I think reddit is going to be the new model of digital media. They launched recently profiles, which means users who have been fairly anon will have the opportunity to start branding themselves as thought leaders in each respective subreddit. It's already happened with breaking news. Twitter might be faster, but there is less moderation and filter for fake news vs. crowd moderation (not perfect). I wouldn't be surprised if they start their own editorial team for news or a publishing platform and let the crowd moderate what's fake/real. The only thing stopping them is trolls/shills, but that might be solved with the profiles. They just need to convince users to come out of the shadows.
There’s a Digital Media Crash, But No One Will Say It
71–80 of 102 posts
Re: There’s a Digital Media Crash, But No One Will Say It
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
Eh I guess without any context then its not a very useful blog post. I'd still like to see some links or an attempt at verifying some claims. Even a byline with his industry experience would help.
It's posted on TPM on the "Editor's Blog" and the byline says "Josh Marshall is editor and publisher of TalkingPointsMemo.com." what else do you need on his credentials? There are links scattered throughout, but part of the point of this post is that no one is really talking about this issue at least at the depth it deserves, so understandably it's light on references. In this case, I'd treat a lot of this as an orig…
Thats completely meaningless. I've got that byline on 4 different websites. There is one link in the entire post. So because it deserves depth, he does the opposite?
There are thousands of 'publishers' like this - I don't believe he's qualified to claim the industry is broken. He can't see anything from a macro perspective.
Re: There’s a Digital Media Crash, But No One Will Say It
#73I have never understood, not from the very early 90s and the very early days of the graphical web and online advertising, WHY anyone ever accepted the proposal from advertisers that they pay either based on clicks or based on completed sales or things like that. It is insane. It is based on a fundamental lack of understanding of what advertisement IS and where its value lies.
Advertisers have, in my opinion, been getting a free ride for decades. They get brand recognition for free. They get goodwill for free. They get customers who know they even exist for free. They get knowledge of their product in front of customers for free. They don't pay a cent for any of it. And content providers just let this happen, in exchange for being paid based on driving clicks.
Do you think television networks would have said "sure, OK" if advertisers proposed they only pay for TV spots based on how many people showed up at the store and said they saw the ad and it was what specifically made them go to the store? Do you think radio stations would have bent over and said 'sure, sounds like a cool idea' to advertisers wanting to only pay based on how many customers came in and knew their jingle? Would newspapers have accepted only getting paid based on how many people said they saw the ad in the paper?
OF COURSE NOT. Because every single one of those customers who 'glided over it' or 'didn't see it' or didn't 'act' on it was influenced by it. And it is wrong to give that away for free. When an ad appears on a website a user is visiting of their own free will and desire, the simple mechanics of how the human brain works creates a vague positive impression for the brand advertised even when no one clicks at all. Advertisers know this. It's how they sell themselves to businesses. And they rely on content providing sites being either blissfully or willfully ignorant of this fact.
I can't help but chuckle at the timing, though. Print publications shut down text in deference to video because advertisers want it right at the same time the only video platform that is viable or ever likely to be barring a very large lawsuit for anticompetitive practices, YouTube, running at gigantic losses for more than a decade guaranteeing competition is impossible, has decided it is disgusted by the prospect of large numbers of people making a reasonable living from producing video content. They want to reform themselves in a more traditional more centralized model where a small number of tightly controlled producers of content will get rich, and the rest will either die off or be starved. Eric Schmidt touched on the idea that he sees Google's role in forcibly controlling (he would call it 'guiding') human culture as very important. He is rich, therefore he is Better and it is right for him to take the reigns and protect the seething masses from themselves. The same old mentality Old Money has operated on for centuries coming to the nouveau riche and technorati.
A mass migration of advertisers to YouTube will make Googles continued claims of a desperate lack of interested advertisers seem more and more strained as time goes on...
Re: There’s a Digital Media Crash, But No One Will Say It
#74Everyone not in the ad industry loves to make claims about how its going to fall apart, but no one I've seen has the expertise and data needed to back up their claims. Maybe the author has a point, but this article is incoherent. There is no sources and the entirety is predicated on baseless assumptions and some analogy. No sources or even attempt to prove any claims: - There are too many publishers - There is a fixe…
> There is a fixed amount of 'revenue seats' > Google/fb/etc take a portion of that fixed revenue If you need citations for these, your burden of proof is a bit too extreme. Unless advertisers have an infinite amount of money, there will be a finite amount of ad revenue. At some point, there's a floor to how much ad revenue you can capture while still having enough money to maintain a journalistic organization, creat…
My point below that is that those large publishers increase the amount of revenue available. So they take a percent, but the entire pie would be smaller without them.
With double digit growth, supply isn't fixed and its a common idea that supply (from an advertiser perspective) is effectively unlimited.
Re: There’s a Digital Media Crash, But No One Will Say It
#75I agree, but my question is, why hasn't the crash happened yet? Doesn't everyone know most clicks are by bots?
This is anecdotal but I feel it's much more common than we talk about: when I was in ad tech, I saw first hand how advertisers would spend money on impressions for the sole purpose of being able to report to their higher-ups how many impressions and click they got. Particularly for brands where conversion attribution was difficult to impossible. The media agencies spending on be half of the brand also have virtually…
Yes - but in order for something to be rigged it has to be rigged "against" someone, and I believe that someone is the consumer. Advertisers and publishers benefit, but the consumers see intrusively targeted, annoying ads everywhere they go. Ad blockers have re-balanced the equation in favor of consumers (at the expense of publishers), but publishers are resorting to video because it's easier to force someone's attention the more passive they are, even though that defeats the entire value proposition of digital marketing for many places, which is higher user engagement/tracking...
Maybe the most profitable and effective way to do advertising is still direct sales, but call me old-fashioned.
Re: There’s a Digital Media Crash, But No One Will Say It
#76Relevant... I got told a few days ago that: "Buzzfeed writers have to generate at least 1 article per day. There is no minimum limit on words on the article, and the topic can be anything (within reason)." Once I knew this, the prevalence of low-quality Buzzfeed links all over the web suddenly made sense.
One per day? I had someone at one of Vox's regional properties tell me they had to do 12 a day (combination of local and national)! One per day seems pretty light. TV reporters in medium and small markets are usually required to turn out two a day (one package, one VOSOT). Radio reporters sometimes five or six or more, depending on market size and whether they're unionized.
"vosot
A TV news term, an acronym that stands for 'voiceover/sound on tape.' This is a story in which the news anchor reads copy while video plays, and then a short soundbite plays while the anchor stops reading, and then the anchor reads the end of the story. Also spelled vo/sot or vo/b for 'voiceover/bite.'"
Source: https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=vosot
Re: There’s a Digital Media Crash, But No One Will Say It
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
One per day? I had someone at one of Vox's regional properties tell me they had to do 12 a day (combination of local and national)! One per day seems pretty light. TV reporters in medium and small markets are usually required to turn out two a day (one package, one VOSOT). Radio reporters sometimes five or six or more, depending on market size and whether they're unionized.
Cranking out one buzzfeed-grade article a day doesn't seem like much work. I'm pretty sure I've already put more thought into this comment than they put into most of their articles.
Automate it, a mad libs job haha, pick a random topic from the news, fill it in with data, wonder how poorly written it would come out.
Re: There’s a Digital Media Crash, But No One Will Say It
#78Relevant... I got told a few days ago that: "Buzzfeed writers have to generate at least 1 article per day. There is no minimum limit on words on the article, and the topic can be anything (within reason)." Once I knew this, the prevalence of low-quality Buzzfeed links all over the web suddenly made sense.
Although Buzzfeed and the similar ilk are all terrible, you cannot blame them for doing what they do. They are all merely a symptom of the burgeoning idiocracy they pander to.
Re: There’s a Digital Media Crash, But No One Will Say It
#79A couple of weeks back there was a headline about a site surreptitiously using visitor's hardware to mine some form of crypto. People were upset, but it made me wonder.. why isn't this a viable business model? Crypto mining in lieu of advertisers would realign interest between content producer and content consumer - the person who reads your articles begins to be your customer again, instead of the companies advertis…
> why isn't this a viable business model?
If I find any site doing this, I'm going to throw it into my local dns resolver to point to 127.0.0.1 faster than I can script it.
Why? Because when I'm on battery and any site decides their crypto currency ad scheme is ok to run and blow through my laptop battery, I'll likely wonder if I can bill them for the machine resources they have used.
Re: There’s a Digital Media Crash, But No One Will Say It
#80A couple of weeks back there was a headline about a site surreptitiously using visitor's hardware to mine some form of crypto. People were upset, but it made me wonder.. why isn't this a viable business model? Crypto mining in lieu of advertisers would realign interest between content producer and content consumer - the person who reads your articles begins to be your customer again, instead of the companies advertis…
This is actually a great idea. Worthy of a post of its own.
It’s been discussed repeatedly right here on HN. Unlike you, it strikes me as one of the dumbest things I’ve heard in a while, and I can support that assessment from multiple angles. But one person’s dumb idea is another’s successful business model, and I’ve been wrong plenty of times in the past. Like a sibling commentor, though, I catch you doing it and your domain will never again resolve to a valid IP on any machine that I own.