Our Best Weapon Against Fake News: Ad Blockers

There’s plenty of good (and costly) reporting being done to prove just how much money can be made in the questionable business of “fake news.” But what’s really keeping fake news afloat is pretty simple: institutions in a position to fight against this nuisance, from search engines to ad servers to brands, are not incentivized to do so. Each of these institutions benefits (or, more accurately, perceives themselves to benefit) from a larger scale of page views, regardless of the quality of content on those pages.

For that reason, ad blockers might be the only thing that can upset an economic system that supports useless and/or intentionally misleading content.

I know this firsthand because I’ve made good money taking advantage of the same failure of incentives in the attention economy that fake news is exploiting now — namely, search engines incentivized to serve ads, and media buyers equally incentivized to favor quantity over quality.

Let me explain. When I graduated from college and was looking for a “real” job, I made money writing articles for what are known as “content farms.” (Remember those?) I’d get assigned articles based on extremely generic topics ripped from Google’s top search terms. If a whole bunch of people were searching for “Valentine’s Day Gift Ideas,” I’d spend about 2 minutes compiling a list of the most common and unthoughtful Valentine’s Day gifts (chocolate, teddy bear, heart necklace, etc.), and write an article about their romantic merits — repetitively using any terms that would help it rank highly on search engines.

That article would get formatted by some SEO (search engine optimization) tools and quickly posted to a site with a few programmatically purchased banner ads alongside the “content” I’d produced. And I’d be compensated to the tune of $12 for that article.

With any ability to focus, and a willingness to prioritize quantity over quality, I was making enough money to live on. I had a ton of fun that summer, so I was grateful for (and somewhat proud of) what seemed to be a relatively harmless little side hustle. It seemed to be a victimless crime because the parties most immediately affected (search engines and advertisers) were happy. But I was wrong: The victims were the readers of my content and the creators of the content they were actually looking for.

That’s where the parallels to the “fake news” epidemic start.

Beneficiary #1: Google

My content was designed to clutter the search experience. The intention was to figure out what people were searching for and produce something that search engines would identify as helpful, without much of a concern for whether it actually was helpful. The only goal was a page load.

That may seem like a problem that Google’s search engine team would want to fight. But Google, as the ad server for the long tail of the internet, was often also the company benefiting from the page view that my article would generate. So the company wasn’t financially incentivized to fight the problem of content farms. If their search engine sent you straight to the high quality article you were looking for, they’d miss out on the money they make from the ad load on my crappy article.

Likewise, fake news — especially as it relates to the publishing of information that readers want to be true — is designed to get clicks. Sometimes it happens to serve the author’s political interests or some foreign interest (hi, Russia) and sometimes it doesn’t. But it’s the clicks that are the endgame, and Google runs plenty of search ads on these sites too.

Beneficiary #2: Programmatic Advertisers

We can safely assume that the majority of people who landed on one of my articles quickly recognized its uselessness and navigated away to some more valuable content. That may seem like a problem for the advertisers paying to display ads on my page, but they don’t see it that way. The programmatic advertising ecosystem values “eyeballs” as measured by page loads, and rarely has any value tied to time spent. And as far as ad dollars are concerned, your eyeballs hold the same value wherever they go on the internet. So, the page load on my garbage article and the time spent reading the higher quality piece of content are equally valued as an ad “impression.”

Any publisher that puts real time and effort (and money) into their content obviously must charge a premium to support its creation. So, my articles (and fake news) just give programmatic advertisers a cheaper place to buy the same “impression” that would have cost more elsewhere. The result is that ad dollars are optimized away from premium publishers and toward whatever the cheapest site is that gets viewed by the same eyeballs.

And that’s what makes “fake news,” much like the “content farm” content I wrote, a money maker with no strong enemies.

Solutions Come from those Affected by the Problem

Content farms and fake news alike (and the system of indifference that has allowed them to thrive) have two real victims: producers and consumers of premium content. These victims are the only ones we can reasonably expect to do something about the problem.

As usual, the consumers are leading the way. Installing an ad blocker is the first successful means we have to defund useless or deliberately misleading content. And premium publishers should emphatically endorse this solution…right after they stop giving away their content for free.

A common misconception is that ad blocking software allows users to view content without ads — the truth is that ad blockers just block ads. They force publishers to decide if they’re willing to give their product away without ads, but the ad blockers don’t make that decision for them.

In any other business, giving away your product for free would be an obviously silly thing to do…and it would be even more bizarre to complain that people are stealing from you as you continue giving out your product for free. But that’s what most publishers are doing right now. The publishing industry is underestimating how easy it is to make content exclusively available to customers that pay — with either their credit card or their attention (by whitelisting sites in the ad blocker). Publishers have no right to claim that ad blocking is “stealing” if they make no effort to prevent the theft.

Not giving your product away for free should be obvious, but I understand why publishers encouraging ad blocking may seem counter-intuitive. However, if we accept that widespread ad blocking is an inevitability (26.3% of internet users will use ad blockers this year), then premium publishers benefit from getting ad blocker usage to 100% as quickly as possible.

Why? Think about what it would do to to their competition.

The long tail of the internet, collectively, is any premium publisher’s biggest competitor. The long tail has no overhead and gets most of its content for free, but still delivers a mass amount of “impressions.” Take away 26.3% of its impressions and the long tail, as a whole, will be fine. But all of those long tail impressions go away when ad blocking is at 100%. At that point the advertising marketplace would consist exclusively of advertising that users actively allow, which they will only do as an alternative means of “paying” for access to content they see as truly valuable.

If you’re a content producer that sells ads, and you’re truly confident in the value of the content you create, you shouldn’t be concerned about the 26.3% of users blocking ads, you should be worried about the 73.7% of users that are NOT. Because by NOT blocking ads, these users are unwittingly creating a gigantic pool of “impressions” as they bounce around the internet’s less premium web pages. And that pool of impressions is what’s really stealing ad dollars away from premium publishers — by obscuring the very real scarcity of attention that exists in the world.

So, as a publisher, you should get in touch with an ad blocking service and ask them to create a direct link to download a version of their service that has your site pre-loaded on the white list. And then promote the hell out of it to users that aren’t (yet) using ad blockers.

If premium publishers all took this approach, and ad blocking neared 100%, eventually consumers would come to understand that any site you can access with an ad blocker on (and without paying for that site), is probably not worth anyone’s time or attention. The long tail of the internet, with its fake news and content farms, will always exist. But ad blockers give us a chance to more consciously decide who and what we fund with the dollars generated by our attention.

So, go ahead, install an ad blocker. Let’s see who’s left standing…I doubt it will be my old Valentine’s Day Gift Ideas.