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Advertisers want to place ads next to content that is 'Brand Safe'. The end of Jezebel is a case study of how that impacts hard hitting news sites
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- Title
- Advertisers Don't Want Sites Like Jezebel to Exist
- Published
- Nov 10 2023
- Word count
- 3454 words
I don't really buy this article's premise, that Jezebel deserves to be put on a pedestal of journalistic integrity and quality. I know there are examples of very well written articles from the site, but there were also some pretty deplorable pieces published there too. They published nonconsensual pornography, trivialized domestic abuse, and objectified celebrities all the time. For every example of hard-hitting analysis, there were at least a dozen other examples of tabloid-esque bottom of the barrel dreck. I don't blame them for it, they published what they had to in order to get clicks. Even if it seemed like half the time the target audience wasn't feminists so much as incels hate-reading their site looking for evidence they can point to to say feminists are crazy.
I'm not happy to see them go, but we don't need to lionize every clickbait blog that goes under.
The article also points to Vice as suffering because of the constraints of ad based funding. It also talks about advertisers not wanting to be next to articles about war or anything else tied to negative emotions.
Brands: cause strife around the world with poor labour practices
Also Brands: "No, don't paint us like that!"
Honestly. The dissonance so many of us have when shopping for anything is intense. We know our shirts come from awful places, yet we choose to wear it anyway.
But companies that cause huge problems, then refuse to have their names attached to many of these problems are just god awful.
This is a difficult problem. You used clothes as an example. I'd argue many people don't know about the poor labor practices of some of these cheap clothing producers. And there's probably a large group of people who do know, but can't afford more expensive clothing. And even if you have the budget to pay more, you would still have to educate yourself on each brand, because "fast fashion" extends beyond the cheapest clothes.
Me and my partner try to buy as good chunk of our clothing from thrift stores, not because our budget is low, but because we know that's likely the last stop before the landfill. Even if we are buying some of these brands with poor practices from there, we're at least not buying it new and supporting them.
But even with that, a lot of thrift stores have questionable labor practices and/or spend money on political messaging, which they can do tax-exempt with their non-profit status. This likely applies to some "wear it for life" type brands too.
My point is, it's very hard to navigate purchasing to make "good choices" with no negativity anywhere along the way, and this extends beyond clothing.
Sweatshops have been a constant talk in the UK for as long as I can remember.
But I think you're more likely to be onto something with the later remark. My Mom used to work in fashion and once it started moving towards fast? It become absolute garbage. I am VERY of the ilk of buy something once and never have to buy it again when it comes to my clothes. But that is such a huge problem and goes the story of the guy who can't afford the £50 boots, but can the £25 and can't save up... which I think is Terry Pratchet?
Admireable!
Again, UK Charity shops do have a small cadre of bastards who'll take anything good for themselves and eBay it. But this is generally a good idea. The sheer volume of textile waste is absolutely insane, and completely avoidable in the current production cycle.
The fashion industy is so much to blame for this nonsense.
You are absolutely right. Actually living a truly 'ethical' life is damn hard. Even if you only buy from ethical firms, you know that somewhere in the supply chain there's going to globalist/slave labour bullshit floating around in it.
I distinctly remember my Mom returning home from work after discovering 100K+ items of clothes had pieces from sweatshops on them. She had to cancel the lot and she got it in the neck, but stood her ground. I suspect in her older age she's far less firebrand (We're estranged these days), but it sure as shit sent a message to me.
I wish we could force transparency on firms around supply chains. But they'd just scream about competition rules.
I think the tv show The Good Place explained this dilemma well. So much of what we consume is comes with/from some kind of negative actuon by someone. The complexity of modern life- heck any life- makes it hard to vet every single thing you buy. Not only that, if you were to go down that road, not just vetting the finished product, but all the components in that product quickly becomes an impossible task.
Pretty much. There's a utopic idea that we can manufacture everything ourselves onshore. We could! But the price would be painfully unattainable to so many that we'd end up in rags again.
The irony is? That says more about the fucked up capitalistic system than it ever could about us as consumers. It means products are no where near as economical as we thought they could be.
Exactly right. One of the truths about capitalism that makes people uncomfortable is that it depends on an underclass to exploit. That's the undergirding of this tangent.
It's also why the struggle against capitalism is international. So long as the threat of cheap, exploited laborers exists, all of our livelihoods are in jeopardy. Jobs get shipped overseas all the time for all different reasons. There needs to be worker solidarity across borders, across continents otherwise we're just exporting our exploitation.
I was writing earlier about that.
The death of collective belief in the West is because a lot of folks have got exploitation to move elsewhere, whislt realistically... it's still painfully prevelant. It's just not OUR kids getting fingers lost to machines now...
Degrowth is the only way out of the shitshow we're in. But that means accepting that money actually means very little...
I disagree that degrowth is a viable answer to the calamities that we are facing today(unless we'retalking about degrowth of the wealthy and ruling class!). Humanity has the resources to house, clothe, and feed every person alive, and then some. And do it cleanly in a sustainable way.
What makes degrowth a viable option in your opinion?
You've essentially just described degrowth.
Degrowth isn't population, it's energy usage and redistribution of wealth. It's essentially around the idea of investing in everyone, rather than just the top class.
I've got a book recco if you like? Less is More - Jason Hickle. 300-400 pages of goodness around the topic. Worth a read with anyone who wants to see a path away from the capitalistic hellscape we have now.
I'm not going to disagree with you, but I will question the veracity of that statement. Humans only really stopped wearing rags once we were able to afford to pay others to produce our clothing. I don't believe it's impossible for us to achieve a post-scarcity utopia, but I am certainly wary of saying that it's big, bad capitalism's fault.
This isn't even close to true. Plenty of people wearing not-rags made their own clothes (or had a woman in their family make clothes for them). We had clothing prior to the existence of money, much less the existence of capitalism.
It's an interesting topic, definitely, and thank you for posting the article.
There is an inherent irony to social media in that the algorithms have learned that outrage drives viewership, and yet advertisers don't want to be associated with that outrage. There is clearly an uneasy equilibrium right now where advertisers are content to look the other way up to a point where they get called out, and social media companies clearly try to maximize attention-driving divisive content just up until the advertisers' tolerance level.
Is this wrong though? This is the nature of ad supported media. If they have content compelling enough to get people to pay for it, then they should charge for it. People will pay for high quality content, even when it covers wars and other negative sentiment topics.
Case in point (I am in fact a subscriber to the NY Times, and other publishers).
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/08/business/media/new-york-times-q2-earnings.html
Instead, they are complaining that nobody wants to advertise on Jezebel and appealing to some supposed responsibility of advertisers to support them, which brings to my mind the grasshopper singing “oh the world owes me a living.”
Don't know if it got better post Gawker, but I didn't think of Jezebel as much better than the rest of the Gawker sphere in that regard. Definitely felt like an editorial choice that applied across all websites.
This is one instance where I would have done better to snip paragraphs into the comments. I was a lot more interested in the general discussion of advertising dollars being withheld for difficult topics, then I was in Jezebel per se.
Also discussion of dumb algorithms making decisions without an appeal process or transparency as to reasons and standards.
It's an incredibly important topic, I appreciate you linking the article! I think the way it begins makes it seem more Jezebel-focused than it goes on to be. It reminded me of another article I read a while ago which discusses the consequences of risk-averse advertising for journalism with a focus on big UK newspapers (the Guardian, Times etc). It also shows how blocklists can have a big effect on sites discussing issues outside of what is considered mainstream/ acceptable - such as abortion, sex and LGBTQ+.
I take your point, but honestly how do you get around it?
Because the world we live in, with the entire planet wirelessly connected with each other and eager to pile onto any slight (perceived or real), it's amazing we're not living in a 1950s Leave it to Beaver episode. Something saccharine and supremely inoffensive.
The people with money call the shots. That's what they do. That's what the money means. They have it, and when they spend it, people fall all over themselves to get it.
People have weaponized social media over all sorts of slights, again perceived or real. They vow to rain down hellfire on any entity (corporate or person) who supports "the wrong" thing. That thing could be a message, a practice, you name it and they'll rise up over it. And it happens in less than a day.
https://www.ted.com/talks/jon_ronson_when_online_shaming_goes_too_far/transcript
The woman Ronson talks about in this piece may or may not have been insensitive in what she Tweeted, but her life was fucking destroyed in about twelve hours. Destroyed. Not just lost her job, got hounded out of her industry. Why? Because people on social media decided to pile on. Was her one Tweet so bad that she deserved to be destroyed? She couldn't have just apologized and changed; she had to be ruined?
Apparently so because mob rules.
Is it really hard to understand why corporations are terrified of controversy? And remember, while we (including myself) like to think of corporations as evil overpaid executives, there are people in the corporations. Not all of them are evil overpaid executives. Some of them are just working a desk, reporting to superiors, hoping to get through each week and claim their paycheck on the way home.
It's easy, so easy, to be terrified of controversy when you know, without a doubt, that the corporation -- which will hold employee meetings and pay some silver tongued douchebag HR person to tell you "we're all family here" -- will can your ass in a heartbeat when crisis comes just so they can point to you as the fault of whatever the latest crisis is. So they can sacrifice you to the mob.
Again, it's actually amazing the only things that don't get advertising dollars are at the level of a Mr Rogers rerun.
What I think needs to happen is we need the online mob to band together and shame companies for not supporting mature topics and content. People rise up and shout "shame, shame, shame" when they "catch" a company advertising or doing somewhere that apparently "supports" something bad (like ... pick whatever social media is pissed about this hour).
What if, instead, people rose up and shamed companies who fled from those topics?
Take South Park as a not-very hypothetical example. The latest SP movie has all the middle class people cast as utterly inept at everyday repair tasks; they can't do anything except the specific whatever it is they went to college for. So basic household repairs are beyond them.
Let's say social media decides this is making fun of handy people in some Completely Unacceptable Way, and starts screaming at the advertisers running ads in the ad tier on the streaming service, or on Comedy Central (if/when) it runs there, and so on. The usual. The mob demanding that the company "stop supporting this because (reasons) and (bad) and SHAME!"
What if, as soon as the advertisers panicked and pulled their ad buys, the other half of the mob rose up and shamed them for running for cover? "How dare you kowtow to this ridiculous pressure; it's just a show; grow up; hire that marketing person you shitcanned back because it wasn't her fault" and so on.
I'm only kidding a little. Because that's what it would take, I think, to reverse this trend of people with too much time on their hands eagerly looking for this hour's bandwagon to grab hold of and ride enroute to piling on to the latest outrage target. If people fought back, not later but in the moment. If, as soon as the shame calls began, the backlash swelled.
It'd be nice if something happened though. Maybe this idea, maybe something else. Because money talks, money walks. It's only "notable" in this instance because it's connected (however vaguely or not) to news. You usually see this in pure entertainment, and more often in the adult sector.
Credit card companies are cutting off adult content providers of basically any kind you can think of. We know people want adult content because they buy it. But it keeps being made hard to buy when you can't use your usual methods to, you know, pay for it. All because the online mobs keep pressuring the banks and whoever else to "stop supporting filth."
Push back. Throw up enough flack that the companies, and the fucked over people in the desks at those companies who will be thrown to the curb the second any controversy starts, have some cover. Something they can point to and say something along the lines of "look, we're just neutral in this issue; some people hate (adult content/whatever), but some support it, so we're not going to take a side and therefore refuse to back away from doing business with these law abiding entities."
They can't do that when today and tomorrow all the pressure is shouting Shame. The backlash has to happen sooner to give them leverage to not run for cover. The backlash can't come weeks later, when everyone's seen "oh shit, I didn't mean you should cut my favorite program/whatever off; we've gone too far and should be ashamed of ourselves." The backlash has to rise up soon enough to actually push back against the mob mentality, and act as a counterweight.
I haven't read anything from them in years, but my general feeling about them is pretty negative.
Jezebel occupied a space that I would rank as something like a left wing Fox News. Mostly garbage and very, very occasionally legitimate journalism. I’m not sad to see them go.
The reason I linked the article was not specific to Jezebel.
I don’t think Jezebel is a good example. However, the analysis that advertisers and marketeers have a disproportionately large power in media is worrying and also fitting/supporting 404media’s - and other independent platforms - own standpoint.
I am not really knowledgeable on this subject (I binged Succession and watched the pilot of Madmen), but I feel like that while advertising’s power has been around for a long time, since the inception of online-only (social) media outlets, a lot of ‘content creators’ are almost solely dependent on advertising income. From the standpoint of advertisers it only makes sense; just do what gets the most money. The switch to becoming independent by finding ways to secure other cash flow sources seems the logical one to try and break free from this broken system, see for example 404 media.
The second part seems to focus on actors that game the system. It seems that advertisers don’t lose enough money (maybe because brands still pay the advertising companies regardless?) that they change their practices, which is extra worrying; potentially legitimate sites are dropped in favor of ad optimized fake blogs? Seems to be bad for everyone involved (except the intermediary ad companies of course).
An tangential afterthought: It’s not hard to grab attention with extremes, but it’s also common sense that it will scare advertisers. The better part of the time on the internet is spent watching pornography or lewd images, but mainstream advertising companies wouldn’t touch that market. I presume that brazzers and the likes still exist because some people are paying for the content with cash instead of only attention.
Indeed. But that's also the hardest part: it's extremely hard to rely on user subscriptions for income unless you yourself are a very large name. the volume you need with a small price is enormous, and the price for a niche sort of service may be cost prohibitive for most lower-middle class users.
Also, there's simply so many "free", ad-supported services you're competing with, and at the end of the day "ad-free" isn't enough of a draw for users to start paying up. They have a lot more time than money.
I don't know how we break through that except through other societal breakdowns first. Make it easier to operate as a business of 1 or few (which has been happening), lower the cost of living so the floor needed to support a full time job is viable (which we have been going farther from), lower the power or tolerance for ad based content (impossible?)
You can see it on this very site even, every time a paywalled article goes up it's a 50/50 chance the first comment is just bemoaning paywalls.
I agree with that take. I tend to see everything as political nowadays cuz it really is, a lot of problems could be alleviated if we had better safety nets that helped everyone live well, so we're free to pursue things without needing to make money to survive. It's a long shot but I feel like that's the only way.
The thing with paywalls on news is that it’s not a matter of subscribing to 1-3 sites that everybody uses, it’s instead tens of sites none of which share a subscription.
I think people would be a lot more willing to pay if one or two subscriptions eliminated paywalls and ads across the majority of news sites one might encounter.
(I'm sorry for taking this topic so off course) But that's basically what Youtube Premium is right? One subscription that eliminates ads and (assuming Google is a ethical company (read: it's not)) does something similar where it removes ads across multiple creators and pays them more based off of that. The way that some people subscribe to individual Patreons to certain creators is basically the same concept, in my mind.
Either way though the system is broken. One subscription that eliminates paywalls across the board won't feed every journalist and news site out there unfortunately.
For some reason, nobody is willing to compromise on a structure for arbitrary online micropayments. That would solve this. A local newspaper in the US used to cost a quarter, a Sunday color edition was fifty, and a national syndicate was $1.50. You could see a headline, wrinkle your brow, and drop some change. Now nobody wants to offer a single article for a small fee, they'd much rather you sign up to be automatically charged $10 for "all the content you could want!" monthly. Sorry fourth estate, but prepaying for every piece of news I plan to read, and choosing to just whistle on by a breaking headline from someone I haven't yet subscribed to is a nonsensical proposition.
That is an interesting solution, though maybe there would be some issues with it? Initially I thought that it would hyper incentivize clicks and clickbaiting, but I guess we kinda do that right now anyways. The other thing I'm guessing would be online payment processing. It's an interesting idea though! I wonder if it could happen.
Yeah, there are always tradeoffs, but I'd be amazed if it led to worse unintended outcomes than giving Google and Faceboo the power to control all information for the average person. The big issue is that the last few pushes for that sort of framework have come from the cryptocurrency/web3 world, and they soured a lot of people on it by association.
The Washington Post could become THE go-to newspaper in the US simply by including a digital subscription with Prime.
I wonder if other prestigious outlets wouldn't consider cutting a deal with credit cards to bundle in a digital subscription as a perk, much like insurance or lounge visits.
Well, thankfully they'd be instantly slapped with a massive antitrust suit with that. Bezos and the editors already have to constantly insist against a conflict of interest just to not run against those kinds of actions, that'd be well beyond the line for the FTC.
I don't think a bundled subscription is the way, either. It diminishes journalistic independence, and that's not to mention the demand for quality that competition does facilitate the communication of to suppliers. Obviously that last bit is pretty minimal, but trusts, even if they don't look like them at first, are dangerous stuff.
What we really need is a online new subscribers consumer union or cooperative.
The problem with subscribing to online newspapers is that the newspaper and online reading experiences are different. I don't want to read a news site "front to back" like I would an old print newspaper. I personally don't have any interest in the paper's sports section, but I have to pay for it anyway. I would like to pay for just the portions of a paper that I read.
Now, if I only wanted to subscribe to one news site, this wouldn't be a problem. Just like old print papers, you don't need to read the entire thing. But in the contemporary online media system, I want to read articles from a few dozen different papers/news sites. I don't want to read every article on the NY Times each day. I want to read a few articles from the Times, a few from the Washington Post, etc.
What we really need is a unified system that allows you to effective subscribe to a hundred papers at once. Maybe $20/month gets you access to any story in any of a hundred or more papers. You subscribe to this service, and then through your login, the system tracks how many articles you read on each site. At the end of the month, your subscription cost is then divided between the various news sites based on how many articles you read from each one (or some other metric like engagement time, etc.)
The hard part is getting news sites to agree to this. They really don't have a lot of incentive. They would rather lock people in to full monthly subscriptions. The solution to this might be a consumer union organization. Get a million people together, each willing to pay that $20/month for their news content. Then that organization can go to individual papers and negotiate as a single block. News sites that don't want to get onboard won't have to, but in turn they'll be leaving a lot of money on the floor.
The power of ad based content probably is the societal breakdown. Find me one teenager that isn’t glued to twitch streams, TikTok, Snapchat, Instagram etc etc in their free time. Funding the system, while also suffering the losses of independent information.
Thanks. This is a thoughtful comment that imho added to the conversation.
I wonder who, respectfully, gives a shit about whats next to an ad. Maybe some ad industry peons paid to care sure. But normal, non activist, average users/consumers? They are watching the content in the first place, so they are okay with it, why should the ad provider create a means for censorship by ad starvation.
Sure for blatant criminal NSFL content, but everything else should be fair game.
The only thing companies hates more than losing is bad PR. and putting your product next to any controversial theme comes into risk of bad PR. A bad quarter is a bad quarter, a bad reputation affects you for years to come.
War especially has a decades long history with adverts and how various activism have put pressure on ads associating with war in any form (which includes the act of serving ads in a country undergoing war) so it seems the pendulum has shifted to companies trying to completely stay out of it.
How I read the GP was that normie customers only care about two kinds of bad brand reputation:
Only the executive spouse club and activists care about implicit support of genocide.
yup, and those two groups are loud and can cause a ruckus. Which large brands want to avoid.