it's definitely a big part of growing subscriptions in the future once we've got the new technology in place.
Thanks so much. Thanks so much.
Right. It looks like we have no further questions.
Okay, everyone. Well, thank you so much for joining us today, and I hope you found the session informative. We're certainly delighted to being able to present NZME to you, and we thank you for being shareholders, investors, and those who are interested in the business. A copy of this video will be up online in the next 24 or 48 hours, but we look forward to staying in touch with you over the coming days and weeks. Thanks, everyone, enjoy the rest of your day.