Advertisers Don't Want Sites Like Jezebel to Exist | Hacker News Reader

Advertisers Don't Want Sites Like Jezebel to Exist

404media.co

20 pointsmarban27 comments

I am surprised that there isn't a more niche advertising provider for the more controversial sites as there are abundant products and services that cater to the Jezebel demographic, from political fundraising ads to particular wine brands to clothing marketed for the body positivity movement.

Quaker Oats would steer away from their kind of content as Republicans/pro-life people also eat oats, but others should be quite happy with that demographic.

> A well-run company would have moved away from an advertising model

Is this working anywhere, for anyone? I keep seeing people bring up moving away from advertising, but to what? Even Alex Jones was built on advertising crappy supplements and overpriced water filters.

> I am surprised that there isn't a more niche advertising provider for the more controversial sites

There are (specifically for NSFW websites, at a minimum) but they aren't as lucrative to the sites themselves. Fewer advertisers are willing to do business with random small ad exchanges (for a variety of reasons, fraud among them) and the ones who do don't generally spend much.

Remember: most ads online are bought and sold via auctions. If demand/competition is low, the highest bid won't be much.

Regarding moving away from the advertising model:

The last time I checked, The Register was predominantly funded by display ads (targeted to content) and paid articles.

It's still ad funded, but it is much less problematic than ad sense, facebook, etc.

> moving away from advertising, but to what?

Subscription-based revenue

Advertisers don't care about the content next to their ads. What they don't like is when a mob of people puts them into the news cycle for "supporting $controversy." It's not the content itself that is the proximate problem. It's the angry mob that comes with it.

They absolutely do care, controversy or no

> Ads that appear near negative content cause a 2.8 times decrease in consumer intent to associate with the brands

https://www.marketingdive.com/news/consumers-believe-brands-...

Back to back videos (YouTube) makes it harder

> OMD has found that people associate commercials with content when they appear in a linear format, meaning a bad video could taint a company’s image

https://www.cnbc.com/2017/03/20/google-online-advertising-ad...

Well that explains some of the reasons why pre-roll ads are so much higher value, that and “having” (lol Adblock) to watch them before you can see the content at all.

Incorrect. Advertisers care deeply about the content next to their ads and other brand safety and suitability issues.

You can read this if you want to learn more: https://www.iab.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/IAB_Brand_Saf...

I think we're saying the same thing here. Brand safety only matters insofar as lack of it causes the company to lose money from people boycotting it.

You won't find any brand safety guidelines that prohibit advertising next to uncontroversial content. Because it's the controversy the content causes that is the issue, not the content itself.

Advertisers absolutely do care about placement quality for non-controversial content too. It's a waste of money to run ads for luxury watches on a website that hosts math games for kids.

That's got nothing to do with "brand quality guidelines," just poor targeting.

Yes but Jezebel was heavily involved in creating that culture. Being destroyed by it is Biblical

I, too, don’t want Jezebel to exist.

That was such a weirdly blatant site it boggles my mind the way people talk about it.

They openly promoted violence towards men, disgusting group of people, that's why they were all fired.

live by the algorithm, die by the algorithm

Well, I don't want advertisers to exist.

I don't understand this POV at all. Advertising provides a fair playing field for up-and-coming businesses. If startups could not advertise, how would people find out about it? If I want to start an eCommerce brand, people won't suddenly show up on my website. If I open a new club in a city, people don't just suddenly show up.

Without advertising, the world would be filled with large companies with no incentive to innovate because it would be impossible to discover their competitors.

"Without advertising, the world would be filled with large companies with no incentive to innovate because it would be impossible to discover their competitors."

There is nothing in that sentence that makes sense historically, and certainly doesn't now. Larger firms can leverage advertising usually better than small players just on budget terms, so it isn't just advertising itself, but how its deployed.

Adtech favors larger players that are platforms (e.g. Doubleclick) and just scrapes marketing dollars from everyone it can, and then benefits the platform itself if its product family has competing products (Google, Amazon, etc)

Advertising doesn't provide any fairness in a playing field. It's simply a parallel arena of competition with a more opaque set of operating rules.

Today's advertising industry systematically violates everyone's privacy with no practical opt-out, and hand the information to oppressive regimes.

Also, the middlemen extract tons of cash from the auction process, diverting it away from sites that people actually want to use, and spending it to cement in their mostly-hated monopolies.

The problem is that what we call advertising isn't what advertising actually is.

Advertising in the 21st century is about spying on people, whether or not they want it whether or not they will ever be your customer, and selling that information to other people if it's beneficial to your business.

That isn't advertising.

That's organized stalking.

Advertising is as near to lying as the advertisers can get. Also, advertisers end up corrupting ad-supported media: look at all the "payola" scandals in radio. Newspapers famously didn't run stories that upset major advertisers. Google has gone from being nearly miraculous to just serving ads, not to mention what SEO (which is nothing but optimizing advertising) has done to it.

I bet those innovators could come up with a solution that doesn’t involve eyesores placed on every surface imaginable, if traditional advertising were banned.

Advertising sponsors the addictive attention economy. It's poison.

>Without advertising, the world would be filled with large companies with no incentive to innovate because it would be impossible to discover their competitors.

And yet we have this world anyway.

I do think the world would be better if most forms of advertising were strictly limited or banned, but advertisement absolutely doesn't require what is being called "advertisers" in this context.

Me neither. It's a shitty business model, depending on deceiving and preying on consumers.

Only problem is, media infrastructure costs $$$. How else you gonna finance it? I'm seriously open to suggestions -- I'm fresh out of ideas myself.

Well without seeming condescending usually a product sells for $ and that's it. So just let me pay for something without all the other nonsense.

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