Brands need to fire adtech

You've pretty pretty much articulated one of the reasons for existence of ad tech industry. Inventory on the web is highly fragmented and ad sales one small site at a time is not really scalable for anyone to make a living out of. Hence ad networks emerged to aggregate inventory.

Now you probably have a "real" day job and don't really need to make even the website pay out, let alone make a living out of it. Not so for many other people who do make a living out of content.

Tech companies are taking a lot of heat here, but I think some of the blame here lies with Youtube's content creators.

If I buy ad time on late-night shows on NBC, I know I don't have to worry about Jimmy Fallon opening his show with a diatribe on "White Genocide" or "How feminists are the real Hitlers" or incoherently rambling about LBGTQ tumblr teens in a sweat-stained Starwars t-shirt.

Several Youtube content creators want to be able to freely oscillate between their core content topic (gaming, pop culture, etc) and random "edgy" topics. You're free to do that, and you shouldn't be censored, but you are not entitled to ad dollars.

They claim they're just trying to be "real" and "authentic" with their audiences, but how is it "authentic" to rant against Jews, Muslims, immigrants and neoliberal globalism while lining your pocket with ad revenue from Johnson & Johnson on a global technology platform built by immigrants/1st-gens, many of whom are jewish or muslim themselves? The cognitive dissonance is exhausting.

Ad targeting can be done based on what you know about the content it is displayed against. But it seems like a lot of weight is put on what the network knows about the person accessing that content.

Enabling brands to automatically opt-out of being shown adjacent to content with extreme/hateful views is only part of the problem. Ad tech must also contend with the fact that the audience has many dimensions. Someone who harbors hateful feelings for a subgroup of humanity may also be interested in a sweet deal on a pay as you go plan from AT&T.

I feel like the author of this article is missing the reasons behind the rise of adtech in the first place, and doesn't really address how traditional advertising can compensate. There are at least three forces at work here:

1) People straight up don't want to see ads. Ad blockers, Netflix, etc. are a natural response to this. If your medium relies on traditional ads, there's an increasingly large chance that your audience won't ever see those ads in the first place.

2) Companies want to know that their advertising dollars are actually producing results, and traditional advertising completely sucks at this. If you've never run a traditional ad campaign, I suggest giving it a try and then decide how much value you think you got out of it. You can spend thousands to millions of dollars and have absolutely no idea if your money impacted sales even the smallest amount. Compare that to adtech, where you get real data on outcomes on a regular basis. Even if it's crap data, it's often better than "well we think the brand is stronger now".

3) Traditional mediums for advertising are dying out quickly, especially with younger demographics. Newspapers used to be the prime advertising medium, and now most of them are guilting, begging, or strong-arming people into viewing their ads online. Magazines readership has been declining year over year for at least a decade. Live broadcast TV viewing among younger viewers has been flat or declining as well. Where are you supposed to find captive audiences willing to sit through your golden-age traditional advertising spots?

I agree that the adtech industry is slimy and in desperate need of a shakeup, but idolizing traditional advertising while ignoring the difficulties of ads in today's world doesn't really help here.

I think the author is trying to stay focused only on the issue of adtech vs (as he calls it) Madison Avenue ads. You also raise relevant points but they can be separate issues.

Anyhow to your point, I think the problem is that YouTube creators don't really think of themselves as being sponsored by brands. They've internalized only that they get paid to make content people watch. And that's not entirely accurate.

But for all the problems the author identified with adtech it has afforded people such as those on YouTube to enjoy what may be a fleeting era of getting paid to be genuine and uncensored. Perhaps membership fees to the platform that get allocated to creators can succeed here.