Weaponizing Ads: how free speech dies when advertisers pay the bills.
Damon Peters
Founder at ImmutableType || 2x CMO || Former VP Overstock.com || Marketplaces & Auctions || Growth
Media Jackals can kill their competitors by terrifying advertisers through simple assertion and innuendo. Why blockchain will save journalism from the media.
Good Evening,
I love the idea of journalism, which, for me, is a professional practice filled with passionate and incredible people who work tirelessly to sift through the noise to find the truth.
Journalists were always warriors in my eyes as a child. It was the time after Watergate, and I believed the fourth estate was out there fighting for the people, always researching and reporting about important topics to help everyday people be well informed and knowledgeable about the world around them. I found comfort in the idea of the protection journalists provided.
The world was big until the late 90s, and journalists provided views from around the globe which were unavailable otherwise. They purported to fight against government encroachment and provided assurance that the people had power on their side. I was not alone in my views as a child, as many young people of the time viewed journalists as fearless rebels who could speak truth to power simply by writing, photographing, or publishing information on our behalf, on behalf of the people.
We were empowered to know this power and security was accessible to us all. Local journalism was the primary form of journalism at that time. Journalists were part of the community, and the incentive to create good work was rewarded with direct impact upon the social environment of the community itself. Cities and towns were better off when local government had to answer to the media as it digested news and information for the public. That accessibility fostered actions from the community to shape their environment, because they (we) could observe the results of using our voices locally.
There’s a scene in the movie, Despicable Me 2, where Gru says to Agnes, “never get older” and that line gets me every time — I say “every time”, because I’ve seen that movie 138 times so far with my 3-year old.
It hits me hard, not only because the adult experience of having our childhood heroes and ideals ground to dust by the gristmill of life is a painful education that my daughter will also experience, but, more so, because it’s a universal experience. We all believe, until we don’t.
We all establish and anchor to truths as children, only to have most of them slowly fade over time upon closer examination. Even as adults, we spend enormous personal energy examining information to discern what is true and accurate. Part of journalism’s value comes from its ability to commit its own energy as a service to help us do some of this investigative work and identify trustworthy information.
That service is what we believe we are paying for when purchasing access to works of journalism, news reports, or media.
Never Get Older
The gristmill is relentless, always turning, slowly grinding.
Over the last few months a troubling practice within the media industry has become more public. It’s the practice of media organizations attacking OTHER media businesses by attacking the advertisers of those media businesses.
While not a new practice, the effects are much more swift and damaging today within such a highly interconnected legacy media and social media environment. The industry faces greater risk of attacks than ever before, as information travels instantly, regardless of the veracity of the content.
The impact of rapid distribution can be immediate. One of the results of such rapid impact is the ability to weaponize advertisers by threatening to shame them for placing ads within specific media brands. The simple threat is powerful, because the advertiser can do little to research and verify the onslaught of information generated each day. It’s impossible to know what is true and what is fabricated at the current scale of content generation (I use the word ‘content’ intentionally). It’s easier and safer to simply pause advertising until the threat blows over.
If this subject is new to the reader and journalists were your childhood heroes as well, well, today you’re going to get a bit older, Agnes.
Ad Revenues vs. Subscriber Revenues
I did some work in an effort to acquire a couple print newspaper companies during 2023 (will get into that at another time), and the diligence process provided some valuable insights to the quality of revenue within the industry.
(Dirty little secret: Many media companies are really just ad sales departments and marketing agencies which happen to own a newspaper, magazine portfolio, or a radio or TV station. You can’t unsee the organizational structure once you’ve seen it.)
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