From Tedium, October 30:
What if the problems with the news ecosystem could be solved by shutting off the data pipeline to the advertisers? After all, they’ve spent the last 30 years aggressively exploiting it—and us.
The original sin of online news, it’s often said, was the decision to make the information free. I think that’s only half-true, and to be honest, I don’t think blaming the users for that gets down to the actual problem.
I think the real problem is that we gave advertisers more than enough rope to hang themselves—as well as the publishers whose work was being funded. To some degree, marketers had long been looking for increased data to maximize results, and here was this online thing, which could basically do the most granular work of online research for them, so they could maximize their bottom lines.
The problem, as I’m sure you’ve figured out by now, is that they didn’t actually care about whether you survived, as long as they got theirs. And with that in mind, the “original sin” has been allowed to spread into new mediums with increased damage to the entire ecosystem. We bend to the will of what the advertisers want, without considering what makes for a better product for all of us.
Which is why it does not surprise me one bit that, in the name of “brand safety,” brands have literally been starving the actual news when the going gets tough, because advertisers too often don’t care about the news—they just want the eyeballs, and the data that those eyeballs get. As AdWeek reporter Mark Stenberg recently wrote in his newsletter:
When advertisers remove ads from coverage of critical events, such as the Israel-Hamas conflict, news publishers have to fill those ad spaces (called inventory) with digital ads off the open-exchange, which are poorer quality and less lucrative than ads sold directly or through curated deals, such as private marketplaces or programmatic guarantees.
The result is that news publishers’ most critical reporting, which is also often their most expensive to produce, is inefficiently monetized. And while they can, to a degree, make up for this decrease in price with higher volume, as readers flock to stay current on whatever issue is at hand, the margins are poor and there is a significant opportunity cost....
....MUCH MORE
