Revenue Management: #9 Revenue Recognition in Media & Publishing

   

Media & Publishing industry has evolved in recent times. It offers subscriptions, bundles digital and print access, runs sponsored content, and sometimes even sells ad spaces. If you run a media or publishing business, you will always get into a situation where you get paid in advance, but how do you determine what part of the money is earned today versus what needs to be deferred for the future? Can you recognize all of them upfront? Or should it spread across issues or impressions?

How do publishers and media platforms handle revenue?      

Revenue Recognition Scenarios in Media & Publishing

Subscriptions, advertising contracts, bundled content, and sponsored campaigns often complicate revenue recognition in media and publishing. Though accounting guidelines like ASC 606 and IFRS 15 apply, how you use them varies based on how you deliver content.

Subscription Revenue

When a customer pays for a weekly, monthly, or annual subscription, the revenue must be spread across the subscription period, as content is delivered over time rather than upfront.

Example: A $120 annual magazine subscription should be recognized at $10 monthly over 12 months.

Bundled Offerings

You may offer print+digital access, or magazine+e-book bundles. Each component should be recognized separately based on delivery schedules and relative values.

Example: A $240 subscription includes $180 of weekly print magazines and $60 for e-book access. Revenue is recognized $15/month for print and $60 once access is granted.

Advertising Revenue

Advertising may be sold per issue, impressions, or based on clicks. You can recognize revenue only after delivery of an impression or publication, not when the ad is sold or paid for.

Example: A $5000 ad campaign for 1,00,000 impressions recognizes revenue only as impressions are delivered (say $500 for every 10,000)

Sponsored Content or Paid Articles

Sponsored stories or influencer placements should be recognized on publication date or campaign completion, depending on the agreement.

Example: A $2000-paid article is published on July 5th, and revenue is recognized on the same day.

Cancellations & Refunds

If a subscriber cancels mid-cycle and gets a partial refund, revenue must be adjusted with only the earned portion as recognized.

Example: $120 yearly subscription cancelled after 3 months. Only $30 will be considered recognized.

These scenarios highlight how delivery, not payment, drives revenue recognition. With multiple formats and monetisation models in place, manual revenue recognition handling is a huge task prone to errors and misstatements.

Scenario: 

Your publishing company sells an annual subscription package at $240. This subscription covers weekly print magazine work of $15 and on-demand access to the digital library, which is valued at $60. The customer pays upfront on the 1st of January.  

Zoho Billing for Media Revenue Recognition

Publishers and content creators will be able to work with Zoho Billing to define revenue recognition rules based on content delivery and access architecture.

For the scenario above, you may go with the following revenue recognition rule configuration,

Component	Recognition Frequency	Recognition Method	Recognition Time
Print Magazines	Monthly	Evenly Distributed Prorated	Period Start
Digital Library	Once	One-Time (Daily)	Period Start

 

Even though the $240 is received upfront, revenue must be split evenly for the subscription-based service.

Reports in Zoho Billing

Let's say you are checking the reports during March.

i) Recognized Revenue Report

Component	Recognized Revenue	Description
Digital Library	$60	Fully recognized on the subscription start date
Print Magazine	$45	$15x3 issues delivered
Total Recognized	$105	recognized at the end of three months

 

ii) Deferred Revenue Report

After three months of offering, nine print issues are still pending delivery.

Component	Deferred Amount
Digital Library	$0
Print Magazine	$135 (9 months of deliverables)
Total Deferred	$135

 

iii) Revenue Waterfall Report

Month	Digital Library	Print Magazine	Total
Month 1	$60	$15	$75
Month 2	----	$15	$15
Month 3	----	$15	$15
Month 4 (upcoming)	----	$15	$15
Month 5 (upcoming)	----	$15	$15
Month 6 (upcoming)	----	$15	$15
Month 7 (upcoming)	----	$15	$15
Month 8 (upcoming)	----	$15	$15
Month 9 (upcoming)	----	$15	$15
Month 10 (upcoming)	----	$15	$15
Month 11 (upcoming)	----	$15	$15
Month 12 (upcoming)	----	$15	$15
Total (after 3 months)	$60	$45	$105

 

Only at the end of one year will the full payment you received be considered recognized revenue.

Best Practices for the Media Industry while recognizing revenue

• Break Down Subscriptions: Separate print, digital, access, ads, and events into individual deliverables.
• 
  Match Revenue to Delivery: Recognize only when issues go out, impressions are served, or access granted.
• 
  Account for Returns & Refund: Handle cancellations by adjusting the deferred revenue schedules automatically.
• 
  Monitor Reports Monthly: Revenue Waterfall and Deferred reports ensure timely recognition tracking. 

Up Next: Common Mistakes while Recognizing Revenue

• Topic Participants

• Hari | Zoho Billing

  

• Sticky Posts

• Community Learning Series | Digest #5 — September 2020

  Dear customers, We're happy to bring you the September edition of our #CommunityDigest! Keep track of your subscription KPIs right from your smartphone: Last month, we enhanced our Android mobile app to help our customers get daily updates on their business health. We got to know from a lot of customers that this has made their job much more easier because they no longer have to keep a reminder to manually check on the previous day's revenue or activations. If you have not downloaded it yet, here's

• Community Learning Series | Digest #4 - August 2020

  Dear customers, We hope you're staying safe and healthy. I'm happy to bring you the fourth edition of our #CommunityDigest with some brand-new updates from us. 1. Daily Business Updates (for Android users) The Zoho Subscriptions Android app has got a cool new update: You can now get a push notification to your smartphone that lets you know how many activations and cancellations have taken place, and what's the net revenue for the previous day. The best part is, you can tell the app when exactly you

• Community Learning Series | Digest #3 - July 2020

  Dear customers, We hope you're staying safe and healthy. We're glad to bring you the July edition of our #CommunityDigest. New community members can view our previous newsletters here. This time, we have two major updates and three interesting topics for you: 1. Zoho Subscriptions Developer Community Since the inception of Zoho Subscriptions, our team believed that the recurring billing platform we provide should be able to offer an extensive API library that empowers businesses to automate most

• Introducing: Community Learning Series | Digest #1 - May 2020

  Dear customers, We hope you are staying safe and healthy. Helping businesses manage their customer subscriptions more efficiently has always been, and always will be, our goal at Zoho Subscriptions. We strongly believe this is possible if we grow together as a community and share what we know with each other. To nurture this shared learning experience, here is our brand-new Community Learning Series! ​ Welcome to the first edition of our digest! Each edition of our community digest includes guides

• Recent Topics

• Non-depreciating fixed asset

  Hi! There are non-depreciable fixed assets (e.g. land). It would be very useful to be able to create a new type of fixed asset (within the fixed assets module) with a ‘No depreciation’ depreciation method. There is always the option of recording land

• Managing Rental Sales in Zoho Inventory

  I am aware that Zoho Inventory is not yet set up to handle rental sales and invoicing. Is anyone using it for rentals anyway? I'd like to hear about how others have found work arounds to manage inventory of rental equipment, rental payments, etc. Th

• Megamenu

  Finally! Megamenu's are now available in Zoho-Sites, after waiting for it and requesting it for years! BUT ... why am I asked to upgrade in order to use a megamenu? First: Zoho promised to always provide premium versions and options for all included Zoho-applications

• Cannot access KB within Help Center

  Im working with my boss to customize our knowledge base, but for some reason I can see the KB tab, and see the KB categories, but I cannot access the articles within the KB. We have been troubleshooting for weeks, and we have all permissions set up, customers

• Zoho Flow to Creator 3001 Respoonse

  I have updated my Flows with the new V2 connection to Zoho Creator, but now some Flows do not work. They take in data from a Webhook and are supposed to create a record in Creator, however creator returns a 3001 message along with a failure, but I cannot

• File Upload to Work Drive While Adding Records in Zoho Creator Application

  Hi I am trying to set a file attachment field in zoho creator form, to enable the user to upload a scanned document from their local pc. The file should be uploaded to zoho workdrive and not to the default zoho creator storage. The file link should be

• Why not possible to generate?

  Using this https://desk.zoho.com/DeskAPIDocument#TicketCount#TicketCount_Getticketcountbyfield on my ZML script url :"https://desk.zoho.com/api/v1/ticketsCountByFieldValues?departmentId=XXXXXXXXXXX&accountId!=XXXXXXXXX&customField1=cf_country_1:XXXXXX&field=overDue"

• email

  Hi My crm email is not working, can you check, I have zoho one account.

• Need option to see Mass Emails & Cadences in Gmail Outbox OR a dedicated Zoho Outbox

  Hi everyone, Right now, when we send 1:1 emails from gmail (with gmail API connected to Zoho CRM), those emails appear both in gmail's sent folder and in Zoho CRM. That works well. But when we send Mass Emails or Cadence emails form Zoho CRM, they are

• I can't found API for Sales Receipts

  Hello May you please help me to find an API document for Sales Receipts to get data and retrive a custom fields like Invoice and credit notes Regards

• Kaizen #205 - Answering Your Questions | Managing Picklists and Enabling History Tracking via Zoho CRM APIs

  Hello everyone! Welcome back to another post in our Kaizen series. In this post, we will look at how you can manage picklist fields in Zoho CRM using APIs. This topic was raised as feedback to Kaizen #200, so we are taking it up here with more details.

• Multiple Vendor SKUs

  One of the big concerns we have with ZOHO Inventory is lack of Vendor Skus like many other inventory software packages offer. Being able to have multiple vendor skus for the same product would be HUGE! It would populate the appropriate vendor Sku for

• Internally created tickets

  Hi there When tickets are created internally on-behalf of customers - there is nothing to show that the ticket was created by an internal agent. This means, that it's easy for our agents to confuse tickets which were created by internal team members and

• Automatically change website passwords

  Hi everyone, We just switched to a Professional package to also use the "Automatically change website passwords" function. But I cannot find anything about it, how to use it, anywhere. Does anyone know how I can use this function? Best, Caspar

• Change Invoice Prices for an Effective Date

  Hi, It would be a really good feature to be able to change the prices on invoices/recurring invoices from an effective date in the event of price increases. For instance, I am in the process of increasing prices that will be effective from a specific

• "Other Current Asset" accounts as "Paid Through" accounts in Expense

  It would be incredibly useful to be able to assign accounts of type Other Current Asset as Paid Through accounts in Expense. Currently, Other Current Liability are permitted as Paid Through Accounts. This makes sense, as Credit Cards are current liabilities.

• Multi column open text questions that allows respondents to add rows for additional information

  I need to create a question that has 2 columns with open text, but I also need to allow respondents to click a "+" button, or something similar, so that they can add additional information if they choose to. I've tried using the Multiple Textboxes type

• Bot Filtering & Apple Mail Privacy Protection Compliance in Zoho Campaigns

  Dear Campaigns Users, The wait is over! We’re excited to announce that the enhanced bot filtering feature is now live in Zoho Campaigns. This update brings greater accuracy to your email campaign reports by distinguishing real user engagement from automated

• Découvrons les détails qui simplifient vos journées de travail avec Trident

  Nous nous installons dans des routines efficaces et rodées avec le temps. Chaque matin, nous ouvrons nos e-mails, passons aux messages, consultons notre agenda, puis attaquons nos tâches. Ce processus nous semble maîtrisé, mais est-il réellement optimisé

• Issue with Purchase Rate Showing as “0” After Importing Items List

  Dear Zoho Books Support Team, Good day. I’m reaching out regarding an issue I’m facing while importing my items list into Zoho Books. Despite mapping all fields correctly and including the purchase price for each product in my Excel file, the Purchase

• API for Task Entity in Zoho Books

  I’m working on automating task creation in Zoho Books via a custom button in the Bills Module. The goal is to create a task in the Tasks Module and assign it to the Finance Team, so they can track progress efficiently. While reviewing Zoho Books documentation,

• create invoice in zoho books from the zoho forms

  Is there a native way to have create invoice in zoho books, when zoho form is completed?

• Email undelivered

  GOod Day I am always receiving an uncategorized-bounce to my email. I am not sure why this is happening.

• Add inventory_valuation_method to items endpooints

  To ensure consistent item creation it would be helpful to have the inventory_valuation_method (FIFO vs WAC) be able to be set at item creation or as an update (consistent with current behavior where it is not allowed for items with existing transactions)

• Use Zoho to send sales receipts for Gocardless transactions

  I've been using gocardless for years and have d/d mandates set up on there. Each week we get bulk payments from customer d/d's. However, we need to send sales receipts to these customers. So I know I can sync mandates into Zoho, and then I can set up

• Zoho - Gocardless sales receipts

  I've been using gocardless for years and have d/d mandates set up on there. Each week we get bulk payments from customer d/d's. However, we need to send sales receipts to these customers. So I know I can sync mandates into Zoho, and then I can set up

• Introducing Rollup summary in Zoho CRM

  ------------------------------------------Moderated on 5th July'23---------------------------------------------- Rollup summary is now available for all organizations in all the DCs. Hello All, We hope you're well! We're here with an exciting update that

• Introducing Connected Workflows in Zoho CRM for Everyone : Free Your Teams to Focus on What Matters

  Hello Everyone, We’re thrilled to introduce the next big evolution in Zoho CRM for Everyone -- Connected Workflows. This new feature builds on our commitment to deliver a CRM that’s truly inclusive, adaptable, and designed for consistent collaboration

• Introducing Connected Records to bring business context to every aspect of your work in Zoho CRM for Everyone

  Hello Everyone, We are excited to unveil phase one of a powerful enhancement to CRM for Everyone - Connected Records, available only in CRM's Nextgen UI. With CRM for Everyone, businesses can onboard all customer-facing teams onto the CRM platform to

• Cooling-off Period Just Got Better: More Coverage, More Control

  We’ve enhanced the Cooling-off Period feature in Zoho Recruit to give you more control over repeat applications and referrals. This helps you maintain a cleaner, more efficient recruitment pipeline. With this enhancement, you can: Prevent duplicate candidate

• Revenue Management: #7 Revenue Recongition in Construction & Real Estate Industry

  If you are in the construction or real estate business, you are used to long project timelines and progressive invoicing to keep up with your billing. But when does revenue get recognized? Will it happen when the contract gets signed? At different milestones

• TikTok (and other social platform) Messages and comments of the past

  When I link a social channel, Zoho will show in "Inbox", "Messages" and "Contact" sections the interaction done in the past? (comment, messages...)

• Email Integration - Zoho CRM - OAuth and IMAP

  Hello, We are attempting to integrate our Microsoft 365 email with Zoho CRM. We are using the documentation at Email Configuration for IMAP and POP3 (zoho.com) We use Microsoft 365 and per their recommendations (and requirements) for secure email we have

• How do I fix this? Unable to send message; Reason:554 5.1.8 Email Outgoing Blocked.

  How do I fix this? Unable to send message; Reason:554 5.1.8 Email Outgoing Blocked.

• Restrict Employee mail deletion

  Dear Zoho, Is there a way where i can restrict my employees to delete any mails from their account

• 554 5.1.8 Email Outgoing Blocked.

  Hi guys, I just singed up for mateusz.nowicki@zoho.com mail and I can't send any mails.. Why? Everytime I try to send something I got error like the one in the screenshot. Please, help me.

• Zoho IP blocked by SpamHaus

  ERROR CODE :550 - 5.7.0 Your server IP address is in the SpamHaus SBL-XBL database, bye

• File Upload in Creator's Subfrom

  Hello Sir/Madam, Here is a Problem......... Scenario: In CRM One Custom Module (Payments) have one File Upload Field now we have to Upload that File into Creator's Custom Form (Documents) have one Subform (Documents) in Document Upload Field using Deluge

• Error AS101 when adding new email alias

  Hi, I am trying to add apple@(mydomain).com The error AS101 is shown while I try to add the alias.

• Trigger workflow base on email clic

  Searching the help and forum, I see that there were workflow trigger rules based on email. But now, I can't find this type of trigger when I create a custom workflow. What I'm looking for would be to automate the sending of an email for a new prospect,

• Next Page