Industries · Media
Media, streaming, gaming, and advertising
How streaming services, broadcasters, game publishers, and advertising-funded platforms make money, how to work with subscribers, ARPU, churn, and content amortization, and how to crack media cases.
Key takeaways
- Media companies spend heavily upfront to make or buy content, then earn it back from many people through subscriptions, advertising, or sales.
- A subscriber is worth the monthly margin they bring times how long they stay.
- Media is consolidating: scale in content and in audience lowers the cost per viewer.
- Explain subscription, advertising, transactional, and licensing revenue models
- Calculate ARPU, customer lifetime from churn, lifetime value, and advertising revenue from CPM
- Explain content amortization and why profit and cash differ in media
- Describe the main media and gaming players and the deals and trends of 2024 to 2026
Lessons
How media, streaming, and gaming make money
The media segments, the four revenue models, the value chain from creation to monetization, and an approximate streaming cost breakdown.
Subscriber and content economics
Calculate lifetime value from ARPU and churn, see how content amortization separates profit from cash, and compare an ad-supported plan with an ad-free one.
Media players, trends, and how to crack the cases
Main streaming, TV, gaming, and advertising players by region, the consolidation of 2024 to 2026, regulation basics, and typical case prompts.
Worked cases in this module
Look it up
Key terms
- ARPU (average revenue per user)
- Churn and retention
- Network effects
- Fixed cost
- Economies of scale
- Bundling
- SVOD and AVOD
- CPM (cost per thousand impressions)
- Fill rate (advertising)
- Content amortization
- ARPPU (average revenue per paying user)
- Payer conversion
- DAU/MAU ratio
- CLV (customer lifetime value)
- CAC (customer acquisition cost)
- Depreciation and amortization
Start with lesson 1
3 lessons, about 39 minutes in all. Each one builds on the one before.