Advertisers Don’t Want Sites Like Jezebel to Exist
Advertisers Don’t Want Sites Like Jezebel to Exist
The 'Brand Safety' and 'Suitability' industries have financially crushed the news business by keeping ads away from articles that its 'sentiment analysis' algorithms think will make people sad or upset.
The outsized influence of ad money in society is getting worse day by day
How do you pay for journalism?
There are plenty of small independent publications and online journalism outlets that survive off donation drives, subscription patrons, and volunteer citizen journalists. There are even totally independent citizen journalists that report on community sources. Unfortunately, honest journalism is something that society currently has a limited carrying capacity for, but that capacity is not zero.
I actually loved Jezebel, because it was maybe the only news site I encountered (as a dude not particularly in the know), that actually talked about women's issues like my wife does.
People got very upset that they were opinionated, but that's the whole point; why would you expect anything else on a site literally named Jezebel?
I wish this discussion happened around Vice. I was subscribed to every platform that had Vice on it and had watched every episode of their news shows as they were scrambling to pivot as HBO Max gave them the hatchet. Yeah, capital decides. At the end of the fucking day, the people with the money decide for us.
I don't even think readers wanted it to exist
It really seems like ad networks specifically targeting these edgier spaces could do very well for some brands.
I definitely see some of the concerns that they have with this GARM stuff, but I also don't particularly feel like I've seen much under the umbrella of the Gawker media group in general that I'd classify as "high-quality journalism". There are decent articles here and there, but the standard for what qualifies to be published has always struck me as not particularly high.
I get that there's a place for aggressive journalism, sometimes it's exactly what's called for. But Gawker always kind of felt like it was just aggressive for its own sake in order to attract eyeballs. Not to say that they never shed light on anything important, but a lot of the time it seemed like they were tilting at windmills just trying to keep that energy up.
Advertising really doesn't seem like a great long-term solution for journalism's funding, though. Nobody really wants ads, and people are increasingly able to just not interact with them. At the same time, nobody wants a paywall either.
Government funding, maybe? Some big public foundation? We certainly need something to prop journalism up financially or it's just going to keep getting worse.
I think the problem is centralised "big house" journalism. I've only ever really been happy with special interest, independent, moderately-sized publications. I can drop them and move on when they start to show institutionalised bias that I find distasteful (like the AIM hosting Labor lapdogs, which would be fine, if the party wasn't ambivalently ableist and infested with documented Christofascists). There's a certain size of online journal that is actually sustainable given its audience.