Journalists! Stop biting the hand that feeds you
On ad-blocking, alternatives and making money for journalism
The idea — presented as fact — that nobody likes ads is at the root of a lot of discussions. But it’s not true. Old media mainstays such as Vogue, GQ and Vanity Fair — solidly at the ‘luxury’ end of the print market — include adverts that contribute to the overall experience of the product.
New(ish) media companies including BuzzFeed, Vox and Gimlet Media have swung strongly in the direction of ‘native’ ads — commercials presented in the form of articles or reports during podcasts — which, for a time, were certainly better received by readers and listeners.
In realm of podcasts, native works really well. Hearing about products from hosts you trust — for me that includes Dan Benjamin and Merlin Mann on Back to Work, Keith and Chemda from Keith & The Girl and the aforementioned Gimlet Media programmes — can be extremely effective and doesn’t feel pushy or unnatural when done properly.
Display ads, however, which have been the bread and butter of editorial websites across the internet since the early days of crudely retrofitting print products for the digital world, are pretty much done.
Clickthrough rates are low and many of the interactions reported by ad networks are fraudulent. Visitors are fed up with pop ups, pop unders and constant exhortations to sign up for things. The ad blocker rate is rising.
Those are all facts in a way that a blanket dismissal of advertising as a medium is not.
However, banging the drum for ad blockers when you are employed by a company whose livelihood, in part, rests on display advertising of one kind of another is like being a turkey who votes for Christmas by screaming “Stick me in the oven,” through a megaphone while plucking itself with its other wing.
The number of journalists — especially at tech sites — that agitate for the use of ad blockers, even while their own companies seek to find new ways to maintain and grow revenue from advertising, is ridiculous. It’s not just biting the hand that feeds them, its hacking at the fingers with a penknife.
Of course, some sites ad strategies can be incredibly annoying. The earliest implementation of my old employer The Next Web’s ‘canvas’ ads was so frustrating that the editorial team was entitled to rage about it. Even more egregious are the walls of sponsor messages forced upon visitors by sites that have followed in the footsteps of content farm with pretentions, Forbes.
My issue is that a lot of the eyerolling, tutting and general headshaking about the ‘evil’ of ads comes from members of the media who both expect to be paid for their writing and refuse to give proper support to the business sides of their organisations, which are trying extremely hard to find routes to sustainable revenue.
Good journalism shouldn’t be funded by bad ads, deceiving readers or a pop-up apocalypse, but if you work in the media and bang on about ad-blockers, it might be better to cut down on the moaning.
Sadly, the rest of us don’t have a one-click way to effectively shut out your entitled tweets, think pieces and Facebook posts. Maybe it’s because we just accept that it’s a small irritation — just like web ads, really.
