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How about since the dawn of mass media? It was always either ad supported, investor supported, or both. Print, Radio, TV, have always been in bed with, and at t

How about since the dawn of mass media? It was always either ad supported, investor supported, or both. Print, Radio, TV, have always been in bed with, and at the behest of advertisers. Corporations sell with good feelings, not reality. At first, the web seemed to dis-intermediate brands from products, marketing from reality. In a couple decades we've gone from honest online reviews to SEO spam and reputation management; publishing raw ideas to Facebook's endorphin optimizer, maximizing revenue per session and usage at all costs. Adjacency is the core precept of advertising sponsored media. The advertiser gets some of the juice of the media brand, and the media brand's decisions about what ads to allow materializes an aspect of their brand. Digital advertising at scale takes away the relationship between publishers and advertisers, and instead rely on brokers who define what is an 'ad safe environment'. Having worked in programmatic ads on the buy and sell side, I can say with confidence the system sucks for all. Publishers are constantly having to police which ads appear on their pages, advertisers wind up spending money on Eastern European spam domains without their knowledge. I think life even sucks for the ad exchanges, which have to try to balance the interests of all parties with profit. A new model is certainly needed. Its shape has yet to be determined, but I can't imagine we'll be doing header bidding in 10 years.

mcv 7y ago
Sometimes I feel like independent journalism is inherently contradictory: journalists need to get paid somehow. Even without ads, someone needs to pay their salaries, and that means someone has control over them. If subscription-based, you write what your subscribers are willing to pay for. If ad-funded, you write what your advertisers think is good for their ads. When paid by the government, there's the risk that the government may decide what you can write. I fear truly independent journalism can only be amateur journalism, but you don't get deep investigative journalism that way.

mcv 7y ago

Sometimes I feel like independent journalism is inherently contradictory: journalists need to get paid somehow. Even without ads, someone needs to pay their salaries, and that means someone has control over them. If subscription-based, you write what your subscribers are willing to pay for. If ad-funded, you write what your advertisers think is good for their ads. When paid by the government, there's the risk that the government may decide what you can write. I fear truly independent journalism can only be amateur journalism, but you don't get deep investigative journalism that way.