Advertising: perhaps the best and most effective involuntary ally of the Puritan movement.
It is a shame that the Internet that we have created depends pretty much solely on that form of revenue.
They're just leaving money on the table. Ads are sold at auction, so the auction price on NSFW pages would be lower, but because it would be lower then some advertisers would want the discount. The alternative is that the ad network bans them and gets nothing, the advertiser loses out on cheap impressions and the site goes bankrupt.
Sites like Deviant Art could have a policy to the effect of "NSFW content is allowed but you have to mark it" and then advertisers who don't want to be seen next to NSFW content, aren't. Hypothetically some user could post something NSFW without marking it, but the same is true on sites that ban NSFW content entirely.
Then the site itself gets the full payment on the majority of pages that are safe for work, still gets something from the ones that aren't, and doesn't have to deal with shady malware-laden ad networks.
Two main reasons:
- Websites cannot accurately classify content a lot of the time without human review. Ads are served dynamically, so they could appear on a NSFW post faster than a human can review it. It's less work to simply optimize for as little NSFW as possible.
- NSFW content consumers aren't valuable to advertisers or ad network operators because they don't sell products that could be placed as a 'contextual' ad. Ad platforms need insurance brokers, banks and CPG brands to make up the fat tail of revenue. That stuff can be placed next to posts about pretty much anything. NSFW content on the other hand doesn't work the same way, which is why ads on porn sites are for scam dating sites and unregulated erection pills.
This is doubly so considering the use of remarketing cookies. While you're watching something that's bound to fill you with regret moments after the fact, you won't want to see an ad showing the Amazon products you were browsing previously.
This is the same whether NSFW content is banned or not. "It's banned but somebody posted it anyway" has no apparent solutions different than the problem of "the user is required to mark it but they didn't."
As an obvious example, adult content is nominally banned on sites like TikTok, and yet there are thousands of TikTok accounts that serve as the funnel for OnlyFans, with the creators dancing on the line of the site's policy (and often crossing it), only to create a new account and carry on if they get banned.
> NSFW content consumers aren't valuable to advertisers or ad network operators because they don't sell products that could be placed as a 'contextual' ad.
Which is fine because the ad slots are sold at auction. The ad network's choices are to get something or get nothing.
edit: sibling comment has a better explanation which I think is probably 100% on the nose for this one.
It's a deliberate, active decision and its cost. That's policy. Prioritized over cost and profit.
In the US, there is often concern that the more valuable clients or end-users might otherwise boycot their product, or get them regulated even further. A concern that their are under pressure to do that, or else face even more costly consequences. (And they are. It's a very vocal part of society that's puritan.)
Which is weird, given that "sex sells."
> If music be the food of love, play on; > Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting, > The appetite may sicken, and so die.
The point is actually to suggest sex. Keep you aroused, but not let you finish.
Imagine, if Budweiser ran a brothel and buying their beer actually got you laid. You'd get laid, forget about sex for a while, and the association between the beer and sex would not entice you to buy the product.
The usual defense by advertisers is that their clients do not want their businesses to be associated with adult material, so they insist that advertisers do not place ads on adult-content-friendly websites to reduce the risk of that association happening due to ads adjacent to adult content.
I'm curious as to how valid that is. Are many/most businesses (or many/most businesses that are highly valuable to advertisers) materially concerned enough about association-with-adult-content-via-ad-placement that they would switch advertisers over it? Or are advertisers manufacturing family-friendly ad placement as a competitive selling point that their customers never really asked for?
I'm also curious about the next level down the stack, as it were: if a significant subset of businesses who hire advertisers are concerned about adult-content-association-via-nearby-placement, why is that? Is it merely disgust/discomfort on the part of business leadership and prevailing culture? Or does data indicate that there's a material risk to enough businesses' bottom lines that it's fiscally prudent to avoid that association?
(Reasoning from first principles without data, so probably wrong) I'm skeptical about the validity of both claims. Adult content is really popular across many demographics whose behavior is otherwise quite different. Given that broad base of popularity, is it really that risky for a business to have its brand appear in an ad next to pornography compared to, say, appearing on a politically extreme news site, or next to algorithmically-prioritized ragebait content on social media? Unlike adult content, I feel like the associations formed by seeing a company mentioned next to something anger inducing are more likely to be negative than the associations formed by seeing it next to adult content that the viewer presumably sought out. In both cases, the chance of behaviorally-significant associations being formed at all seems quite low, so I'd imagine that effects here (if there are any) would only be visible in the very very large.
Advertisers don’t have to believe the content is actually objectionable to fear reprisal. Outrage machine types on all sides will make an issue out of anything they can use to score points for themselves.
The marginal value of putting a Johnson & Johnson ad (say) in front of some furries is nothing compared to dread of the headline “J&J wants your children to be furries!”
A very real possibility when advertising on DeviantArt. But a no-adult-content policy would have (probably) satisfied adsense terms but would not have eliminated (most) of the furrie content on DeviantArt.
The advertisers care about getting bad press and having to do the rounds in the "news cycle".
By now everyone knows that advertisers don't choose which posts, tweets, images, etc. their ads are shown next to, but that still won't stop the CNNs of the world from writing a "<Brand> advertises next to Nazi content on <Platform>!" article.
Like, if a media outlet or politico wants to make hay about Walmart being advertised next to nazis, I’m sure that’s trivially easy to find today (and you only need to find one instance of that adjacency to make hay for a news cycle).
So why isn’t this already an issue in the status quo? Why aren’t brands being pressured into changing their ad placement habits right and left?
Sure, some businesses are being called out for things they explicitly endorse (e.g. Budweiser pride ads), but that’s not the same thing as running an ordinary ad in a questionable place.
Perhaps advertisers have written off adult content sites as places where there isn’t enough money to be made to risk it? If so, I’m curious what consumer behavioral data backs up that conclusion.
Didn’t this just happen to Xhitter? Their ad revenue has dropped like a brick.
That's the biggest joke in the world, the largest diffusers of explicit content are by far the advertisers which they use to sell anything, from cars to shampoo
The advertising industry is the very last industry which can claim a moral high ground on anything.
It's buck-passing all the way down.
Relevant Bill Hicks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G4NyMJHWVHw
If the media stopped writing shrieking news articles about "X brand promoting Y evil", we could all move on collectively as a society.
I've worked in a couple of digital advertising roles (mea culpa) and brand safety is a very big deal. No-one wants their product associated with porn, extremism, or even politics. eXtwitter's revenue implosion due to advertisers pulling out (pun not entirely intended) is one recent example of the importance placed on brand safety.
In summary, they are a tiny % , but by no means insignificant in terms of impact.