Welcome to the 2022 NZME Investor Day.
Kia ora kotou, welcome to New Zealand Media and Entertainment's Investor Day for 2022. We're pleased to be able to share with you our continued transformation of NZME and the progress we have made two years into our three-year strategy. NZME, like most companies across New Zealand, and indeed across the world, has experienced an extremely challenging operating environment once again in 2022. Supply chain challenges, labor shortages, and inflationary pressures have resulted in overall business confidence in New Zealand falling to levels as low as had been seen in recent years. Despite this, I'm proud of the adaptability and flexibility NZME has demonstrated in such challenging times to remain largely on track to achieve the 2023 targets that were set under our three-year strategy.
Having a very clear and targeted strategy has ensured a strong focus on the initiatives that are going to move the dial by driving growth and transformation, ensuring the long-term success of the business. We've celebrated record audiences across radio and our digital audio platform, iHeartRadio, and continued to grow publishing and digital platforms, including our online subscription space, as well as seeing growth in OneRoof, although this has been somewhat hampered in recent months due to fewer real estate properties coming to market. As you will recall, we have five guiding principles which you can now see on the screen. Each underpins our ongoing focus on delivering our targets, and we're committed to delivering shareholder value through achieving them. Firstly, customer first.
NZME remains focused on putting our customers at the heart of everything we do, providing excellent experiences and ensuring our platforms are indispensable to them by being part of their lives through multiple touchpoints. A big part of our focus is on providing personalization for our customers wherever possible, providing a unique experience to each user. We have engaged with several global companies that are leading in this space, and we look forward to continually adapting and improving NZME's customer experiences. Win with quality means that NZME is committed to delivering world-class premium content and experiences, and that a high-quality lens is applied to everything we do, both internally and externally.
Building on our principle of win with quality this year, the board strongly supported a focus on quality and trust in our newsroom with codes and principles that have been captured in NZME's new editorial code of conduct and ethics. The importance of providing quality, trusted news content to our audiences is more important than ever with so much misinformation prevalent on other platforms. NZME is focused on providing the news that our audience of 3.6 million people can trust. Through digital acceleration, NZME aims to be a world-class digital business, driving the growth of digital content via our news platforms across the Herald Online, iHeartRadio, and OneRoof. Through audience expansion, we're focused on growing audiences across all NZME's platforms, becoming indispensable to even more Kiwis.
We're also focused on how we connect with and engage our next generation of audiences, enticing them onto our platforms with the content and experience they desire, and then retaining them as lifelong readers or listeners. Being a top performer, we will continue to set new standards and benchmarks to ensure top performance across all areas of our business. Michael and members of the executive team will speak in more detail shortly about NZME's strategic priorities and provide an update on how we are tracking against our three-year strategy and 2023 targets. While the year has been another challenging one due to the ongoing global and local pressures, I have enjoyed leading such an experienced and talented board of directors.
Together for two years now, we each bring our own unique skills, experience, and diverse backgrounds to the board table with expertise that spans corporate finance, marketing, customer and brand insights, financial and audit, digital business growth, data commercialization, and extensive media industry knowledge. A huge thank you to Carol Campbell, David Gibson, Sussan Turner, and Guy Horrocks for their support and commitment to our strategy and for remaining steadfast in your focus on supporting Michael Boggs and the NZME executive team in delivering excellent results in another challenging year. The company has made significant progress in recent years and has delivered strong earnings results against the backdrop of COVID and economically impacted markets. As a board, we remain focused on returning excess capital to shareholders. Over the past two years, the company has significantly reduced debt and recommenced dividend payments.
In addition, as of last week, NZME has completed NZD 23.5 million of the planned NZD 30 million capital return through the purchase of NZD 11.5 million of shares and the NZD 0.05 per share special dividend that was paid in July. NZME's current on-market share buyback program will end on 16 December. As shareholders will be aware, we undertook to review our capital and dividend policy settings over the second half of 2022. Due to NZME's strong cash flows, the board last week announced an increase in the dividend payout ratio from 30%-50% to 50%-80% of free cash flow. This is subject to being within its target leverage ratio of 0.5x-1x EBITDA and having regard to NZME's capital requirements, operating performance and financial position.
Given the current uncertain economic environment, the company intends to operate at the lower end of its target leverage ratio, but despite this uncertainty still expects to continue to generate strong cash flows. Additional capital management options, including possibly undertaking a further on-market share buyback program in 2023, will be considered as we review our year-end position in February. This will take into account the net debt position, the economic outlook and the NZME share price and liquidity at the time. On behalf of the board and NZME, thank you to our shareholders for your support and confidence in NZME. We value our strong relationships with our investors, and we remain committed to continuing to engage with you frequently and in depth. Thank you for your feedback and support throughout the year. We look forward to further engagement with you in 2023.
I'd also like to say a big thank you to Michael, the executive team and the wider NZME team for your commitment to implementing the strategy, further progressing towards the company's 2023 targets. Thank you for your hard work, commitment and passion to drive success across the business and for your steadfast focus on achieving superb results and providing excellent value for our shareholders. Thank you once again for joining us today, everyone. I'll now hand you to Michael.
Welcome and thank you all for joining us today for our 2022 Investor Day. Thanks, Barbara, for setting the scene to begin the day. In a few moments, I'll update you with an overview of our progress towards our strategic targets and update you on our near-term outlook. I'll then hand over to David Mackrell, our CFO, who'll provide you with a brief performance overview. Jason Winstanley, our Chief Radio Officer, will then update on our audio business and our ambition to be New Zealand's leading audio company. Following Jason will be Carolyn Luey, our Chief Digital and Publishing Officer. She'll overview the significant progress we are making as a digital publisher. Finally, Paul Maher, our Chief of OneRoof, will provide an update on the growth we're seeing in our OneRoof business and how we believe we can continue to win in light of some very strong competition.
I'll then ask Barbara and each of the presenters to rejoin to take your questions. Firstly, I'd just like to highlight the breadth and scale of NZME's platforms. NZME reaches an audience of more than 3.6 million people. That's nearly 90% of all New Zealanders that are over 15. That's phenomenal reach that can be accessed by a broad range of advertisers. We have market-leading brands across audio, publishing, and OneRoof, with a number of record audiences achieved over the past year. We'll share more about this with you today. At the end of 2020, we set targets and strategic priorities for 2023, and we're now halfway through that strategy. To recap, those strategic priorities are, firstly, to be New Zealand's leading audio company, for the New Zealand Herald to become New Zealand's Herald, and finally, for OneRoof to become your complete property destination.
Under each of these strategic pillars, we have a number of key focus areas that we'll update you on today. As we look across the globe, we see useful growth models that provide inspiration and insights as part of delivering on NZME's strategy. Jason will share with you how we are using iHeartMedia's digital platform. That's iHeartRadio to grow overall audio revenues. We're also taking learnings from them with regards to being a leading podcaster. New York Times is a global poster child for how they have grown their digital subscriber business. Carolyn will share some metrics which show that NZME is following a very similar growth trajectory. Domain in Australia has shown how a new real estate brand can be successfully established and grown utilizing publishing and audio assets within a media business. Paul will be sharing with you the success we are having here at NZME.
These graphs show the changes in market revenue across the radio, print, and digital display platforms, together with how NZME has grown its market share in each channel over the last four years. While the total radio market revenue has not yet returned to the pre-COVID levels of 2019, NZME's increased market share has resulted in a full recovery to these levels. The print market share decline in 2022 reflects lower performance in the first quarter of 2022, while Auckland was impacted by Omicron. The second quarter has rebounded and has returned to solid market share growth. Digital market revenues continue to grow meaningfully, with NZME's share of this also growing at an accelerated pace. We continue to see strong digital revenue growth across the three strategic pillars.
This demonstrates the focus on the digital transformation and the diversification of our platforms, and its positive influence on NZME's performance. We have seen strong growth in digital audio revenue through our iHeartRadio platform, up 56% in the first half compared to the previous corresponding period. Digital publishing revenue has also increased by 18% year-on-year, and OneRoof celebrated a 53% increase in digital revenue compared to the same period last year. The strong growth that I've just shared across each of our strategic pillars means that digital revenues are now becoming a more significant part of NZME's total revenues. The share of revenue has more than doubled in the last three years. You can see the significant change in both publishing advertising revenue and OneRoof real estate revenue mix.
There has been continued strong growth in digital subscribers, and we've now reached the inflection point of digital versus print subscriptions. Given this and the strong digital advertising revenue growth, Carolyn will later share with you that the digital publishing business is now profitable on a standalone basis. That's a significant milestone that we've reached this year. As you all know, the operating environment has been and continues to be challenging. This, combined with supply chain challenges, inflationary pressures, and labor shortages for businesses, has resulted in overall business confidence falling to levels as low as have been seen in recent years. This ANZ Business Confidence Index shown in the graph on the left highlights the weakness in confidence this year.
It has been at levels similar to that seen at the start of the COVID outbreak in early 2020 and not seen prior to that since the 2008 GFC. Despite grappling with the impacts of the Omicron outbreak early this year and the coinciding low business confidence levels, we are pleased to have returned advertising revenues to pre-COVID levels. You can see this in the chart on the right-hand side. As just noted, it has been a difficult year. While there is cautiousness being noted by advertisers, we are pleased that bookings for the remainder of the year continue to track ahead of the same time in 2021. We expect cost pressures to continue and therefore we must continue to focus on efficiencies right across the business. David will shortly provide you with some insight into our cost base.
As announced last week, the recent low advertising levels and reduced number of new real estate listings coming to market has resulted in 2022 EBITDA guidance being reduced to between NZD 64 million and NZD 67 million. As Barbara noted, the board has updated the capital management settings and will consider a further buyback in 2023. As Barbara also noted, NZME has remained adaptable and flexible during challenging times to remain largely on track to achieve the 2023 targets that were set under our three-year strategy back in 2020. The audio business continues to grow and deliver on its profitability goals. Publishing is reaping the benefits of the digital transformation that has well progressed. OneRoof investments have been made to grow the business as rapidly as is sensible within NZME's operating parameters.
While OneRoof is unlikely to achieve its 2023 EBITDA goal, we continue to believe the current investment level is appropriate to ensure it benefits from a future change in the property cycle in coming years. Paul will update you on this further. None of NZME's success today could be achieved without the talented team we have here at NZME. At the core of our people strategy is a desire to ensure that NZME's leaders are exceptional and that they are at the forefront of designing and delivering on NZME's business success. In addition, they are also responsible for ensuring their team members are coached through learning and development opportunities to be the best they can be, whether that be for their role at NZME or a future role they may desire. Roles at NZME can literally lead anywhere.
We've worked hard on engaging our team of 1,300 over recent years. NZME's Employee Net Promoter Score, or eNPS, has risen from +11 at the beginning of last year to a recent high of +38. This puts NZME just one point off being in the top 10% of consumer media businesses globally. I'm really proud of how the entire NZME team has navigated the challenges of recent years while staying steadfastly focused on delivering on our 2023 strategic goals. David Mackrell will now join me to provide a performance overview. While he does that, let me show you some of our people. They'll share how working at NZME can lead you anywhere.
What I love the most about working for NZME is the sheer amount of opportunities that are out there.
We have so many brands that people know and love and can relate to.
Like Newstalk ZB, OneRoof, New Zealand Herald that people use day to day.
It's really awesome to see where you start and how your career can just evolve so much here.
I started in the mailroom, and now I'm the quality assurance engineer.
When I started out in sports reporting, I didn't think I would now be doing news.
There's a lot of opportunities to try new things and experience new things.
My roles and responsibilities have evolved a lot.
I often tell my friends how lucky I am for working for this fabulous company.
NZME, this could lead anywhere.
This could lead anywhere.
New Zealand Media and Entertainment, this could lead anywhere.
Thank you, Michael. The presentations today will demonstrate that we have a strong focus on our three strategic priorities and on ensuring we continue to grow our digital platforms. The chart on the left shows the overall revenue over the last four years, highlighting the growth that has been achieved, and that this year we will deliver revenue above pre-COVID levels. The chart on the right shows the earnings improvements over the last four years, despite the revenue having been impacted by COVID restrictions over the last three years. This table shows the forecast divisional performance for the year. The business continues to be integrated in many areas, requiring some cost pools to be allocated to each division on an appropriate basis. The table on this slide has been prepared based on the midpoint of our guidance range.
The publishing business remains the major contributor to earnings with an expected EBITDA of NZD 48 million, while the audio division's EBITDA has grown to around NZD 23 million. Both of these businesses are expected to contribute higher EBITDA than 2021. OneRoof's digital classifieds platform continues to grow revenue rapidly, albeit this has required additional costs to be introduced ahead of revenue growth, resulting in a negative earnings outcome for the year and versus last year. We believe that this is the right decision to grow the business brand, audience, and revenue. The other column includes the corporate costs of the group and our events business. In 2020, NZME implemented initiatives to permanently reduce the cost base by NZD 20 million. These reductions have been maintained but have been partially offset by cost increases to drive growth, particularly in OneRoof and the addition of BusinessDesk.
People are our largest expense item, and while wage and salary inflation has been controlled over the three years, it has had a significant impact on the cost base. Print volumes have reduced significantly, which combined with lower third-party print volumes, have resulted in lower print and distribution costs, partly offset by distribution and paper cost rate increases. There were significant capital spend reductions in the last two years with a return to a more normal profile of development in 2022, which is expected to result in a spend of NZD 10 million. We continue to focus on developing our key digital platforms to ensure that we continue to grow audience and engagement. The company has returned NZD 45 million to shareholders since September 2021 through the payment of NZD 21.6 million in dividends and NZD 23.5 million via the capital return program to date.
This capital return program has comprised an on-market share buyback of NZD 13.8 million and the payment of a special dividend of NZD 0.05 per share in July. The leverage ratio is expected to be around 0.2x EBITDA at the end of this year, which continues to be well below the company's target leverage ratio of 0.5x-1x EBITDA before IFRS 16. The company continues to generate strong cash flows. The table on the right of this slide shows the current year projected flows to demonstrate the strength of the free cash flow. With the continued economic uncertainty, the company intends to operate at the lower end of its target leverage ratio. However, given the expected investment profile, the board has increased the dividend payout ratio to 50%-80% of free cash flow. Let me now hand back to Michael.
Let me bring in Jason Winstanley, who'll update on our audio business and our ambition to be New Zealand's leading audio company. Here's a bit about Jason first.
My name is Jason Winstanley, and I'm the Chief Radio Officer here at NZME. What makes me proud to work at NZME is our commitment to our staff, our clients, and our audiences. I love the energy that our staff bring to work each day, and I love the winning attitude that we have on display right throughout our business. We have really strong partnerships with our clients, and we deliver excellent solutions across our platforms to help grow their businesses. We're also lucky to have a really large, diverse, and engaged audience across all of our platforms. The best thing about my role is I love audio. I love listening to audio. I love the way it makes me feel. I love how it makes me think. It's fun, it's serious, it's informative, and I love being part of creating New Zealand's best audio.
I heard a great quote recently that I thought summed it up really nicely. "Video is what you see. Audio is what you feel." Our greatest achievement in the past year has been the record audience numbers for NZME. We reached over 2 million broadcast radio listeners for the first time ever, something we're really proud of, and we've topped the New Zealand podcast rank for 12 consecutive months with over 50 million podcast downloads or listens in that time. Also, a record number of listeners and listening hours on our iHeartRadio platform. This really demonstrates our team's understanding of what content our audiences want and where they are listening. Thanks, Michael. Our ambition is to be New Zealand's leading audio company.
We are tracking well towards our targets for 2023, and today we will take you through our progress and an update on how we are delivering against our strategy. Firstly, let me take you through what's happening in audio globally. On this graph, you can see broadcast radio in the U.S. continues to have an extremely strong reach. In addition, digital listening and podcasting is growing overall audience reach and engagement, an incremental opportunity for monetization. Broadcast radio globally still commands a steady share of total advertising spend and is forecast to continue to hold the share. This again highlights the incremental opportunity from digital audio and podcast revenue. Podcasting has seen growth in most markets and is a huge opportunity for audio as a format. In the U.S., podcasting revenue continues to grow at rates that were not expected.
This has resulted in market forecasts being raised over the last 12 months. The PwC/ IAB Podcast Ad Revenue Study forecasts the total U.S. podcast ad revenue in 2024 to be over $4 billion, up from just over $500 million just a few years ago. For perspective, I've summarized iHeartMedia's recent half-year results on this slide. As many of you will know, iHeartMedia is the leading audio media company in the U.S., reaching 9 out of 10 Americans each week. We licensed the iHeartRadio platform for the New Zealand region. In H1 2021, 24% of iHeartMedia revenue came via a digital channel. In the first half of this year, the percentage increased to 28%, with total broadcast radio revenue also growing. Podcast revenue grew 68% year-over-year and continues to be a big area of focus for iHeartMedia.
Like the U.S., but closer to home, Australia is a market that we monitor due to the similarity of market conditions. I have summarized the most recent half-year results for ARN, part of the Here, There, & Everywhere group in Australia. Like NZME here in New Zealand, ARN licensed the iHeartRadio platform for the Australian market and are seeing encouraging digital growth. They have dominated the Australian Pod Ranker since its inception. Let's now look at the New Zealand market. Commercial broadcast radio remains one of the largest media channels in New Zealand, reaching 75% of New Zealanders each week. On average, each week, Kiwis listen to the radio for 15 hours and 22 minutes. The New Zealand radio advertising market in 2022 has shown its resilience as it returns to pre-pandemic levels.
Direct customer revenue is around 70% of the total market, with media agencies representing approximately 30% of radio channel spend. This highlights the importance of NZME's direct sales channel that sells across NZME's platforms. In Australia, this is reversed, with agency revenue representing the largest portion. Digital audio revenue in New Zealand continues to show strong growth, and NZME makes up the majority of IAB-reported spend. With the acceleration of digital revenue, we see major opportunities to continue our digital evolution for both audiences and clients. As you'll be aware, the three pillars of our 2023 audio strategy are creating New Zealand's best local audio content, growing broadcast and digital reach, and growing market revenue share and digital revenue. Let me first talk to you about creating New Zealand's best local audio content. NZME has significant content offerings across the entire broadcast and digital ecosystem.
We have broadcast radio stations in 27 markets across New Zealand with a total of 147 radio stations nationwide. Our strength in podcasting is driven by our Catch-Up radio show podcasts, our original or partner podcasts, and the international network that we commercially represent here in New Zealand. We have a portfolio of radio stations targeting all the major demographics. The content changes in 2020 were made to grow our audience share, with some changes to demographic targets on a number of brands. All of our radio stations are also streamed on iHeartRadio, available on over 200 different devices. 2022 was a very successful year at the New Zealand Radio Awards for our stations, taking out six of the seven premier awards, a testament to the great content being produced. Let's look at how Kiwis consume our broadcast radio content today.
NZME reached over 2 million listeners for the first time ever in 2022. We're particularly pleased with these results, especially in the 25-54 demographic. Despite more competition in the news space than ever before, Newstalk ZB remains New Zealand's biggest radio station and is number one for cumulative audience and audience share. You can see on the right-hand chart how audiences moved away from music radio during the recent pandemic, focused on getting their trusted news and updates from Newstalk ZB. The content strategy we put in place in 2020 is focused on down-aging our older targeted brands. This chart highlights by radio brand the average age from left to right and the gender split top to bottom. The size of the bubble represents the number of listeners. The gray bubbles are where we were at the end of last year.
The purple bubbles represent where we are today. Newstalk ZB and Coast have moved younger, exactly what we wanted to achieve. The Hits has moved slightly older, and we expect this trend to continue as the changes take effect. On this chart, we have overlaid in gray MediaWorks' stations, so you can see where each brand sits by way of comparison. There remains significant opportunity for NZME in the 25-54 demographic, with a major focus for NZME on filling the 40-50-year-old demographic. An example of the content changes we made can be seen here. With Coast, we implemented a new breakfast show headlined by leading broadcaster Toni Street, changed the music to focus on feelgood '80s, and changed our positioning tagline to "Feel Good." These changes were designed to down-age Coast and have it focus on the 40-59 demographic.
As you just saw, the strategy is working. Now back to the bubble charts again. In this chart, the gray bubbles are where we currently sit, the purple is where we are moving our brands to focus. We want to see total audience growth for all our stations and see both The Hits and Coast take stronger positions in the 25-54 demographic. Let's now talk about our digital audio growth opportunity. Our digital audio platforms allow us to deliver advertisers mass reach across digital audio listening, either through our live radio content streamed through iHeartRadio or across any one of our podcasts as they are listened to on all platforms. In September this year, NZME served digital audio content to more than 1.4 million Kiwis.
Licensing iHeartRadio allows us to bring all the features and benefits of this global audio platform localized for Kiwi listeners and advertisers. One such example of this was the Talkback Mic, a new way for listeners to engage with their favorite NZME show by recording a short voice message through the iHeartRadio app, which is then delivered directly to the on-air studio. We launched this feature with ZM's Secret Sound promotion in February this year and saw 13,000 submissions in the first 72 hours, an engagement rate which was identified as market leading by iHeartMedia U.S.. We have plenty more use cases ready to roll out to lift overall audience engagement with our brands. We have New Zealand's largest podcast network with four distinct categories. The first is radio catch-up.
This is content that is broadcast on our radio stations and is then repurposed and made available in podcast format. The second is NZME original content, which is content we create or partner to create and is only available in podcast format. The third is content produced by others, where we only provide sales representation and have no involvement with production or promotion. Finally, we do produce podcasts in partnership with commercial clients. Collectively, this offering reached 795,000 individual Kiwis in September, representing more than 2.5x the reach of our nearest competitor. The Alternative Commentary Collective, or the ACC, is New Zealand's premier multi-platform sports entertainment brand, with content expanding across radio, TV, print, social, live events, and of course, podcasts. 2022 has seen great progress with our strategy for the ACC.
We've added two new podcasts to our suite, The Boys Get Paid, focused on horse racing, and The Bench Warmers, focused on basketball. This has helped us deliver 95% growth in listens and downloads so far this year. We have also signed a number of long-term commercial partnerships, as well as a two-year content partnership with Sky TV. This delivers our ACC content across Sky TV platforms. As you have seen, podcasts are an important part of our audio business, and we expect growth in both audience and revenue in 2023. We are positioning ourselves to be the home of New Zealand's most loved audio content. With podcasts, NZME will be the place creators bring their content to be made, to be heard, and to be sold. This will ensure that NZME can continue to create and deliver New Zealand's best local audio content.
Our second pillar of being New Zealand's leading audio company is to grow broadcast and digital reach. Commercial radio reaches 3.4 million listeners per week, with listeners across all age demographics of New Zealand. Here we have new research that was released yesterday in New Zealand. The Infinite Dial is a market-leading independent audio consumption study, allowing us to understand Kiwis' audio consumption habits and how they compare with global markets. In this graph, you can see the strength of digital audio as a medium, with 77% of Kiwis listening to audio online within the last month. You can see that digital audio adoption is particularly strong with younger audiences, reaching 92% of those aged 16 to 34. NZME's digital radio audience in 2022 has gone from strength to strength.
While mobile remains the predominant device, pleasingly, a large portion of this growth has been driven from smart speakers and connected devices, making our content more accessible than ever before. In line with other international markets, podcast consumption in New Zealand has reached critical mass. Younger audiences, as expected, have adopted the digital formats of audio faster, including podcasting. We expect to see growth across all demographics. Given NZME's leading capability in podcasts, this again highlights the opportunity for audience and revenue growth. NZME's podcast listenership continues to grow, with downloads in H1 this year up 86% on the same period last year. The addition of our partner network in Q4 2021 has further added to our commercial opportunity. NZME's podcast reach in the September 2022 NZ Podcast Ranker was 795,000, by far the largest commercial podcast network in New Zealand.
NZME has held top spot for the 12th month in a row as New Zealand's largest network on the NZ Podcast Ranker. With more than 50 million downloads in the past 12 months, we have generated more than 5 x the number of downloads of our nearest competitor. As noted earlier, we will continue to create New Zealand's best local audio content. Continued digital audio and podcast audience growth will be driven through our eyes to ears strategy. Here's an example featuring Toni Street from Coast. Her podcast, We Need To Talk, is growing by leveraging all of NZME's audiences and platforms to get the right content on the right platform at the right time. Having the content and the audience, our third strategic pillar is to grow market revenue share and digital revenue. A key focus for NZME is to grow the overall market revenues.
Audio is underrepresented in the advertising ecosystem, with significantly more consumption within the channel than the investment by advertisers. While 30% of Kiwis' media consumption is with audio, only 8% of advertising spend is on the medium. A huge growth opportunity. Advocacy will help grow market revenues by building the channel customer relationship without the sensitivity around media suppliers and agencies. This is an industry initiative that will work in conjunction with the Radio Broadcasters Association for the advancement of the total industry. Our market revenue share for broadcast radio has continued to grow in 2022. As noted earlier, NZME's radio revenues are returning to pre-pandemic levels. We continue to focus on our multi-platform approach with our sales teams to ensure we deliver comprehensive, multifaceted solutions for our clients.
A large Australasian client has recently noted that NZME brought a cohesive total solution to them that they had not seen from any other media partner across Australia and New Zealand. They went on to say that every part of the cross-platform proposal made sense and had a reason to be there. Our digital audio revenue has continued its accelerated growth. 2022 digital audio revenue is forecast to be more than 3 x 2019 digital audio revenue. With the significant ad inventory that has already been generated, we expect this growth to continue. I spoke earlier about the content that we produce using the team known as the Alternative Commentary Collective. This is a live commentary show by the ACC in partnership with DB Export, and highlights the strength of NZME's multi-platform approach.
DB Export has teamed up with the ACC as a way of reaching passionate sports fans in an entertaining way. Our approach includes monetizing live commentary on NZME platforms and Sky TV, podcasts, live events, merchandise, and radio. This continues to be a growth monetization opportunity for NZME. In summary, we believe that NZME audio is well-positioned to achieve our goals in 2023. I'm excited by the year ahead. Let me now leave you with a quick video overview of NZME Audio.
Radio is about starting people's day off in a really fun and exciting way. Anything can happen, and we can talk about it in a second.
iHeartRadio works well because it puts everything that you want in one place.
It's an instant connection with people, and you get to change as the day does. We're online, we're on air, we're everywhere.
It's like hanging out with your friends in the morning. We're just being ourselves, and they're part of it.
Thanks, Jason, for that. You'll all have a chance to speak with Jason and the other presenters during the Q&A later in today's session. Let me now introduce Carolyn Luey, our Chief Digital and Publishing Officer. She's gonna give you an overview of the significant progress we are making as a digital publisher. Here's a little bit from Carolyn first.
I'm Carolyn Luey, I'm the Chief Digital and Publishing Officer at NZME. I'm proud to work at NZME because of the great team I get to work with, who are passionate and committed for delivering for audiences and advertisers every day. Across our newsroom, our print operations, and digital, our teams are focused on delivering news and insights that bring greater clarity and connection through quality journalism and product experiences. The best part of my role at NZME is the diversity of the NZME business and the breadth of opportunities. One of the big focuses for this year has been continuing to innovate in the data space. At NZME, we have great diversity of data. Everything from what people browse on the New Zealand Herald, to listening affinity on iHeartRadio, to property buying stage on OneRoof.
This has meant we've been able to expand personalization to deliver greater relevancy of content and experiences across multiple touchpoints, a broad range of data targeting products to our advertisers, and new tools to our newsroom to enable better decision-making. Our greatest achievement from the last year is bringing our customer first strategy to life and embedding it into our ways of working. By bringing the voice of the customer to everything we've done, we've unearthed new insights and now have a deeper understanding of our customers and what they're expecting from us. Which means that we can continue to enhance our customer experience for both our readers and subscribers across the New Zealand Herald. Thanks, Michael. 2022 has been a big year, and I'm excited today to provide you with an update on NZME's publishing strategy and key strategic priorities.
We've made great progress against each of our publishing scorecard metrics and are on track to achieve our 2023 targets. We've continued to grow our digital subscription base and reached the inflection point in Q3 this year where we had more digital subscriptions than print subscriptions. Our advertising mix has continued to shift, with digital now making up 49% of publishing's advertising revenue. EBITDA is tracking towards the 2023 target. The H1 EBITDA percentage is lower due to seasonality. With a lift in revenue in H2, this will deliver an improved overall EBITDA percentage for the year. Our publishing strategy continues to focus on the New Zealand Herald being New Zealand's Herald as we move into the final year of our three-year strategy. There are three strategic pillars. Our audience strategy is focused on being the number one news brand for all New Zealanders.
Our subscriber strategy is focused on being subscriber first, and our advertising strategy is to be a safe, scalable destination for advertisers. Last year, we added a simplification focus to simplify and automate our operating model to enable our business to be more agile and nimble to adapt as we transition to a digital future. I would now like to first focus on our audience strategy pillar and the key achievements over the last 12 months and our key priorities for the future. To start, let's have a look at some key audience metrics. We have two powerhouse news brands in the New Zealand Herald and Newstalk ZB that reach a combined news audience of 3 million Kiwis each month. The New Zealand Herald has never had more readers, achieving its biggest ever brand audience of 2.26 million this year.
This demonstrates the ongoing strong interest in news and our journalism. Our newsroom of more than 300 editorial staff across New Zealand continues to deliver award-winning journalism across multiple platforms, including newspaper, digital, and radio. We are super proud that the New Zealand Herald has won Website and News App of the Year three years in a row at the Voyager Media Awards. While Newstalk ZB was recognized as Station of the Year for the second year in a row. Our unique advantage in the market is that our storytelling follows people across the day. From the New Zealand Herald app first thing in the morning, to on the radio in the car through to the newspaper and websites across the day. We ensure that Kiwis stay connected to the news and issues of the day like no other media organization.
To be the number one news brand for all New Zealanders, we have three key priorities we will cover today. We know that Kiwis are seeking trusted sources of news and information, and so a big focus this year has been on embedding trust and quality in the newsroom across all of our journalism. Engaging with all New Zealanders to expand audience by building out our connections with the next generation and creating more personalized experiences that help different segments discover relevant content. One of our unique advantages is our multi-platform storytelling capability in creating immersive content experiences that drive engagement. From our New Zealand Herald brand monitor, we know that our readers are looking for trusted, accurate, quality sources of news and information. We've had a focus on quality across four key areas this year.
We've introduced new scorecards this year to ensure that our editorial team have the best data to inform the decision-making. This has included a new daily article scoring engine that is focused on engagement metrics like average time on page, audience recirculation to more stories, and subscription conversions. We also produce a journalist report that highlight the areas we need to replicate, optimize, support, and amplify across the newsroom. The new scorecards will also help identify the best journalism and stories each day to engage audiences further on or opportunities to build new ones. We've launched a new newsroom mission and code of ethics to set a clear quality standard in the newsroom alongside extensive learning and development programs to keep lifting the journalism capability and reinforce a culture of quality right across everything we do.
Our new editorial authoring platform has been deployed this year, giving our newsroom a new modern interface for creating and publishing stories, and is a key enabler of our quality-first approach and future workflow automation. Every day, our editorial team is focused on producing distinctive quality journalism that sets the agenda across news, sport, business, lifestyle, and entertainment. Here we have some fantastic examples of the breadth and depth of the stories we cover. From breaking news to the big issues facing Kiwis like mental health and economy, to the big global stories like the plight of the refugees in Ukraine to the Queen's passing. Quality is at the heart of the New Zealand Herald's journalism, and we have the best journalist talent in New Zealand who are committed to ensuring that our journalism is fair, accurate, and balanced.
The customer insights from our brand monitor have helped us unearth what Kiwis are really looking for from their main news source and the key attributes of a quality news provider. We have used these to develop our brand strategy and brand promise as we look to deliver on our vision to be New Zealand's Herald and grow brand preference. As the world gets more complicated, at the New Zealand Herald, our purpose is to deliver greater clarity and connection for all New Zealanders through high-quality, trusted journalism. In a time of unparalleled information overload, our opportunity is to uncover the news worthy of New Zealanders' attention. Our new brand promise, "News Worth Knowing," emphasizes the quality and the depth of the Herald's journalism. Our new brand promise needs to be more than a tagline.
We need to weave the brand experience of trustworthy, valuable, and relevant across every touchpoint and deliver a customer experience where we respect everyone, drive discovery, and make it seamless to ensure we deliver on our brand promise every day for our readers. Over the next 12 months, we will build brand advocacy by bringing the brand experience to life across the website, mobile app, emails, social, and content, so readers can seamlessly engage with the News Worth Knowing. Our focus is to become the main news source for all New Zealanders and build brand preference. With the refresh of the New Zealand Herald brand promise, we will introduce a new set of brand codes to create a distinctive brand and market, leveraging the Gothic H we are well known for as a key brand mark, black as our main brand color, a new audio sonic and brand voice.
We will upweight local marketing and have local creative executions to drive preference in key regions to grow audience penetration and engagement. We are proud of the audience expansion initiatives that we have delivered on this year. With Kāhu showcasing our Māori community stories and journalism talent, one of their standout pieces was the Matariki video series that authentically tells the story of the stars and their symbolism to celebrate Matariki. While the launch of Talanoa has connected with the Pacific Island community and brought their stories to life. It's great to see Kāhu and Talanoa expand the audience that the Herald connects with and deliver strong audience numbers. Open Justice has also broadened our legal and court coverage and delivered strong regional engagement and audiences. We will continue to expand and diversify our audience through our next generation audience strategy.
The New Zealand Herald already has strong reach with 18 to 34-year-olds and favorable brand perceptions as a quality news source. The opportunity for us is to grow engagement through authentically connecting with the next generation by giving them a voice in the news conversation. We need to be on the platforms where they are to make the news accessible, digestible, and enables them to collaborate and make it their own. We are taking a test-and-learn approach to see what resonates with a truly digital native audience, starting with social reels first and then looking to expand across other platforms like podcasting and newsletters. We've expanded personalization as a key strategy this year to drive audience engagement.
Personalization has now been rolled out across all article pages, the homepage with a personalized module for logged in users, newsletters, and most recently, the mobile app with the personalized news feed in the new For You section. We have seen an impressive 2x lift in engagement from the rollout. Building out our personalization capability this year has been a key focus. The enhancements to the data models this year have seen us improve the underlying infrastructure to improve the freshness of recommendations and to build a story cluster model to group stories together so that we avoid serving an All Blacks pre-game article after the post-game wrap-up article. We have an extensive roadmap for further development of the models and capability to drive greater recirculation of audience across all NZME platforms, including DRIVEN, BusinessDesk, and OneRoof.
Longer term, our vision is to shift to our predictive models to maximize conversion and audience engagement. The New Zealand Herald homepage is a key strategic asset, but with 800,000 daily web users and over 200 articles being published each weekday, it's a challenge to curate the top 14 articles which generate 75% of the clicks on the homepage for different audience segments we serve. To optimize content discovery, we will shift to a segmented and personalized homepage so readers can easily discover the relevant content. This will enable us to grow engagement with the different segments, subscribers versus non-subscribers in each of the different regions. For example, a South Island reader is going to be less interested in a rate increase in Auckland than an Auckland reader. A segmented homepage will enable us to curate content for these different segments of readers and their interests.
This year we have focused on improvements to the video player and article pages and on the mobile app, and the creation of new video, like the Focus Morning Bulletin, covering the top stories of the day in a short snackable video. Mobile video continues to grow exponentially. To take advantage of this, we will shift our focus to creating a mobile-first video experience with a focus on live streaming, short-form, and snackable reels. With 83% of our traffic now on a mobile device, vertical video formats will be critical to enhancing the viewing experience and growing engagement. We see an exciting opportunity to combine NZME's strength in news and audio to create an immersive audio experience on the New Zealand Herald.
Text-to-speech capability will provide audiences with choice on how to engage with our content, particularly for those that are visually impaired or looking to consume news while multitasking. New features like a listen option on all articles, creation of a top stories podcast, and the development of an authentic te reo Māori voice will give us rich audio news offering unique in market. Lifestyle is an important part of our overall audience proposition, and our vision is to be New Zealand's home of lifestyle with a diverse range of the best lifestyle content. By creating a lifestyle hub that delivers a high quality, immersive, glossy, like, magazine experience, there is a significant medium-term opportunity to grow audience and accelerate digital revenue growth.
This year, we've reviewed our portfolio of lifestyle brands and mapped them across the different need states to ensure that we have both full market coverage, but also to ensure that each is distinctive with a clear target audience and unique content offering. We have launched new brands and redefined some of our existing ones as we transition to a digital-first approach. On the left, our newest lifestyle brand, Reset, is more accessible, edgy, and practical compared to Viva, which is more sophisticated, contemporary, and influential. While Canvas, on the far right, is more premium, cultivated, and curated. Having clarity on the positioning of each of our brands will enable us to create unique content environments for each of the different audience and advertiser needs. To continue to drive our digital acceleration, we're investing in our core platforms and have delivered a number of significant initiatives this year, which we've covered.
From 2023 and beyond, we will continue to enhance the audience experience with new site features like search, navigation, video, and audio, and we'll continue to build out our editorial automation to ensure that our newsroom has the best tools to support delivering high-quality journalism. Before I move on to talk about subscribers, let me share with you New Zealand Herald's latest brand campaign. Our second strategic pillar we would like to talk to you about today is subscriber first. In 2020, we set the subscriber growth target out to 2025 across print and digital. I'm pleased to share that we are well on track to achieve these targets, and we'll cover our progress over the next few slides. Starting with print subscribers. Subscriber revenue has remained resilient, with yield growing continuing to substantially offset the volume decline.
Retail cover prices were increased in May, but retail revenue has continued to decline. However, subscriber revenues now make up 85% of total print reader revenues. With the increase in print distribution and direct mail costs, we've changed the approach to acquisition by reducing the free trial program. This will reduce acquisition, but it will also improve yield and retention moving forward. We now have over 110,000 digital-only subscriptions, partially driven by the uplift from the acquisition of BusinessDesk in January. Our digital subscriptions have continued to grow organically over the last 12 months, despite a slower news cycle. With the introduction of longer introductory offers, periodic flash sales, and growth in our corporate channel with a strong Herald Premium and BusinessDesk bundle, we are pleased with the progress we are making at growing our digital subscriber base.
As the subscription base has continued to grow, we've had a strong focus on maintaining yield. With the growth in corporate bundles, the customer base mix has changed, with corporates lifting from 13% to 24% over the last 12 months. This has contributed to a small yield reduction, along with longer introductory offers to improve retention of new subscribers. Our annual recurring revenue is now NZD 16.6 million and continues to grow as a proportion of our overall publishing revenue mix. The International News Media Association now provides a quarterly benchmarking survey of publishers globally, allowing us to track our performance on a quarterly basis. Overall, Herald Premium performs well versus the global benchmarks. We perform very well on subscriber penetration rate of monthly unique audience versus other publishers. Our conversion funnel performs well in terms of stop rate and paid conversion.
The key focus area is monthly churn, where we're currently close to the medium benchmark. We are working hard on improving this through the likes of extended introductory offers, personalization of content to improve the value perceptions, and continued improvement in the quality of our journalism. The New York Times is seen to be the global best-in-class digital subscription publisher that continues to flourish. New York Times subscriber revenue now makes up 66% of total revenue, driven by their growing digital subscriber base and diversification into non-news products. We can compare our growth trajectory to New York Times. You can see on this graph, the yellow line represents the percentage of their total subscriber base that are digital subscribers. We have mapped our ongoing progress onto the graph in green, showing that our progress is similar to that of New York Times.
As we track towards our 2025 target of more than 70% of subscriptions being digital, this would be in line with the New York Times trajectory. Despite a big differential between print and digital ARPU, digital subscription contribution is now approximately 10% higher than print due to the increased cost of paper and distribution over the last 12 months. The total addressable market for digital news subscriptions in New Zealand is significant at 1 million. As other New Zealand publishers start to launch their own paywalls, it's expected that this will grow the overall digital news subscription market as there'll be less free news options, as it is the experience in other markets around the world.
We currently have 208,000 subscriptions across print and digital, and our research has highlighted that currently there is a further 21% of Kiwis who are considering subscribing to a new service. This represents a strong opportunity for growth. Looking at Herald Premium's regional household penetration, there continues to be good opportunity to drive further growth through growing regional brand preference and strategic distribution partnerships to increase our footprint. There are three key strategies to accelerate digital subscriber growth. Enhance the value proposition to drive acquisition and improve retention. The launch of new verticals to expand the addressable market. Optimizing pricing and packaging to increase ARPU and drive reader lifetime value. One of the key insights from our NPS surveys is that distinctive quality journalism is the number-one driver of value.
We have built out our content offering with the addition of True Crime section that features all of our latest in-depth investigative crime stories. We will continue to build out a content-led proposition by identifying content offerings that resonate with our subscriber base. Our new smart upgrade capability has been a driver of reduced churn and increased reader lifetime value by driving upgrades from monthly to annual pricing and will shortly launch smart downgrades to optimize retention. We recently migrated our e-editions to Herald Premium as a new subscriber feature to increase value and utility. Two key areas we are looking to build is a data-led content optimization engine, which will determine whether a story should go in front of or behind the paywall to optimize conversions, and the introduction of a mobile-only app subscription to enable a lower entry-level price point without cannibalizing ARPU.
This year we have ramped up our focus on customers and embedded voice of the customer into everything we do. This has enabled us to unearth new insights and gain a deeper understanding of our customers' expectations. This allows us to address key pain points like online cancellation and build out a distinctive customer experience that is personalized and enhances the content experience for all of our subscribers. Our second strategy to accelerate growth is to create new subscription verticals. The first of these was the acquisition of BusinessDesk at the beginning of the year. I'm really excited about our Viva Premium, which has just launched this week. I'll talk more about that shortly. The addition of these verticals will help us expand the addressable market and grow appeal while also enabling ARPU growth through bundling and cross-selling.
As we've seen globally, we will continue to assess the opportunities for our build, partner, and buy strategy to continue to grow our offering. The acquisition of BusinessDesk has lifted the breadth and depth of our business offering alongside Herald Business. BusinessDesk is focused on the corporate reader and goes deep, while Herald Business is focused on the retail reader and goes broad. They're highly complementary and together offer the best business coverage in New Zealand. BusinessDesk has seen strong growth in the monthly audience with promotion across NZME's assets, growth in ad revenues, and increased penetration into the corporate market with our new corporate bundling offer.
Last week, we launched an all-new refreshed website to showcase BusinessDesk's depth of quality business journalism, and later this month, we will be adding FundSource to the proposition to grow penetration within the wealth management industry in New Zealand. We are well-placed to accelerate the growth of BusinessDesk through growing brand awareness and increasing the depth of the content offering to key industry verticals. There is a large addressable market with over 500,000 businesses in New Zealand and over 100,000 with a turnover of more than NZD 500,000. We're taking a strategic approach to growing the subscriber base by targeting key industry verticals where we either have a strong track record of conversion or where we think there is a strong potential for our deep business offering.
Our target is to achieve 25%+ penetration of managers and professionals across key industry verticals like health, construction, and IT. Global publishing insights suggest the best opportunity to drive digital subscriptions is where you already have a strong brand and content offering. Viva is one of our most well-known brands and has been the leader in the lifestyle market for over 25 years. Its content reflects modern Kiwi style and attitude, and so we see an opportunity to build out a lifestyle subscription offering focused on delivering unique and exclusive content across six content flavors. Viva Premium has been designed to reflect the unique brand values of the Viva brand with a fresh, modern look and feel with big, bold images to showcase the rich content from the Viva team, offering expert opinion and thought leadership.
Viva will be a multi-platform, immersive experience where subscribers will be able to participate in live experiences with our Viva team and become part of the Viva community. It will be priced at NZD 3 per week or NZD 99 per annum as a standalone subscription to grow a new audience segment and will be offered as part of a bundle to existing Herald Premium subscribers. Part of the Viva build has been the build-out of our paywall to support bundling, as well as the integration into our current subscriber customer journeys to drive conversion and ARPU. Early this year, we partnered with a global consultancy to build out a strategic pricing model to benchmark our current price and volume drivers as global publishers to ensure we had a clear long-term strategy to optimize revenues.
Some of our key learnings from the benchmarking were lower introductory prices drive trial and acquisition, longer introductory periods will reduce churn, and price elasticity is relatively low, but relies on a sticky, mature proposition. We have now translated the core insights into our pricing strategy with three key components. These are focus on introductory pricing and length to drive acquisition, utilize retention programs to drive lifetime value, and optimize yield and cross-sell through the development of a dynamic offer engine. We are embedding these learnings within the business. Before I move on to talk about advertising, let me play you our Herald Premium video.
So far, that plan is working, and that is thanks to everyone who has stayed the course.
Everything sort of dreamed up on the fly, and it's not really properly thought out.
Russia's Vladimir Putin thought he could roll into Ukraine and the world would roll over.
You've read the headlines. Now get more of the story. Herald Premium, giving you everything you need to know about the issues of the day. Delivering trusted commentary and in-depth analysis from our world-class team of journalists. Every day, generating insightful content exclusive to Herald Premium subscribers. Bringing you the bigger picture on what's happening right across New Zealand right now with investigative news reports, business insights, analysis of top sporting events, lifestyle advice, entertainment reviews, and an expanded view of global issues, pulling in content from leading global publishers. Plus, enjoy added functionality across both the Herald site and app that allows premium subscribers to comment and exchange views with other subscribers, save stories to read later offline. Tune in to exclusive Q&As with topic experts, receive curated news summaries, and get access to the Herald's daily crosswords and puzzles. Get everything you need to know with Herald Premium.
The third pillar of our publishing strategy is focused on advertising and being a safe, scalable destination for advertisers. There is significant changes in the digital advertising ecosystem and therefore increasing demand from clients for digital solutions that deliver strong results in a brand-safe way. The digital advertising market is continuing to see strong growth and now makes up 58% of the market and growing at a 13% CAGR. While digital advertising is dominated by global tech platforms, we believe we can make inroads into this. The print advertising market has stabilized with an overall 10% CAGR decline. That's an improvement from the five-year CAGR to 2020 of a 15% decline because of COVID impacts. NZME's print share has remained stable at 47%. The market has partially recovered post-COVID, particularly in retail and travel, offsetting the decline in Ministry of Health.
The overall print advertising market is currently tracking to be slightly down on last year. It's great to see NZME's digital market share continuing to lift, with share now sitting at 28%. This is driven by strong share growth in digital display and native advertising enabled by NZME's rich data targeting capability. We have three key priority focuses in our advertising strategic pillar. Continuing to grow our first-party data and data targeting products, evolving and diversifying our advertiser products and environments, and enhancing the advertiser experience through driving the adoption of self-service. At NZME, we have a huge diversity in data that is collected across our different touchpoints, from New Zealand Herald browsing behaviors to listening affinity on iHeartRadio to property buying stage on OneRoof. The amount of data we're processing every day has increased by 300% since 2020 to 15 TBpd .
We are using a range of the latest artificial intelligence technologies to enrich our data. Natural language processing services to understand regional relevancy and the context of our articles to create context-based advertising solutions and machine learning techniques such as look-alike modeling to understand behavioral and intent signals which improve advanced targeting solutions and improve the relevancy of our digital advertising. Our data-driven revenues have grown 60% year-on-year, and will continue to be a key focus to grow yield and deliver improved ROI for our advertisers. The digital advertising ecosystem will be significantly disrupted with the deprecation of cookies at the end of 2024. Our portfolio of first-party data-driven targeting solutions will future-proof us from cookieless targeting and enable us to continue to deliver effective solutions to our advertisers post the change. The e-commerce market has experienced rapid growth post-COVID.
In 2021, e-commerce spend was NZD 7.7 billion in New Zealand and grew 21% year-on-year. We'll have a big focus on diversifying our products to support this high-growth industry. ShopMe e-commerce driven ads have been launched. This takes a product feed and then delivers them into ad units across the New Zealand Herald. We then optimize for clicks by picking the highest performing products in the catalog and placing them in the right environments. It's designed to be a super easy product for retailers to adopt, as the feeds will sync regularly to ensure any out-of-stock items are removed. Live shopping is growing massively in China, and we'll be launching our first live shopping experience next year to provide a new way for consumers to engage and interact with products through an immersive virtual shopping experience.
We are building a new shopping vertical to provide audiences with a shoppable content experience. This will create new revenue streams through affiliate commissions. This category has seen significant growth globally as more and more products have become available online. Another industry experiencing significant change is automotive. The new business models are emerging globally and shifting more of the car buying journey online. Everything from complete digital retailing by companies like Cazoo enable cars to be bought online end to end, including home delivery and seven-day money back guarantee, to Tesla's direct-to-consumer model with no dealers. These changes to the automotive industry have led us to reposition and refresh DRIVEN to be an independent car advice site. Our deep automotive editorial expertise is one of our competitive advantages in the market with our team test driving over 200 cars every year.
This provides us with a compelling platform upon which to launch a new DRIVEN proposition next year. New features will include a new car showroom with in-depth reviews, a comparison tool designed to make one of the biggest buying decisions in life easy and simple. DRIVEN Car Guide will give us a unique position in market for both audiences and advertisers and future-proof DRIVEN as more of the car buying journey shifts online in the future, as well as provide new revenue streams with boosted content and manufacturer lead generation. Increasingly, clients are expecting to be able to buy everything online. To future-proof the experience, we now have a self-service experience called NZME Adh ub. This provides clients with the ability to create, book, and monitor campaigns in one place, 24/7, without having to speak to anyone.
The campaigns go live almost instantaneously, giving 100% control and visibility to the advertiser. NZME Adh ub will enable us to onboard new advertisers through a full end-to-end digital experience and enable NZME to continue to grow our direct client base and manage them efficiently. Our vision is to have over 50% of our clients using self-service in the future, leaving our sales team to focus on building deeper client relationships. Our final strategic focus is simplification. As our business continues to change, simplifying and automating our operating model will enable us to be more agile and adaptable in the future needs of the business. We are currently operating in a digital-centric hybrid model and have strong commercial businesses focused on four core revenue streams. Print subscribers, print advertising, digital subscribers, and digital advertising.
In the long term, we'll become a digital-only model, so over the next period, we need to simplify our operating model and deploy our resources to effectively optimize print while accelerating our digital growth. We commenced our simplification program this year by reviewing all of our print publications. This has included standardizing our community portfolio, which has positively delivered revenue growth this year after many years of decline. We've refreshed the New Zealand Herald Monday to Friday with a new reader flow and introduced BusinessDesk. We've launched a revamped Herald on Sunday with a new lifestyle magazine, Reset, offering an improved Sunday reader proposition. We've refreshed and standardized the regional daily publications to be part of the Herald. We've also automated key processes across print subscriber management. Overall, our print publications now offer a significantly better reader experience while also reducing the operational complexity.
The next phase of the simplification program will be focused on streamlining the business and transitioning to a model with a dedicated focus on growing the future of digital business and the creation of a print hub. The print production hub will be a team of experts dedicated to optimizing and streamlining the process of taking the content created by the newsroom for digital platforms and curating and producing it into our portfolio of print publications. The three main focuses for the print production hub are standardizing, rationalizing, and automating the portfolio to drive efficiencies, optimize product profitability, and extend the life and contribution of print to the business while we accelerate the growth of digital. This will improve efficiencies and ensure the business adapts to market changes and opportunities.
We now have a profitable and sustainable digital business that stand alone with fully loaded editorial and overhead costs deliver positive EBITDA. With our digital revenues growing 60% over the last three years, we have a solid platform for significant future growth. The print business continues to be EBITDA positive despite increases in paper and distribution, and is forecasted to remain positive in the long term. To accelerate digital growth, a key change will be the shift from a masthead-driven editorial and product model to a more population-driven model that will provide strong nationwide coverage to drive incremental growth in digital subscriptions and advertising from the regions where NZME does not currently have mastheads.
Reader lifetime value is a key strategic measure that the publishing business is focused on, and all of our strategic priorities focus on growing engagement to increase lifetime value and convert readers through the different stages from active to engaged and to high value. Positively, we have grown the high value segment from 7%-9% and the engaged segment from 18%-22%. In summary, as we shift into our final year of our three-year strategy, we're on track to deliver our scorecard targets in 2023 through driving digital acceleration and growing reader lifetime value. Let me now leave you with an overview of our publishing business.
Just hours away here from seeing one of the most significant funerals.
Inflation hitting almost 6%. Average Kiwis aren't getting ahead.
I am always hopeful for climate justice.
Thanks, Carolyn, for that. I hope you all can see the great progress we're making as a digital publisher. Finally, let me introduce Paul Maher, our Chief of OneRoof, who'll provide an update on the growth we're seeing in our OneRoof business and how we believe we can continue to win. Here's a little bit from Paul first.
I'm Paul Maher. I'm the Chief of OneRoof. What makes me proud to work at NZME is there's amazing people, of course. The NZME brands have so much depth in this country. When I think about the way that we engage with New Zealanders across our platforms, how relevant we are to New Zealanders every day, I'm really proud to be part of that. The best thing about my role at OneRoof is I work in such a dynamic industry. If I think about the real estate industry in 2022, it's changed in a way that we never thought it would. I'm really proud of the fact that we had a strategy, we've deployed that strategy through the year, we've delivered on it, and we've had some fantastic results.
I think OneRoof's greatest achievement is its continued success in terms of growth of audiences, of brand, and of revenue. That's in the face of a really dynamically changing real estate market. If I think about the way in which the economy's changed, the lending criteria have changed, there's different demand/supply dynamics. Within that, OneRoof is the brand that has continued to grow its audiences right through the year. Our brand preference and awareness has continued to grow. That's turned into top-line revenue and conversion in Auckland and in the rest of the country. Clearly, we wouldn't have done that if we didn't have the right strategy and a really talented and committed team. Thanks, Michael, and good morning everyone.
I'm pleased to be able to take you through an update on the OneRoof business for this year and our plans to continue growth in FY 2023. Let me start by highlighting how we're tracking against the 2023 strategy targets. The OneRoof business is on target to deliver audience, listing upgrade, and revenue mix goals. While we have almost all agencies now providing us with listings, we're still in the process of securing a long tail of listings to get us to the target of 96% of all agency listings versus Trade Me. This continues to be a focus with a one-to-one direct approach with agents. We do, however, have similar imagery levels to our other main competitor. Finally, a combination of changing market conditions and our accelerated investment in growing the OneRoof business has resulted in a weaker EBITDA margin. I'll talk about that next.
The FY 2022 year has shown dynamic change, new supply and demand conditions, a changing and challenging economic situation, and a difficult lending environment. These challenges have resulted in a slower than projected growth rate. Despite this, NZME has and continues to invest in the OneRoof business, which has resulted in strong growth in audiences, in brand, listing conversion, and revenue. Our expectation is that we will see continued growth through FY 2023, and although EBITDA targets are not expected to deliver to the original forecast, we believe we're on track to deliver strong profitability in future years. I'll be able to give you confidence regarding this as we move through this presentation. Let's start by looking at New Zealand's real estate market. New Zealanders remain hugely engaged in the real estate sector across all segments, and real estate investment remains New Zealanders' preferred investment vehicle.
This is supported by the chart at the bottom left, which shows New Zealand continues to have one of the highest residential property investment share of GDP in the world, and is still growing. On the right of the page is our estimate of the size of the real estate classified market at NZD 166 million. NZME remains a key player in this market across our platforms. OneRoof does have a unique position in the real estate marketing landscape. OneRoof is the only true multimedia real estate marketing platform, a position that creates competitive advantage both in delivery of audiences and with our agent customers. Our digital platform delivers unmatched breadth of content, editorial, valuation, and listings. That breadth delivers scaled audiences.
Importantly, over a 1/3 of our audiences are not found on any other property portal, and that audience is of significant value to real estate agents and their vendors. From a commercial perspective, the strength of our platform delivers at scale, and using our first-party and look-alike data across NZME and social media, we deliver unmatched targeting. To fuel our conversion growth, we offer commercial packages at a very competitive price, demonstrated in the comparison on the right between OneRoof Super Boost and that of a key competitor. This chart shows the superior conversion elements that we offer at a price that is 40% lower than a key competitor. Now looking at the real estate sales and listing environment. As I said earlier, the market has been exceptionally challenging, reflecting a number of changing dynamics.
You'll be aware of the global and local economic situation, but added to that is the rising OCR and the changes to the lending environment, which have resulted in lower market confidence for both buyers and sellers. This chart shows residential sales in Auckland, our key market, and the rest of the country, with sales volume down across the country. Sales in Auckland are down 36% versus 2021, and 25% across all other markets. Despite slower sales volume, the national level of new listings coming through the market has remained relatively flat through to August. This, combined with lower sales and longer days to sell, has resulted in significant increase in total residential stock in the market. Looking at national new listings, though, hides the fact that the market has been two-paced. Auckland, where OneRoof is strongest, is down year on year.
That excludes August and September, as Auckland was in a COVID lockdown in 2021. The rest of the country is up across the year. Auckland's a lead indicator of the market, with the rest of the country flattening in September and total national new listings down 16% in October. Overall, we expect the new listings to be down this year versus last year, with Auckland down somewhere between 10% and 15%. Given Auckland's skew for OneRoof, this has a material impact to our business despite increasing residential conversion. Now let's turn to the 2023 strategy. We remain focused on our three pillars. Strengthening our residential listing business, making our brand indispensable to agents, and expanding the portfolio. Strengthening our core residential listing business remains the most critical of the three pillars.
Within that pillar, we remain focused on strengthening our audience position and consolidating the position we have as number two real estate portal in this market. We'll continue to grow our brand position with consumers and agents, and through doing those two things, continue to accelerate listing conversion across the country. Our listing penetration, the number of available listings we carry on the OneRoof platform, remains strong, with OneRoof now securing deals with virtually all agencies across the country and carrying approximately 90% of listings when compared to Trade Me. That's the equivalent of 95% of agent listings on Trade Me and 100% of realestate.co.nz's listings. In summary, OneRoof has a comprehensive and competitive listing inventory set. OneRoof audiences have shown growth over the past three years.
We're pleased that as we've deployed new digital marketing strategies through 2022, that we're the only portal to show audience growth. In doing this, we've cemented our position as number two in the market. In September, that resulted to an audience 56% higher than realestate.co.nz and closed the gap to Trade Me to just 170,000 users. It's worth noting that Trade Me has a large part of its audience for rent, a sector that is not currently a focus for the OneRoof business. We're also really pleased that our investment in marketing is paying dividends. In our September brand monitor, OneRoof was the only brand to show prompted awareness growth. For the first time, OneRoof has become the number two portal in consumers' minds based on that metric.
Importantly, unprompted awareness and preference increased significantly versus last year, and we're up more than 140% versus two years ago. In last year's presentation, we said we were gonna increase focus on key markets of Canterbury and Wellington, and we're pleased that that strategy is also paying off with unprompted awareness up 166% and 83%, respectively, for those markets versus last year. Let me talk now briefly to how we'll continue our growth in brand and audience with the goal of cementing our position as the number two real estate portal in this market. As noted on the last slide, OneRoof is already number two for prompted awareness, and our goal is to close the gap in unprompted awareness and preference.
We only require 15%-20% growth to achieve that, given recent history, we believe that is really achievable. As a brand that's been in the market for a short time, less than five years, against competitors Trade Me and realestate.co.nz, who've been in the market 23 years and 17 years, respectively, taking this position in consumers' mind is an exceptional outcome. To deliver this, we'll continue our investment in growing brand awareness and preference around the country, more strongly leveraging the NZME media assets with increased levels of activity in key regional markets to support our growth aspirations. We'll continue our strategy to target consumers across the real estate funnel. Our ability to engage with consumers across the entire funnel, from passive to active, remains our core competitive advantage, and that's the driver of the 34% of our audience that's unique to the OneRoof platform.
The strategies we've deployed in 2022 have proven successful, and in 2023, we'll increase the use of research and data analytics to improve customer experience and improve personalization, including next action predictive modeling. We'll also create more content that is directly relevant to consumer journeys, supporting the work that we've been doing to leverage our SEO investment. Our audience goal is to continue growth, consistently closing the gap to number one portal and extending the gap to others in the market. Total revenue has continued to grow in 2022, with digital revenue outpacing declines in print despite the weaker market conditions. Our core listing revenue remains the key driver, generating over 70% of the total digital revenue. The key driver of residential revenue relies on growth of upgrade or depth product conversion.
Based on the investment and resource during the year, we're pleased with the significant growth that we've seen through the second half of 2022. Auckland has seen upgrade penetration increasing from a peak of 30% last November to 43% in October 2022, and the rest of the country increasing from 7% to 16%. Both of these results give us confidence that the investments are appropriate and that we're on track to deliver our FY 2023 shareholder goals of 50% of listings upgraded in Auckland and more than 22% across New Zealand. Delivery of that growth lies both in the continued strength of our audience and ensuring our commercial go-to-market strategy offers unbeatable value to agents and vendors. We remain committed to a high-touch, one-to-one agent sales call strategy in Auckland and across all key markets nationally.
To drive conversion through FY 2023, we'll continue to leverage a wider range of conversion products than any of our competitors. This includes the bundling of OneRoof and NZME digital, print, and radio, building agent relationships through entry-level conversion offers that leverage the strength of NZME assets. An example of that is the launch that we had this year of the New Zealand Herald Carousel and through highly competitive Boost and Boost 2.0 sales products. As noted earlier, these strategies have been well received by agents across the country, as evidenced in H2 this year. We intend to continue the strong momentum. Which leads me to our second pillar, to make OneRoof indispensable to agents.
This pillar also has three key strategies, to communicate and deliver strong value-based agent proposition, to meet agents' brand and growth aspirations for the best-in-market lead generation and vendor appraisal offers, and to continue to invest and work to be agents' preferred partner by engaging, supporting, and celebrating agents and agencies. Our core agent value proposition is centered around the scale and uniqueness of our audiences and through leveraging our content creation capability to help build agent and agency brands. As we move into 2023, we're working to add further strength to this proposition in two ways, investing in ongoing customer research to better understand agent needs, and working to provide improved proof points of the OneRoof platform and conversion product effectiveness in terms of more qualified audience and attribution to purchase and/or attending open homes.
Existing research tells us that one of the most critical agent needs is creating and maintaining a pipeline to acquire new listings. OneRoof and NZME data capability creates opportunities to help agents secure appraisals, and we're extending our suite of products to create further value for agent partners in FY 2023. Our agent profiling products have proven attractive to the market and have grown recurring agent revenue by 89% in FY 2022. We're adding further value to this product by overlaying OneRoof segmentation data, which identifies where consumers are in their real estate journey. This creates another layer of qualification of vendor leads and enables more targeted agent profiling. In Q4, we soft launched OneRoof agent ratings, which provides a consumer feedback loop to agent profiles, and we're progressing extension of the OneRoof feature Claim your home to create stronger quality of agent leads.
Our agent relationships are critical to our business and we'll extend this through FY 2023 with greater focus on deepening engagement across agency brands right across the country. Our goal is to be the preferred partner to all agents. Finally, we continue to leverage our platform to drive further revenue through the OneRoof business. While our focus lies more strongly on growing our listing business and agent relationships, we remain committed to increasing advertising revenue from the strength of our audiences and to create new opportunities to grow revenue across other listing verticals. Through 2022, we've seen strong revenue growth in advertising and sponsorship. This is demonstrated by the 14% lift in advertising through this year. We're securing more key advertiser relationships across all key sectors. We remain open to partnering to create consumer services products with a focus on finance and insurance.
In the current market, and given our resource base, we've chosen to continue to focus on growing sponsorship and advertising revenue without investments in OneRoof-owned offers. We'll also continue to build our site performance in the retirement, new build, and commercial verticals with stronger bundling of our media assets across NZME platforms given the shared customers with our agency and direct teams. As I said at the beginning of this presentation, we've continued to invest in the OneRoof business, which has resulted in strong growth in audiences, in our brand, in listing conversion, and revenue. Our expectation is to see this growth continue through FY 2023, and we'll be on track to deliver EBITDA margin goals from FY 2024. Let me now leave you with a OneRoof overview. When I started today, I highlighted that NZME is a leading provider across each of its platforms.
The executive team has today demonstrated how NZME is utilizing those assets with cash generated balanced between reinvestment for growth and for shareholder returns.
There is a significant digital revenue growth being seen. It's being delivered through the well-advanced digital transformation. This transformation is allowing NZME to deliver improved profitability and cash flows, and has a clear strategy to continue to do so. As demonstrated to date, capital management is a core part of investment decision-making. The board has shown that it will return capital to shareholders in efficient ways. In summary, shareholder value creation is at the center of NZME's strategy. Now, that concludes the formal part of our presentation today. We'll all be back with you in a minute to take your questions.
Open the webcast for questions. 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 will be prompted to unmute your microphone on screen and will be invited to talk. To ensure everyone gets an opportunity, could we please ask that you limit your questions to an initial question and one follow-up question. 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, Arie.
Oh, good morning. Thanks, Michael and the team for such a thorough presentation on the business and how you're going against those objectives. I just wanted to start with a couple of questions on areas you didn't cover. I know it's early days, but just on the Google deal, can you just sort of give any visibility on what you're seeing early stage, you know, and particularly, things that sort of give you confidence, I guess, in terms of the longevity of those arrangements?
Yeah. Hi, Arie, and thanks for coming along again. Yeah, as you know, we announced the Google deal in the sort of middle of this year. Early in the first half, actually. That's a five-year arrangement, and you know, in this financial year, we get to see really the full annualized value of that. So obviously, you know, many, many years ahead of us. They're actually being a really great partner with us, working with us really well, actually. Right at the moment, we're doing some promotions with Google for BusinessDesk, for example. You'll see quite a bit of that. At the moment, we're seeing strong BusinessDesk growth and subscriptions because of it. So really pleased with the way we're working with them and obviously plenty of tenure ahead in it.
Right. Just in terms of the RNZ TVNZ merger, I guess just interested in your view on how that's sort of evolving versus your expectations and where, you know, if anywhere you're particularly concerned about potential impacts on your business that, you know, if that goes through as currently sort of structured.
Yeah, I think the key thing for us is, you know, we think a strong media ecosystem's, you know, really valuable for the market overall. We've been engaging, you know, with government and, you know, even recently with the committee that's putting that together. The key focus for us, I guess, is to ensure that that new entity actually delivers on, you know, what it's been set up to do, and it's to deliver on underserved audiences. The reassurances that we're getting is that it'll be focused more on maybe children, on some other ethnicities, for example. Those aren't areas where we play strongly today. I actually think it's a real opportunity for us if that entity actually comes together to really serve those underserved audiences that may actually free up some commercial revenue for the rest of the commercial sector.
That's what we'll be focused on.
Great. Just in terms of iHeart, I mean, you're starting to obviously see some really encouraging signs there in digital audio, and iHeart's obviously, you know, a decent part of that. I guess I was just sort of interested in getting an update as we get closer to that 10-year anniversary on iHeart. You know, that was sort of, I guess, part of the deal with the merger. When are you starting to look at, if you haven't already, sort of extending that agreement, I guess, you know, separating it out from ARN and that. You know, what color can you provide there?
Yeah, I think you're right, Arie. We're pleased with the growth we're seeing. You know, if you'd like any more on that, obviously, Jason can give a bit more insight. You know, to be 5% of our audio revenues is really pleasing. As you look to iHeartMedia in the U.S., you can see their digital revenues are multiples of that. That's our ambition as soon as possible. ARN actually has already extended their agreement, and we have the option to be able to do that as well. We're well advanced on being able to have, you know, a much longer tenure in that agreement. It's not something that's concerning us at all.
Oh, that's great. Yeah, you're well advanced on extending it and on terms that, you know, you're very comfortable with as well.
That's exactly right.
Oh, perfect. Great. Just finally, two quite quick ones. Just audio. I guess your forecast for FY 2022, you know, and it's been a period where things have stabilized as the 13% sort of EBITDA margin. The target that, you know, for next year is 15%-17%. What do you sort of see the drivers of getting up to target being? Is it ability to leverage digital audio revenue growth without on the same cost base?
Absolutely. We think we're fully costed, you know, other than inflationary costs around, you know, [substantial] people in the audio business. Revenue growth is the key generator of that future margin improvement. You know, we still think we'll see, you know, great terrestrial revenue growth and broadcast revenue growth. That continued growth that we're seeing in the digital audio, whether it be people listening to our radio stations live or whether it be the podcasting, is where we're really starting to see, as you'll see, some strong revenue growth, even this year.
Sure. David, just in terms of that color you provided on the digital publishing EBITDA, could you just yeah the basis on which the editorial and overhead was loaded to digital, what basis has that been done on?
That's on a fully effective basis if it was just a digital business, what would be required to deliver all of the editorial content that's there. It's, you know, fully costing everything to digital and then separating out print on the basis that it's just the incremental costs that are required to deliver a print product.
It's your full editorial and associated overhead costs loaded to digital, and then print is just their direct costs.
That's right. I think Carolyn's done a great job of really saying, "This is a digital business." In fact, all the editorial costs are being allocated to that digital business. Then the print business just happens to take some of that content and use the print as a medium, and it's not paying for that editorial cost as part of that. You know, I think that's you know, the most conservative view that we can have for the digital business, but still showing it's profitable on that basis.
Oh, no, that's very encouraging. Yeah. Then just in terms of, you know, the separation you've done there, which sure, I guess might make sense in that. I mean, you're not sort of making any commentary on, you know, particularly with regards regional titles and that, you know, their longevity. In fact, at the moment, at this stage, you sort of, you wouldn't have any plans to shrink that at all. Is that fair?
Yeah, that is fair. Maybe Carolyn, it's something for you to talk about some of the plans of what we've been doing with, you know, some of our regions and community newspapers and the success we're seeing there.
Yeah. This year we've done a full review of our publishing publication portfolio. We've refreshed the communities, and we've started to see revenue growth after many years of decline, which just proves it's a really great product proposition for both audiences and advertisers. We've done the same with regionals, and we've also done the same with the New Zealand Herald. The modeling pretty much shows that we have a sustainable positive contribution print business into the long term. That's really positive, and we'll continue to work on that. In terms of, as we said, we are gonna create a print hub likely. We'll look to kind of do a most streamlined kind of view of that to make sure that we can maintain that profitability.
Thank you, Arie. We now have a question from Nigel Jeffries. Please go ahead, Nigel.
Thank you. Thanks for the presentation, Michael. I thought that was provided some really good depth across all of the business groups, which was great. I was interested in a question on capital efficiency, particularly related to the CapEx spend of NZD 10 million. Are you able to provide some color in terms of where that NZD 10 million is allocated, to which division specifically for what and what you expect to get out of that?
Yeah, sure. Great question, Nigel. David, that's probably one for you to think a bit about.
Nigel, in terms of the NZD 10 million, a reasonable portion of it, probably about roughly 40%, sort of relates to the capital required to maintain all of our infrastructure, whether that be technology or building to, you know, an appropriate level. Then the balance really represents the development energy that we're putting into new platforms and, you know, across both OneRoof and publishing and to a certain extent, investments we're making in audio.
Okay. Thank you. The other note I had was just on the shopping experience. I think that sounds like a great use of the existing assets. What sort of investment do you expect to need to make to get that shopping experience off the ground over the next year or two?
Yeah. Well, there's some of it we've actually already been trialing and launching. Carolyn, probably a good one for you to talk a little bit about the plans there and what we've been doing and what the plan is.
Yeah. I guess, you know, live shopping will be relatively new in the New Zealand market. We know that it's taken off globally. There's definitely technology platforms that you can license, and we will kind of test and learn from there and experiment. We think it's a great opportunity with the growth in e-commerce to kind of bring that type of experience to New Zealand. It's very much a let's experiment and see, and then we'll invest in line with the growth that we see.
Nigel, one of the things we have done just recently is we've used the power of our content and trialed, for example, it was regarding sneakers. Actually writing about different sneakers, embedding in a shopping experience within that. We had, you know, pretty good success of just that one trial we did.
Great. Okay. Thank you.
Thanks, Nigel. We now have a question from Jason Familton. Thanks, Jason.
Hi, guys. Thanks for today. It's been really good. Just, I've got sort of three questions, maybe four. Just on audio. Clearly, you're doing a really good job there. Good audience share, good growth. How do we really accelerate the revenue in that business? I know digital is a key part of it, but I'd just be interested to understand, is there step out opportunities? How do we actually grow this to be a lot larger business than what it is today?
Yeah, I think, again, you picked up on some of the things there, Jason, and Jason will be a good person to talk a little more on this. You know, obviously we wanna continue to grow our audience. We've certainly got a powerhouse with Newstalk ZB, and we're seeing really good signs in the rest of our music brands. From a market share perspective, as you would have seen, we are growing our market share overall. Those have been our focuses. Now that market share doesn't include the growth that we see in digital. That's actually a step outside of from the market share measurements. That's actually truly incremental share for us because we'd be gaining obviously the majority of that revenue.
Jason, do you wanna maybe just cover off some of the things you're, you know, really doing to, you know, to focus on step change in the revenue?
Totally. Thanks for the question, Jason. I think one of the key things I mentioned in the presentation is 30% of all media consumption is with audio, but only 8%, is the revenue share. Again, the things we're concentrating on next year is growing the total bubble for terrestrial radio, with advocacy across the business and across the industry, so really important part. You hit on it before. Digital we see as a massive incremental growth, bringing new revenue into the audio stream. Podcast we're seeing overseas is playing a major part in that. Again, some of that is education with audiences and listeners as well, and getting them to use the different platforms and understand how to use them.
We obviously saw during the pandemic times, our streaming numbers for our live radio stations surge because people weren't in cars as often. Again, we've held on to those numbers even though people have returned to their cars, but we still see a massive upside coming as more and more people stream our content. It's one of the things that's so important about iHeartRadio for us. It's available in over 200 different iterations, so it's available where audiences are. Whether that be in the car, on your mobile phone, or even last week, I was at a function and there it was on a fridge, on a Samsung fridge. Again, it's available in all those key places.
We really do see that will continue to grow, as adoption of those devices picks up, and that provides obviously great revenue opportunities for us.
Okay. Thanks for that. The second one is for Carolyn, and it'll be interesting to understand just around curating content on the site and I guess what goes behind the premium paywall. How do you get the balance right between just clickbait stories which might have shorter term sort of financial benefits around eyeballs and click-throughs versus, I guess, core journalism stories which go to the quality and authenticity of the brand? I'd just be interested to understand the thought pattern between, I guess, those arguably competing forces around creating content.
Yeah. Those decisions are made every day by the editorial team. I guess the key thing that we've done this year is we've introduced new scorecards, so very much focused on engagement metrics rather than just UBs and page views. We very much look at how many conversions come from a subscription from a particular story, average time on page, recirculation of audience, and really think about the types of stories that need to sit behind the paywall to support our Herald Premium subscription, as well as, you know, what's the right mix of content to put in front of the paywall, so that we can drive the funnel and that overall kind of free news proposition we have as well.
It is a balance every day, but we are absolutely providing kind of the metrics through to the newsroom so they can make those decisions.
I think, Jason, one of the things you pick up on there is, you know, a headline or, you know, you use the word clickbait, some of us would say click-worthy, is what, you know, the success metric might have been before of the number of people going to a story. You'll see on one of the slides there's pictures of a couple of the scorecards where we are actually putting people into quadrants and stories into quadrants as to how they're performing. That performance, yes, it does take into account how many people clicked on it, but importantly now it takes into account, did a person read all the way through the story? Once they'd read that story, did they go to a related link to actually want to learn more about that topic?
Importantly, for us obviously, was it good enough that they then decided that they wanted to become a subscriber? We use all of those metrics and have come up with actually a factor that takes all of that into account, and that's the information that goes back daily to the newsroom and then monthly overall as to how specific stories or actually journalists are in different quadrants.
Okay. Then final one, I guess one maybe for Barbara and yourself, Michael, just around M&A and how you're thinking about M&A and is there other areas of the advertising space or media space that may be of interest, like TV or outdoor? Or I guess, are you thinking about expanding that way? I guess there's nothing in here, and you haven't talked anything about it, but I'd just be interested to hear how you're thinking about that piece as well as the organic growth you talked about today.
Yeah, well let me talk and then, Barbara, you're welcome to say anything extra, obviously. It's, you know, I think we're very clear that we have our three pillars of our strategy, and any small M&A we've done to date has been things that are focused on helping in any of those pillars. That continues to be our focus. Having said that, if, you know, some opportunity came along that was larger, you know, of course we would assess it and, of course, we would talk to shareholders about it, from a support and a funding perspective. You know, it's not core to our strategy and core of what we are focused on every day. Maybe Barbara, if there's anything.
Sure.
you'd like to say.
Thanks for that question. Look, it's certainly something that's live in the boardroom discussion. What is out there? What are we seeing that can add value to the portfolio that we have? You know, are there opportunities that are actually there or are we tire kicking on stuff? There's really nothing that's off the list in terms of what Michael has described as being core to us. There's certainly nothing live and active and all of that at the moment, but we just keep a watching brief on it. I think it's an important area where we can grow some value for shareholders.
Okay. No, thank you for that, and good job today.
Thank you.
Thanks, Jason. We now have a written question from David Burrell. Given the low levels of business confidence at the moment, how is ad revenue visibility at the moment? And are you seeing any impact from the changes to Apple's IDFA, and does it benefit you?
Thanks for that, David, and thanks for joining from Australia. Let me cover maybe the first one, and then Carolyn can talk a little bit more about the second one. Just as you know, business confidence at the moment is, you know, down and, you know, hopefully on its way up again, although hope's not a strategy, obviously. The revenue visibility has been extremely mixed. The reason I say that is the patterns are just so different to what they used to be. You know, some months ago, we were seeing bookings coming very late in the piece, and so, you know, much more being booked in the month than we'd seen in the past.
Over the last month or two, we've seen people actually booking earlier, but then stopping during the month, and so they've moved on to focus on, you know, future months from a booking perspective. I think much of that is people's businesses being very fluid and reacting to what's going on in their business at the moment. As you will have seen in the presentation or the outlook, you know, right at the moment, you know, we are tracking above 2021 as we sit here and look into November and December, even taking that into account. I think, you know, we're just being cautious for next year, and we'll make sure we set the business up on the basis of a cautiousness and continue to monitor it overall.
Maybe I'll pass over to Carolyn now to talk about those Apple changes to data and tracking.
Yeah, for sure. As a publisher, we're not seeing any significant impacts from the Apple changes with iOS 14. We do definitely see it as a bit of an opportunity, and hence why we are investing quite heavily in first-party data, and some of the latest technology to build out our targeting capability. We see that as an opportunity to help our advertisers and clients to still continue to deliver great return on investment from their advertising investment. There's definitely disruption coming towards the end of next year, and I think we're well placed to take that on.
We have another follow-up question from David. In streaming and podcasting, do you expect a steep change in monetization at some point when you reach a point of critical mass where you can offer advertisers granularly targeted audiences at scale, or are you already at that point?
Yeah, that's probably a great one for you, Jason. You know, we are continuing to see really strong growth and obviously digital streaming overall and specifically podcast listening, which I think gives us those future opportunities. Right at the moment, we still have plenty of inventory within those digital streams that we have. You know, Jason, maybe you wanna talk a bit more on that.
Sure. Thanks, David, for your question. Yeah, look, we do think we've actually reached critical mass with podcasting already. It's just that the market isn't there with us yet from an advertising perspective. One of the key initiatives we're focused in on is the Pod Ranker, where you will have seen a couple of weeks ago, we announced that we've been number one for 12 months in a row on that and had over 50 million downloads or listens. We're together with a whole lot of other companies invested in that, because we really wanna create a great thriving podcast industry in New Zealand for both listeners and advertisers.
I think 12 months into that, I think it'll be a very different picture in 12 months' time as the category grows from an advertiser perspective, and they understand those listeners they can target and how they can target them in different ways using podcasting. One of the areas we are also seeing overseas is actually the host reads inside podcasts are a very powerful tool in getting extremely high eCPMs out of podcasts internationally, and it's one area that we're focused on generating more revenue. Watch this space over the next 12 months.
Thanks, David. We've come to our final question for today, a follow-up from Arie Dekker.
Oh, yeah. Thank you. Yeah, just one on capital management. I think you've sort of outlined clearly last week, where you're at on that. But just in terms of the gearing and that you talked about, you know, targeting the lower end, and obviously, you're well under that currently. You know, with the benefits of a business that's generating strong cash flows. So could you just sort of talk about, like, is there a circumstance in which you would reset the balance sheet and pay out ahead of what you're generating to actually leverage up to that half times? Or will you essentially continue to be pretty much around sort of no debt.
Yeah, I think you will have seen in the presentation, Arie, that we expect the end of this year to be around NZD 10 million worth of debt drawn. You know, we will have actually completed a very substantial component of the on-market buyback by then. As you know, in the last sort of 14 months, we turned NZD 45 million to shareholders, either through dividends or buybacks at the moment. So we'll start the year at about NZD 10 million in debt, which is obviously well below the 0.5x EBITDA. That that's something I think the board will then look at when we go through our results in February. Maybe, Barbara, is there any more you'd like to talk on that?
Arie, we're purposefully being conservative at the moment and, you know, and we know that. I think what we've indicated is, come February next year, we're gonna have a look at how this year played out and then look at the capital management options that are open to us. Without flagging anything, that's the commitment, that we're gonna take another look at this. As the year ahead unfolds, it's not looking like it's going to be a brilliant year if you read any commentary on it. I think you can expect us to continue to take a conservative stance as we work our way through 2023. 2023, sorry.
No, that's great and, understandable. Thank you.
Well, thanks, everyone, for joining us today. We hope you enjoyed the information we've supplied. Obviously, we're available to have any other calls with you in the hours or days ahead. That ends our Q&A for the day. We really appreciate you joining. A copy of this presentation and the Q&A will be up on our website by the end of the day. Have a good day, everyone. Thank you.