Invasive ad targeting is bad for journalism and other high-quality publishers
ethicalads.io
ethicalads.io
Yet most journos post the actually meat of the article to a Twitter thread anyway. Why try so hard and give me so many reasons to avoid your actual platform you control?
All the ad tracking in the world isn't going to save your company when the generation who grew up thinking your websites are just a bunch of cookie and begging banners don't have the act of going to your site inbuilt in their habits.
Journalists don't typically control the actual platform they publish to. The news agency does, and the news agency is the one trying to figure out how to extract the maximum amount of revenue out of a dwindling number of readers.
I'd much rather hear from the journalists directly, and I'd love to see platforms treat those journalists as the ones running the show. "Patreon for good journalism" is a far more compelling value proposition than any newspaper. Could someone hurry up and kill the newspapers and provide a platform for all their good journalists, please?
That, combined with risk, means some of the most interesting stories out there still need patrons with long attention spans.
They even run a program that started several months ago where they offloaded risk from promising writers for a year by guaranteeing them a minimum pay in exchange for a larger cut of realized platform for the same year. AIUI several writers like Matt Yglesias et al have done well via this program and built audiences that will give them significant windfalls when their risk-mitigation contracts with Substack expire.
I think the agency of the future is just some sort of partnership between several writers on the platform or other similar platforms that allows you to purchase a group subscription to several writers at a small discount. I imagine that writers who are able to sustain such high levels of revenue may also be able to hire editors etc as necessary along with taking on intern writers to write [approved!] guest posts on their streams.
Compared to opinionating, actual journalism is more expensive, is more specialized, takes more time, and often elicits less of the strong emotional reactions that drive "engagement."
Because who's going to pay a monthly subscription to an individual for an unwritten scoop that will take months to investigate and may not pan out?
All an opinionator needs is a keyboard and some input to have an opinion on, so they can pump out that kind of entertainment day after day.
Not to mention that journalism isn’t really a solo gig. The processes, standards, and traditions of an institution are just as much of a factor as good reporters in producing good journalism.
It's not, this is why microtransactions are so important for us to make colloquial.
What will all the recent journalism school grads do before they become skilled?
Usually you get those over those NYT & Co. articles blasting Googles, Facebooks and others for privacy and tracking.
Typically there's a button to allow all tracking and one that's non-committal, something like "see my settings". The second one, as you say, brings up 600 switches, but usually the "non-essential" ones are turned off and all you have to do is scroll to the bottom and click "save settings" or something like that.
They are obviously making it more difficult than it has to be, and probably that causes a lot of people to allow all, but once I got the hang of it, it isn't too much trouble.
"reject all" should be the default option.
But this was messed up horribly from the beginning. Cookies should be disabled (or deleted when closing the tab) by default at the browser side,, with a small button somewhere to enable them for that specific site, and a opup notification to enable them, if the browser detects a login.
I'd love to have such a thing, though I don't want to spend the time building it. I just want to buy it.
The relevance here, though, is your site has to look attractive, like a real front page of a newspaper, or nobody is going to do this for your site.
It could use an e-ink display instead. This company sells a 13.3" e-ink photo frame for €800 that might do: https://framelabs.eu/en/artframes/ Or you could go full DIY and make them yourself for probably ~$250 with a pi zero, picture frame, and a $180 e-ink panel from alibaba: https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/E-Ink-Display-Eink-E-...
Sadly, if you want to go much bigger with e-ink it'll be rather pricey like this 31" for $2.6k: https://www.visionect.com/product/place-and-play-32/
I kinda need a new project...
But your comment misses the point entirely: An organization's home page is its face. They should at least try to make their face look attractive. Even a newspaper stand shows a nice view of above the fold through the window.
What's sad about that is they're also begging for government money so they can be "free and independent". One is always beholden to the paymaster.
The problem with online ads and tracking arises because 1. ads are permitted on the network and 2. "tech" companies rely on them to make money. Newspapers are not driving the development of the online ads business. They may be customers, but it is "tech" companies that write the browsers and websites and a gazillion lines of Javascript (collectively, "ad tech") that make the web extremely ad-friendly, at the same time lining "tech" company pockets, while newspapers die on the vine. "Tech" companies facilitate online ads in exchange for money. They sell nothing else. They purport to offer value for "free". This is just bait to lure in ad targets.
Newspapers produce journalism. They hire people to produce journalism. "Tech" companies just sit on the web as middlemen, lapping up user data and marketing their "business" to advertisers. "Tech" companies do not hire people to produce journalism.
This "but look, they are using ads themselves" argument is really getting old. It does not change the message. The journalist is not equal to the media company that employs her. It's like arguing that newspapers cannot write about the newspaper business because they are a newspaper.
If anything, we should be marvelling at how for the past 20 years newspapers routinely drove traffic to the web (away from print) by reporting on it ad nauseum, and how they now are reporting on privacy issues even though they themselves may benefit from using privacy-invasive "ad tech".
I agree there's a big problem, but NYT does not seem to be a good example of a solution. If ethical ads resulted in more NYT-like behavior, given our current state of nearly-violent-polarization, I can't say I'm sure it sounds like an improvement. More polarized (and polarizing) news is definitely not what we need.
"...unique to NYT"? Not unique to them but they seem to be one of the worst cases, in part because of how far they've fallen but also they seem to be an extreme case.
"include social media"? FB and Twitter definitely also have echo chambers, but they don't really pretend to be otherwise, whereas news sources should be.
"Where do you get your news?" The email newsletter 1440 seems to do a decent job of curating; even if the sources they use are polarized, they are picking out the more informative ones for me so I don't have to dredge through a bunch of ideological preaching.
Every single one of their links is behind a redirection service. It's possibly their own service. But that's not a whole lot of difference. It's kind of ironic that you suggested this in a thread about invasive targeting.
This also precludes me from evaluating the quality of their sources - at least not without clicking through a buttload of redirects. F that. I'll assume they've got something to hide.
Now, you don't need to go to the NYT. NYT's users are tracked, you just have to set up the right targeting on one of the big ad platforms and you reach that same audience for a fraction of the cost.
Meaning, they don't have the attention span for it in a world that is overloaded with information. We've been conditioned to snack size news for a long time now. And the trend is accelerating. Look at "stories", "fleets", Tiktok...all inventions for the viewer/reader to require even less effort to consume it. Extremely short form content, preferably even auto playing the next one.
Further, in highly polarized times, few have the critical thinking skills to appreciate high quality journalism that questions their position or beliefs, it's much easier to see your bias confirmed. Nuance is for losers, outrage goes viral.
No ethical ad will fix that.
I would like to see news organizations build tools that help us understand and follow some of the most complex issues in our society.
If my local news paper reexamined how they stored and then presented the information they already collect day to day, I would have an essential tool learning about and keeping track of what is going on in the world around me.
I assume you know news rooms got decimated? When I grew up, every household had a newspaper subscription, costing the equivalent of perhaps 200$ per year.
Virtually all that revenue is gone, replaced by extremely difficult to monetize internet users.
News organizations typically are tiny and poor now, not rich and powerful. The ecosystem of smaller local news organizations nearing extinction.
Ads combined with maximizing views are the last thing to leave the lights on.
Are consumer to blame? No. But they stopped paying for news for sure.
It's not just subscriptions, but the classifieds - which were considered 'rivers of gold'. The business model of the news industry was hollowed out by the internet.
https://theconversation.com/as-the-rivers-of-gold-dry-up-wha...
In the paper news era, people were much more likely to read in-depth articles. Not necessarily because people were smarter or more intellectually curious, instead because...well, it was pretty much the only information available for the day.
You utilize the information because you consider it valuable based on it being scarce.
Needless to say, we have the opposite problem now. There's an information overdose and we're extremely selective in what we chose to read. And quite obviously, snack-size wins.
Most people now would find it a massive commitment to spend an hour to read and process a detailed article. The few that do, likely check their phone 10 times during this enormous investment of their time.
My feeling that the worst ads are not ones that track you, but the generic "outbrain" ads that are pure clickbait. Stop those ads please.
> "I asked him if that meant he’d be placing ads on our fledgling site. He said yes, he’d do that for a little while. And then, after the cookies ... helped him to track our desirable audience [he'd] begin removing the ads and placing them on cheaper sites"
[1]: https://www.theverge.com/2017/1/18/14304276/walt-mossberg-on...
This is wrong: sites that provide general high-quality journalism do not give a strong signal about the user's interests. If I'm reading an excellent, well researched article about the origins of the fire crisis in the American West, there is no strong commercial tie-in. Highly commercial journalism is in good shape, it's local and in-depth generic reporting that's struggling.
Additionally, advertisers will pay far more to advertise on a prestigious site than to advertise to the same users elsewhere. The article is worried about something that high paying advertisers aren't interested in, because they care about prestige and association, and not just which particular users see things.
(Disclosure: I work on ads at Google, speaking only for myself)
― Upton Sinclair
So with the internet ad market exploding (see Google's 69% growth in ad revenue to over $50B for the QUARTER) but somehow the NYTimes, with their "prestigious site" saw ad revenue DECREASE by 8.5% (1).
Perhaps someone can name a publisher that practices "highly commercial journalism" and "is in good shape" for us? Ideally there'd be 100's for a diverse ecosystem of free press.
If one does not see the threat to journalism one must be well paid not to.
1: https://nytco-assets.nytimes.com/2021/05/Press-Release-3.28....
― Me
The NYT is famous for high quality deep journalism, where reading their site doesn't tell you very much about the visitor, which is the category I described as "struggling".
(Additionally, responses like your opening are why I included the introduction about earning to give in https://www.jefftk.com/p/why-i-work-on-ads)
I would also note that by only advertising to those already looking at cat websites, advertises are missing out on those customers that are not giving off strong cat vibes. I'm sure there are plenty of people out there that don't think about their cat enough to search for cat stuff, but that still buy cat food every week.
If an advertiser were to run an ad alongside an article about the wild fires, they might reach a wider market. Who knows, they might even convince some folks to get a cat who were not even thinking about it.
p.s: And isn't that what marketing is all about - solving problems you don't even have!
p.p.s: When you know you have a problem you look at a catalog, not ads.
p.p.p.s: Also, bubbles.
I do that, but only because The Cat will stuff me into the cat food hopper if I don't.
Exactly. And what's killing it is the big news companies like the NYT since they get preferential treatment by social media and search.
If you search for wildfires in idaho or california, you will most likely get links to NYT, WSJ, CBS, NBC, etc articles first instead of local news sources. People aren't going to click or scroll down to get a more accurate or indepth local source.
As more people use search and social media for news, it will be the local news that will suffer as tech caters to the biggest news companies.
I bet an idahoan who searches for wildfires in his state will more likely get an article from the BBC rather than a local source from idaho.
Seems like we are in an era where only the biggest survive in all industries.
This is a blog from the ceo of youtube, but it isn't just youtube. It's a priority of alphabet, the parent company of youtube, google, etc and all major tech/social media companies - apple, facebook, reddit, etc.
https://blog.youtube/inside-youtube/the-four-rs-of-responsib...
What local news source is more 'authoritative' than the NYT, WSJ, NBC, CBS, ABC, CNN, Fox News, etc? When the george floyd incident happened, what sources were you presented with on tech platforms? Local news from minnesota or NYT, CNN, BBC, Sky News, etc?
These "high paying" advertisers don't exist. Campaigns aren't sold or activated like that. There are brand safety and inventory quality issues but "prestige and association" is not as important as you might think, and all media agencies have been focused on backing into the lowest CPM for the last decade.
It's finally being (forcefully) solved through cookie blocking and privacy regulation leading to the rise of first-party data again, however that makes walled gardens like Facebook and Google stronger too at the same time which brings a whole new set of problems.
Good lord, it can't be any worse than what exists now.
I pay to subscribe to the NYT. Once in awhile, like with a new laptop, I'll visit without blocking. After an indecent interval, I turn blocking back on.
I never minded advertisements in print. I read them, or I didn't.
We talk a bit about how this process works, and why tracking ads don't work well for publishers who are valuable.
Junk sites target the average Joe doing something average.
This is not a good argument.
[Edit] Is this a meta article that's currently targeting us with a poorly written article?