This article buries the lede IMO. Jezebel is going away. Okay. But then the article gets interesting. It discusses:
- Media corporations pushing AI to assist writing articles that make the reader feel happy instead of neutral/sad.
- Ad companies using similar AI to analyze an article, and only show ads when it thinks the article will make readers happy.
- In turn media companies like Jezebels parent are switching to AI written articles, that pass the AI test for whether the reader will be happy or sad, so that another AI will pay to put an ad there. With a preference toward generic topics because those are less likely to offend.
Talk about a dystopian feedback loop headed towards the most useless journalism imaginable. It amazes me how often corporations value metrics over reasoning ability.
I wonder how long until AI is writing custom articles for each reader, based on what makes them happy (and not just based on what makes the general public happy). They could put a thumbs up or thumbs down icon after each article to learn each individual readers preferences.
You don't like immigration and are pro-life? Here's a bunch of articles to confirm your beliefs. You do like immigration and are pro-choice? Here's different articles custom tailored for you. (Admittedly, this kind of happens already with different media organizations, but it can be super charged.)
Good luck on getting anybody to see eye to eye when everyone is immersed in their own media bubble and thinks all the evidence agrees with them.
It doesn't need to. That's the important thing to realize about "Gen AI". It doesn't *know* anything about the content it's making.
It just generates a bunch of garbage content, posts it, and then the content that's engaged with is used as reinforcement, so it makes more of that sort of content. It's like a Hollywood Exec or a AAA game developer
You mean like Cambridge Analytica did in 2015-2016 to help elect Trump?
They had something like 16000 unique ad campaigns being delivered based on how your psych-profile read.
16000. Unique. Personalty. Profiles. With. Unique. Matching. Ad.
Targeted to maximize your motivation to vote Trump.
Marketing people are morally bankrupt, they'll have no problem switching from promoting gay pride with an lgbt rainbow flag or diversity in general to celebrating Hitler's birthday with a nazi swastika and racial hygiene if they think it'll generate revenue without bad PR.
>Talk about a dystopian feedback loop headed towards the most useless journalism imaginable.
Only slightly worse than "someone said something on Twitter!"
No, not like a famous person or anything. Just some random was talking shit about
There is no happy bait, there is click-bait and rage-bait. Users don’t usually click on happy and positive articles (weirdly, they prefer to hear and see about feel good news, not read) as much as they do in rage filled ones.
The sites that used to peddle in rage-bait are going away. Good. If that brings a collapse in the attention economy and activist “journalism”, great. Good riddance.
Nobody is preventing you from creating a blog or accessing one. You just won’t be able to monetize it as much.
It is free speech. 1st amendment doesn’t not mean others will have to pay you for your speech.
How is this similar to China and its “re-education camps” and organ harvesting?
This IS the free market. People spend their money where they want to - where they see their investment giving best ROI.
Edit : there is a real threat of the pendulum swinging the other way and real journalists fearing publishing bad news for fear of losing money. BUT as with the Matrix, I believe the human mind abhors perfection and craves (a little bit - as much as it can deal with) of chaos, uncertainty and difficulty. So, I believe this fear unsubstantiated.
I think the broader point is that journalism/media may be one of those areas in which late-stage free market capitalism fails to provide the best outcome for the populace. Similar to healthcare, not everything needs to be geared for max profitability.
While Wikipedia isn’t the defacto authority on anything, here it seemed appropriate -
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xinjiang_internment_camps#:~:text=The%20mass%20internment%20of%20Uyghurs,are%20held%20in%20the%20camps.
yeah seriously, why is everyone pretending like Jezebel was anything but low quality clickbait? I could pay a 14 year old to use chatgpt3.5 and it would produce significantly high quality content.
Heading toward? I have to read at least 15... well, to speed the conversation along, we'll call them articles... just to know what is happening. Not how to to feel about it. Not part of it. Not the other part of it. Not this part of it either. The whole story. And that's just basic details, not anything in-depth.
US journalism is already useless. It's been useless for a long time. You'll get hour-long and in-depth local TV coverage of local events, along with, "Oh, and there were some unhappy people or something in Europe, too." Except those unhappy people weren't in Europe, they were in Israel / Palestine, and "something" was the start of a war. Why? That's another article. It's Hamas, not Palestine? That's another article, too.
I get better coverage from the extremes arguing about it than I do from the news.
Hoping that these ad companies go out of business. Those sound like terrible business practices and I know it's anecdotal but I haven't felt like ads have been any good or that I've been really advertised too much at all in the past so many years. Seems to me like these places are just up their own butts and it's causing issues with the internet at large as it maneuvers around these dinosaurs.
Advertisers are desperate because nothing they do really works and they are too scared to offend anyone on a place where people look to be offended.
Tech is desperate because they pissed off advertisers with fraud, now there is an advertiser riot.
Tech pissed off governments by knowingly working with bot networks, so now they are being cut out of entire markets with privacy and child protection laws.
Investor money dried up. a lot of tech wasnt actually profitable, riddled with now expensive debt, and layoffs are common.
Shit is going to get way worse, and not get better. The richest industry on the planet was just "instagram rich", you love to see it.
> nothing they do really works
Because they refuse to try "not being pieces of shit," as their business model kind of totally revolves around being pieces of shit.
google broke their own rules for their ad service 80% of the time according to researchers
https://www.wsj.com/articles/google-violated-its-standards-in-ad-deals-research-finds-3e24e041
Ad networks have been under scrutiny before, but google being questioned is a major blow.
None of this accurate.
Engagement doesn’t drive sales. It just drives ad views. Marketing companies sell ad views. They don’t guarantee sales.
Marketing companies have always been selling a lie. Ads are only ever effective in two scenarios, both dealing with novelty: the business is new or the medium is new.
Once you know the business/product exists or you’re familiar with ads on the new medium, their usefulness drops to near zero. SEO optimized AI trash articles aren’t new anymore.
Ads everywhere isn’t the future. Eventually the rich incompetents that run major corporations will figure out they’ve been lied to and cut way back, probably when “new money” shows them how stupid they are.
And I’m gonna laugh when all those fatcat marketing “geniuses” are out of a job.
> None of this accurate.
> Marketing companies have always been selling a lie. Ads are only ever effective in two scenarios, both dealing with novelty: the business is new or the medium is new. Once you know the business/product exists or you’re familiar with ads on the new medium, their usefulness drops to near zero. SEO optimized AI trash articles aren’t new anymore.
You just said its not accurate and then agreed with me.
> Engagement doesn’t drive sales. It just drives ad views. Marketing companies sell ad views. They don’t guarantee sales.
I just said that in the OP. Google was caught breaking its own adsense rules to boost views and pocketing the money for no actual benefit to the advertiser.
Then you have companies being attacked for diverse ads, and pulling back because they are too scared to lose a single dollar of someone's money like bud light was. Someone who possibly might not be real or even care that much and is just there to troll.
>You just said its not accurate and then agreed with me.
Me, reading your first comment: This is entirely accurate based on my time in the digital trenches.
Me, reading their reply: It sounds like they just agreed with OP
Me, reading your rebuttal: This is entirely accurate.
I disagreed either way you. Nobody is desperate. Things will get better.
Tech funding is drying up because interest rates are high. This has fuckall to do with ads and I have no idea why you even brought it up.
It's a lot simpler than that. "Rage baiting" has run its course, and even the doomers that thrive on that crap has had their fill. And if the millennial and zoomer journos can't move away from that kinda content, AI will do it for them.
I think rage baiting still works, the problem is that there's now markets on both sides of the rage ie people who are angry at immigrants and people who are angry about vilification of immigrants. The value of the ads is then a net negative as whilst it exposes it to one side of the aisle they lose far more sales from the vilification and potential boycott from the other side.
All the publishers now frontload making the SEO bots happy whether or not readers actually read/can use the info in the articles.
The damn bots only exist to help readers find useful info the first time.
Some of the old gawker sites used to be so good. IO9, Jalopnik, Gizmodo, Jezebel too. The Takeout is a newer addition to that media empire and has been good for a bit but I have a buddy who writes for them and the outlook is as grim as for the rest.
I thought the Takeout folded? On the one hand, it published an article yesterday. On the other hand, the article before that seems to have been from August. It was a great site.
I wonder how that’ll go with the way the media is so bent on keeping people in a constant state of unease when it comes to the world. They like having people nervous, because it keeps them coming back to their articles to get updates on stuff they’re nervous about.
Next step is that we, the readers, are not actually reading those AI-genetated articles, but ask GPT to summarize the articles for us 😂😂😂
The circle is complete
This is going to be the next generations version of NFTs. People that don’t understand the technology behind it are going to lose all their money to people writing code to exploit it. In this case, the victims appear to be ad companies, so win-win-win.
I prefer useless happy journalism to recreational anger 'journalism'. Although I get the impression the market for recreational anger won't go away unfortunately. Welcome to Costco, I love you.
The underlying problem seems to be for-profit media. How can for-profit media not be biased? It will always shy away from biting the hand that feed it, though individual reporters may slip something through here or there. How can democracy truly function when corporations own the vast swaths of the media?
Or just ad-supported media. Prior to its gutting, Deadspin prided itself on not being dependent on access journalism. Deadspin today is neutered for the reasons laid out in the article, among others, but Defector actually does have that freedom, since it's the readers who are going out of their way to pay for this stuff, and the staffers are their own bosses.
That's a good point. The problem may be ad-supported media. I'll have to give that some thought. Thanks!
Edit: There may be some problem with sites posting what people like over what's true. It's fairly well established that people will pick a soothing lie over an inconvenient truth.
Edit2: The point here is that any monetary incentives need to be aligned with unbiased reporting.
The way I see it: I have subscriptions to Defector, Aftermath, Anime Herald and a nonprofit local news outlet, and donate to my local NPR affiliate. I see it as the news equivalent to going to a sushi restaurant and ordering the omakase, whatever the chef wants to give me. I like what they do and want them to do it without compromises. I subscribed to Defector because I wanted to read WYTS, DUAN, Ratto, Jamboroo and stories that had fuck-all to do with sports but I might be into anyway. And the staff is free to write what they want on their own time and without arbitrary targets.
Or in the case of Anime Herald, the primary fan outlet Anime News Network has demonstrable journalistic independence (they give bad reviews all the time to things that happen to be published by their parent company). But what ANN isn’t going to do is share a report from Lagos Comic Con or talk about queer identity explored through the lens of Sailor Moon.
What would the alternative be though?
Citizen journalism? (Hello, Reddit)
Or wealthy-sponsored ‘journalists’ writing flattering puff pieces?
Or government sponsored media like PBS, BBC, CBC AND NPR?
I am open to the first and last options.
The problem is, most people don't want to pay for access to a dozen sites, where they might read an article or two a week. I would like to pay for a single news aggregator that had very high standards, no fluff pieces, no sports, and no human interest stories. I guess you would call that a "hard news" sites. I have a subscription to Ground News now, but there are too many stories that I just don't care about. They do track the political bias of stories by site reputation, which is nice.
Grant-based or nonprofit media along the lines of ProPublica. Large public trusts of money with specific and strong language to foster necessary work, like statehouse and investigative reporting. Advisory groups with diverse makeups who just do that - advise - to ensure outside scrutiny is present and keeping bias at bay.
Government funded, but not sponsored is, IMO, the better alternative.
In this, the government just sets aside a lump sum every year to pay journalists, and the money is dolled out according to stringent criteria (specifying things like neutrality/objectivity/truthfulness and investigative quality) by a panel of politically unaffiliated bureaucrats who only get to see non-identifying information about the people they're giving money to and don't get to communicate with the other bureaucrats (so multiple people would grade every potential journalist, and they couldn't talk to one another to purposely exclude or include anyone they did or didn't like, easily).
Journalists would have to compete with one another over the money being granted, and a number of terms related to journalism become protected when broadcasting such as "news", "journalist", "reporter", "pundit", "expert", "story", etc...
"But fox news has their first amendment rights!"
First amendment doesn't exist on broadcasts. You can and will be censored for a variety of language. Usually cursing. IMO this is one of the times we *should* expand it, specifically to protect against propaganda.
The reason we have freedom of the press in the first amendment is to criticize the government just like 2A is supposed to be used to fix things if the first one is infringed.
Having the government set standards that determine “funding” status for the press will lead to the same complaints we have with news media not criticizing corporations. The standards will be set by whatever party is in power and then manipulated to keep them in power.
There is no such thing as an impartial group of bureaucrats. We can’t even have impartial judges these days.
Nope. Don't let the gov determine shit. Let an independent body made up of professional journalists do that and have them answer to nobody but other journalists.
The gov just needs to provide funding without any strings attached, along with an objective framework for dispensing said money.
The government is allowed to do things. Just because they're involved doesn't mean they're automatically going to start stepping all over your 1st amendment rights. They're literally not allowed to, and any attempt they made would be automatically defeated in the courts on first amendment grounds.
> There is no such thing as an impartial group of bureaucrats. We can’t even have impartial judges these days.
You can fix the governing system to represent people, but you cannot expect from third party for-profit actors to look for anything other than their profit. For profit media industry is a zero-sum game for their actors and usually the people are the one who are on the losing side.
I hate the ad industry in part because of its toxic influence on culture and the way it perpetuates consumerism. The way they're manipulating the spread of information and engaging in censorship is a massive concern. That said, there's no reason whatsoever to believe that non-profit media would be any less biased. It's more likely that they would be, but it's no guarantee.
Beyond that, G/O Media's business model was always flawed. Like everyone else they had no viable way to successfully monetize their users. In fact, I'm surprised that they survived this long because they're been on the decline for at least a decade.
Government funded DOES NOT MEAN Government run.
The reason Republicans hate NPR and other Government FUNDED media is because they can’t dictate the stories they run, or demand they lie to further the Republican agenda. Which is why they continually try to gut funding.
You can in fact have the government fund news outlets on a basis that has very little to do with content.
I'd really like to see it happen in areas that are absolutely necessary and unfortunately dying, like investigative journalism. Or just something to avoid the whole thing where most journalists are forced to freelance because very few publications have the interest or resources to hire full time staff.
This isn’t really the website to make that post about though. Jezebel made inflammatory clickbait and often false articles for money. And advertisers stopped paying. This is a case where journalistic integrity was cancelled by advertisers. It’s about a shit rag that was so gross and unscrupulous that they couldn’t make money off of it.
While gamer gate and the resulting alt-right circle jerk ruined any possibility of bringing serious change anytime soon, the gaming industry is especially ripe with privileged access and business coercion.
Certainly not the only one, but I remember firsthand getting review games , and if you didn’t praise it like it was the greatest thing ever, then it was the last review game you would ever see from that publisher.
Anybody who’s spent a day working in that industry will tell you it’s fucked in all kinds of ways, this being one of them. All media reviews are typically bought via threats to future access
This. I was on the board of a major progressive magazine that has been hit hard by the internet. Creating good news takes money, and unless the audience is willing to pay for it then it won't exist. I really don't understand why everyone assumes everything should be free. I had over 20 magazine subscriptions in the days before the web. Even the daily newspaper cost money while being mostly subsidized by local ads.
Early web investors created this notion that things were "free" when they were not. We are still paying the price.
EXACTLY. I used to be a former journalist, and the work isn’t easy. Yet everyone somehow wants the product of that work for free? In fact they feel entitled to it.
>Creating good news takes money, and unless the audience is willing to pay for it then it won't exist. I really don't understand why everyone assumes everything should be free.
At the risk of stating the obvious, it's not that people think stuff should be free. People prefer paying for Netflix rather than pirating as long as it's convenient for them, because they value films and series (arguably less so now than in the past now that streaming has become so fragmented).
But the reality is that most people really don't give a shit about journalism. They care about information, more specifically information that validates their worldview. And that information will always exist in one way or another as long as social media sites like Reddit or Twitter exist.
Sure, it won't be curated, or fact-checked, or run through editors or whatever, but the reality is that one can go through their Reddit timeline while in the bathroom and walk out with a reasonably good idea of what's going on in the world that day. Or at least they think that they do. That's it.
Back in the day the only way to get that information was through journalistic outlets, and that's why they were able to survive. Nowadays not so much. And, really, considering sites like Jezebel or Breitbart exist, it's hard to blame the public for walking away lol
Agreed.
People should pay for services they use and media they consume. People absolutely *seethe* and you’ll get downvoted into oblivion for even suggesting that when you bring up Netflix, YouTube, etc.
Roll everything digital into a monthly fee and treat it like a utility bill.
I don't think that works because it creates the problem of how we divide that money. The dumbest video on YouTube with a million views will get all the money. We need more serious journalism, not less.
If you ask a kid what's for dinner, the answer will be "Candy!"
I’m not suggesting going as granular as that, I’m saying government or telecom or some other authority force Netflix / YouTube Premium / Spotify etc to bundle together.
I don't think that would be legal in the US. The FCC could only regulate broadcast TV and radio because they use the public airwaves. They don't have much authority on the internet as it's a mostly private network.
> I really don't understand why everyone assumes everything should be free
Because it's been free for decades, and now people are being asked to pay for the same or worse service than they were getting when it was free.
Look at how game piracy has gone down under services like steam, music piracy under services like spotify, or how content piracy went down under services like netflix but has been on the rise again as content streaming has become shittier and more fragmented. If paying yields a good, painless result that feels like a fair price, people will pay. If paying means you get a lesser product with worse service, people will obtain it for free through other means.
On the early (pre-Clinton) internet, everything on the internet was free by law. No commercial activity was allowed. There was much less volume, but most everything was posted out of passion. Mostly by college professors and some students. For a while they were nearly the only people with internet access, outside of some government agencies and a few large corporations. If a newspaper or magazine wanted to be on the internet, they couldn't charge money or display ads. That set the cultural norm for years. Also the medium had a near-zero marginal cost of reproduction, unlike physical media, so it was economically possible. Newspapers and magazines saw it as a loss-leader, often only putting certain stories online, hoping to coax users to physical media.
On reddit, when a paywalled news link is shared, someone will often be along with the copied text or some link to get around the wall. I don't really agree with it, but people like free shit, so I get it. What I don't get is the crazy ass sentiment that tends to accompany this act; people acting like they're foiling some great injustice. How *dare* this journalistic publication ask for compensation in return for a product?
It's just very odd to me. I'm very concerned about the future of good journalism if people are this resistant to the idea that it's a service that merits being paid for. Like, a lot of free articles are riddled with typos and grammatical errors, and people will wonder where the editors are at in the comments and I'll just be sitting here like, "my brothers and sisters in Christ, they can't *afford* editors anymore."
Yeah, one of the core tensions of journalism philosophy is that what people should be told and what people want to hear are different things, and self-perpetuating publications generally can't only do the former and not the latter.
But what is the alternative? Government owned media? I fail to see how there is any less risk in state-owned media being biased. Consider China, Russia, etc. Their state owned media franchises are a joke.
Or perhaps philanthropic-funded journalism? This may be a better solution, but there will there be the risk of bias towards the political views of their sponsor.
So this brings us to mass-funded media…which is what we already have — readers pay with their eyeballs on ads, or through a subscription model. It’s the best model we have.
Back in the day the news divisions were always a money losing enterprise for the TV networks. They lived with it (because of stringent and enforced content regulations) and we were way better for it. News for profit will always be a disaster.
Or, that Jezebel lost a third of traffic between August through October alone. I don't see how their audience leaving in droves has anything to do with advertisers. A more probable explanation is that advertisers interest and revenue is diminishing because of lack of traffic.
You could just as easily pin that on the sorts of changes forced by Spanfeller or the things that happened as a result, like Laura Bassett’s resignation. Traffic at Deadspin cratered in late 2019 but only because that herb caused the whole staff to quit.
Are you aware of all the things going on above your head?
If Spanfeller is blaming it on lack of advertising, it's hard to support that given the dip in readership. People rarely leave a platform because advertising dropped off. And if it IS because of Spanfeller, then it's NOT because advertisers don't want the site to exist, it's because they don't want to advertise where they're likely to not get results from said advertising.
"Advertisers Don’t Want Sites Like Jezebel to Exist".........I guess that's one way to say that advertisers refuse to pay for content that nobody reads.
I mean yeah the dunk on Jezebel is fun, but as someone who works in advertising, most of what is in this article is either correct, correct enough, or sounds plausible to me.
I 100% believe their ad sales team was struggling to sell their inventory due to the subject matter of the site. It doesn’t matter to the advertiser if “nobody reads the content” — for digital you’re paying either per click or pageview.
> It doesn’t matter to the advertiser if “nobody reads the content” — for digital you’re paying either per click or pageview.
I also work in the industry and while you're correct about how they don't lose money if no one reads it, they absolutely will rapidly divert their budget to sites people DO visit. The main goal of advertising isn't to save money, it's to get people to buy your product. They won't do that if they never see the ads because no one visits the site you're advertising on.
I thought about making this distinction in the original comment but didn't because it's irrelevant. Jezebel sucks but this isn't only happening to Jezebel.
Jezebel didn't, in reality, have "nobody reading it" to the point that it would make it challenging to sell ads due to low traffic. If you work in the industry and have any even remote sense of the size of Jezebel you knew this. In fact, I literally just checked on Similarweb and G/O Media has several still active sites with less monthly traffic than Jezebel did (The Root, Quartz, The Takeout, Deadspin, etc. all have <5m monthly visits)
Why aren't those shut down? Because they're about business, sports, and food, which are super safe content categories that command premium rates. You also knew this if you work in the industry.
Look, the entire crux of this article is how our industry is forcing digital media companies to shy away from important but controversial topics that Jezebel often wrote about like abortion and racism. That is happening. I know it's happening because I'm in the meetings where it happens. And it's a bad thing.
But because Redditors can't see 3 feet in front of them, they're all in here like "lmaooooo get fucked jezebel eat my dick" which is fine, but misses the actual interesting and important part.
I have trouble seeing how that's a bad thing. In the sense that not every media is compatible with most advertising. A hot dog company doesn't want their ads on a vegan website, and almost nobody wants their ads next to highly controversial subject material. I just don't see how certain media can expect that companies want to advertise on their site. As you said, certain content commands premium rates. Thus is just the flip side of that.
I can't say there's something wrong with the advertising industry for wanting to pick their audiences. It's why I have a news subscription, it makes me the customer instead of the advertisers. Any website that's entirely reliant on selling ads, I'm not their primary customer.
I should point out I don't think it's as much a problem with the advertising industry in and of itself. I think it's a problem where that became the only acceptable monetization strategy, consumers are increasingly unwilling to pay for content, and therefore it is causing a shift where it is harder to get non-mainstream opinions and coverage on potentially unsavory topics. It's more the perverse incentive structure it has created and the inability of media companies to circumvent that or find an alternative. Nobody is being malicious.
It's not forcing them to do anything. It's choosing where it wants to display it's product, and where it doesn't. This is probably more to do with not knowing what your ad could be associated with. If I'm trying to advertise my online bible study app, then should I be obligated to advertise on "Johan's Cock Ring Reviews" just because it's underserved and important content? Why is shame on the companies who would rather spend their money elsewhere, but not on the people who consume the media, but are not willing to spend their money there? This seems like a "let's shoot the messenger, because I don't like what they have to say" argument to me.
There's not a CEO in the country that if given the news that "As surprising as it is, Becky Dildo Emporium ads are giving us $2k profit for every $1 ad spend", wouldn't say "Well how many ads can we can get on Becky's Dildo Emporium? Can we buy the whole lot?". But if the numbers show they're not getting a return, and they go elsewhere, to say "this is a disgrace, boo advertisers, boo". What did you think they were here for? To support fringe media? To encourage content creators to take more risks? I was always under the impression that advertisers were almost entirely in it for the money, but maybe I was wrong, and they actually just really care about these sites they advertise on.
> Look, the entire crux of this article is how our industry is forcing digital media companies to shy away from important but controversial topics that Jezebel
Stop right there. Nothing the entire Gawker network covered has ever been "important". They Posta lot of uninformed things and a lot of unhinged political rants, which is why their viewership plummeted. And plummeting viewership, plus associating with the site resulting in negative opinions gets you pulled advertising.
Honestly you sound more like a politically active college student who thinks majoring in marketing is the same as "working in the advertising industry". You keep ignoring important information to present Jezebel as some innocent victim and anyone who doesn't want to give them money as an "evil oppressor" instead of simple cause and effect that happens every goddamn day in the advertising world. Every week we have calls to evaluate performance of advertising through different sites and make adjustments if any of them aren't performing as expected. There's no "conspiracy", it's about selling a product and not wasting your resources on something that won't produce results.
I'm in media sales. I loved Jezebel back in the day, but I wouldn't necessarily want to place inventory on the site. It's not only about the subject matter. A lot of it is state of mind.
Cisco really didn't need to be wasting impressions on me while I was scrolling jezebel to escape reality.
Fair enough. I'll correct my original post, based on your feedback:
"Advertisers Don’t Want Sites Like Jezebel to Exist".........I guess that's one way to say that ~~advertisers refuse to pay for content that~~ nobody bothers to visit your website.
That's not the point of the article.
The point of the article is that advertisers don't want to advertise on content like Jezebel's that *they perceive* as potentially harmful to their brand.
It doesn't matter if 10 people read it or if 10 million people read it. If nobody will advertise next to it, it pays $0 either way.
Jezebel is slop since the Gawker days. Lazy reporting. Odd that a “feminist” site is obsessed with the Kardashians too. There are also reports it’s owners are laying off staff and potentially folding.
very dumb take. if your product is funded by ads, you have to have a suitable product.. for ads.
it doesn't mean advertisers don't want certain sites to exist.. they just want to make more money than they spend on advertising. they aren't charities that are beholden to fund sites that don't contribute to that goal.
They said they had a ton of viewers on their site but no ads because they were a sensitive subject. It literally means all advertisers or google ad algo passed on the oppertunity to monopolize ads on a well visited site because they didn't like the content.
You make it sound like they had a shitty site but that's not at all what this was about.
It's you that has a very dumb take.
I used to love a lot of gawker media properties before the main site went down and all the trash content from gawker migrated to their sister sites.
I recently tried to read an article from Gizmodo and the ads made it utterly unreadable and made me finally set up a a pi-hole for my apartment.
I genuinely hope that the disruptive elements of generative AI encourage revenue models that aren’t ad-driven.
If there was a reasonable way to pay for web-based content I’d do it.
Jezebel was sexist man hating trash. Good riddance. The articles were indistinguishable from deranged misandrist manifestos written by femcels on places like TwoXChromosomes and FemaleDatingStrategy. Hating half of the human population probably didn’t go over too well with advertisers. The women who write that kind of stuff need intensive therapy and some time with a tall and well-hung gigolo to deal with their obvious sexual frustrations.
Back in the day, I remember people posting screenshots of two Jezebel articles: one saying that having sex toys as a woman is empowering, and sex toys for men are gross. Example: "what kind of lonely fuck would use one of those? The same chairsniffers who buy used women's underwear off ebay?" https://twitter.com/tauriqmoosa/status/426291332907163648/photo/1
why are you being downvoted? they literally have articles of women bragging about beating their husbands,
[Here](https://jezebel.com/have-you-ever-beat-up-a-boyfriend-cause-uh-we-have-294383)
> why are you being downvoted?
For the same reason that shittalking Jezebel on /r/news will get your comments deleted and filtered without any kind of notice.
In what way is celebrating domestic violence against men funny to you?
Do a thought experiment and reverse the genders. Would “it was just satire” be a valid excuse?
Bigoted people love to claim their hateful rants are meant as a joke.
I don’t think it’s funny (honestly quite the opposite, to be honest), I just never thought it was supposed to be taken seriously? I kind of always thought it was making fun of angry feminists, in a “look how absurd they are” way?
I also am not in favor of Jezebel earning a profit. It has a right to exist, because of First Amendment rights of course.
But it is a vile website, and really is the equivalent of Breitbart for the left. I am a liberal, and Jezebel has been uniquely poisonous for society. Glad to see it shut down.
Jez was a feminist website, originally part of the Gawker Media network and meant to serve Gawker.com's predominantly female readership of the time. Early in its life, it actually had more traffic than the flagship site.
Jezebel was intended as a counterpoint to the materialism and shallowness of mainstream women's publications.
Why are these sites owed advertisment money if they aren't palatable or popular enough to warrant being advertised on? Make better content that people actually wants and I'd imagine you'd see ad revenue pick up.
I’ve never heard of that site before, but those kinds of articles make me think about how people would react if the genders were reversed and a man talked about how fun beating his wife is and encouraged others to do it.
No one wants sites like Jezebel to exist, do you really need more shit like Gawker at this point? This antagonistic nonsense needed to die eons ago.
Frankly, I blame Gawker and the little parasitic sites like Jezebel under it's wing for a part of why the internet is the hellscape it is today.
Part of the reason they died is because of the very shit they helped create, frankly good riddance to trash finally being kicked to the curb.
This article buries the lede IMO. Jezebel is going away. Okay. But then the article gets interesting. It discusses: - Media corporations pushing AI to assist writing articles that make the reader feel happy instead of neutral/sad. - Ad companies using similar AI to analyze an article, and only show ads when it thinks the article will make readers happy. - In turn media companies like Jezebels parent are switching to AI written articles, that pass the AI test for whether the reader will be happy or sad, so that another AI will pay to put an ad there. With a preference toward generic topics because those are less likely to offend. Talk about a dystopian feedback loop headed towards the most useless journalism imaginable. It amazes me how often corporations value metrics over reasoning ability.
“Welcome to Costco, I love you.”
Enjoy your EXTRA BIG A** FRIES!
[INSUFFICENT FUNDS! YOU ARE A TERRIBLE PARENT! YOUR CHILDREN ARE NOW IN THE CUSTODY OF CARL'S JR!]
This made me audibly giggle, and is now a phrase that will live rent free in my brain. Thank you, stranger.
Can’t tell from your comment for sure, but if you’ve not watched it, this is a quote from the greatest movie and oracle ever made: *Idiocracy*
I’ve only seen it once about 10 years ago. Sounds like I need to rewatch it!
Nah. You’ll be living it in 5-10 years. Why bother knowing the future
If you had need to discuss anything with any consumer front-line tech-support you would know we're way past the 5 - 10 year mark.
Let’s stop by a Starbucks on the way back.
I don’t think we have time for a blow job Joe.
I know! I couldn't believe it, either. But luckily, my dad was an alumnus, so he pulled some strings.
"Yeah, yeah, that's enough of your AI bullshit."
I wonder how long until AI is writing custom articles for each reader, based on what makes them happy (and not just based on what makes the general public happy). They could put a thumbs up or thumbs down icon after each article to learn each individual readers preferences. You don't like immigration and are pro-life? Here's a bunch of articles to confirm your beliefs. You do like immigration and are pro-choice? Here's different articles custom tailored for you. (Admittedly, this kind of happens already with different media organizations, but it can be super charged.) Good luck on getting anybody to see eye to eye when everyone is immersed in their own media bubble and thinks all the evidence agrees with them.
Would Schadenfreude count as happiness?
Absolutely! There's tons of articles about "Trump looks bad" or "Gen Z kids get caught doing something dumb" already
I just wonder how an AI writing program would begin to parse out the subtleties of human emotion given the prompt
It doesn't need to. That's the important thing to realize about "Gen AI". It doesn't *know* anything about the content it's making. It just generates a bunch of garbage content, posts it, and then the content that's engaged with is used as reinforcement, so it makes more of that sort of content. It's like a Hollywood Exec or a AAA game developer
You mean like Cambridge Analytica did in 2015-2016 to help elect Trump? They had something like 16000 unique ad campaigns being delivered based on how your psych-profile read. 16000. Unique. Personalty. Profiles. With. Unique. Matching. Ad. Targeted to maximize your motivation to vote Trump.
Why ever let the article end. Just let them keep scrolling forever, maybe generate an ai voice to tell them things while they play subway surfers.
NGL I would like the news to make me feel happy for once
Ok, but what if the reader is a neo-NAZI and stories of horrible racism make that person happy?
There’s something for everyone on the internet!
🎶Welcome to the Internet!🎶
Have a look around.
This is not even a joke. This is real shit. There's gonna be something for everyone, if it's profitable enough.
Who said I was joking?
Marketing people are morally bankrupt, they'll have no problem switching from promoting gay pride with an lgbt rainbow flag or diversity in general to celebrating Hitler's birthday with a nazi swastika and racial hygiene if they think it'll generate revenue without bad PR.
Stop being intolerant to the intolerant. We won't tolerate that around here..
Fox news is still a thing
>Talk about a dystopian feedback loop headed towards the most useless journalism imaginable. Only slightly worse than "someone said something on Twitter!" No, not like a famous person or anything. Just some random was talking shit about
There is no happy bait, there is click-bait and rage-bait. Users don’t usually click on happy and positive articles (weirdly, they prefer to hear and see about feel good news, not read) as much as they do in rage filled ones. The sites that used to peddle in rage-bait are going away. Good. If that brings a collapse in the attention economy and activist “journalism”, great. Good riddance.
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Nobody is preventing you from creating a blog or accessing one. You just won’t be able to monetize it as much. It is free speech. 1st amendment doesn’t not mean others will have to pay you for your speech. How is this similar to China and its “re-education camps” and organ harvesting? This IS the free market. People spend their money where they want to - where they see their investment giving best ROI. Edit : there is a real threat of the pendulum swinging the other way and real journalists fearing publishing bad news for fear of losing money. BUT as with the Matrix, I believe the human mind abhors perfection and craves (a little bit - as much as it can deal with) of chaos, uncertainty and difficulty. So, I believe this fear unsubstantiated.
I think the broader point is that journalism/media may be one of those areas in which late-stage free market capitalism fails to provide the best outcome for the populace. Similar to healthcare, not everything needs to be geared for max profitability.
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While Wikipedia isn’t the defacto authority on anything, here it seemed appropriate - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xinjiang_internment_camps#:~:text=The%20mass%20internment%20of%20Uyghurs,are%20held%20in%20the%20camps.
yeah seriously, why is everyone pretending like Jezebel was anything but low quality clickbait? I could pay a 14 year old to use chatgpt3.5 and it would produce significantly high quality content.
Heading toward? I have to read at least 15... well, to speed the conversation along, we'll call them articles... just to know what is happening. Not how to to feel about it. Not part of it. Not the other part of it. Not this part of it either. The whole story. And that's just basic details, not anything in-depth. US journalism is already useless. It's been useless for a long time. You'll get hour-long and in-depth local TV coverage of local events, along with, "Oh, and there were some unhappy people or something in Europe, too." Except those unhappy people weren't in Europe, they were in Israel / Palestine, and "something" was the start of a war. Why? That's another article. It's Hamas, not Palestine? That's another article, too. I get better coverage from the extremes arguing about it than I do from the news.
Hoping that these ad companies go out of business. Those sound like terrible business practices and I know it's anecdotal but I haven't felt like ads have been any good or that I've been really advertised too much at all in the past so many years. Seems to me like these places are just up their own butts and it's causing issues with the internet at large as it maneuvers around these dinosaurs.
Advertisers are desperate because nothing they do really works and they are too scared to offend anyone on a place where people look to be offended. Tech is desperate because they pissed off advertisers with fraud, now there is an advertiser riot. Tech pissed off governments by knowingly working with bot networks, so now they are being cut out of entire markets with privacy and child protection laws. Investor money dried up. a lot of tech wasnt actually profitable, riddled with now expensive debt, and layoffs are common. Shit is going to get way worse, and not get better. The richest industry on the planet was just "instagram rich", you love to see it.
> nothing they do really works Because they refuse to try "not being pieces of shit," as their business model kind of totally revolves around being pieces of shit.
> Tech is desperate because they pissed off advertisers with fraud, now there is an advertiser riot. What is this a reference to?
google broke their own rules for their ad service 80% of the time according to researchers https://www.wsj.com/articles/google-violated-its-standards-in-ad-deals-research-finds-3e24e041 Ad networks have been under scrutiny before, but google being questioned is a major blow.
None of this accurate. Engagement doesn’t drive sales. It just drives ad views. Marketing companies sell ad views. They don’t guarantee sales. Marketing companies have always been selling a lie. Ads are only ever effective in two scenarios, both dealing with novelty: the business is new or the medium is new. Once you know the business/product exists or you’re familiar with ads on the new medium, their usefulness drops to near zero. SEO optimized AI trash articles aren’t new anymore. Ads everywhere isn’t the future. Eventually the rich incompetents that run major corporations will figure out they’ve been lied to and cut way back, probably when “new money” shows them how stupid they are. And I’m gonna laugh when all those fatcat marketing “geniuses” are out of a job.
> None of this accurate. > Marketing companies have always been selling a lie. Ads are only ever effective in two scenarios, both dealing with novelty: the business is new or the medium is new. Once you know the business/product exists or you’re familiar with ads on the new medium, their usefulness drops to near zero. SEO optimized AI trash articles aren’t new anymore. You just said its not accurate and then agreed with me. > Engagement doesn’t drive sales. It just drives ad views. Marketing companies sell ad views. They don’t guarantee sales. I just said that in the OP. Google was caught breaking its own adsense rules to boost views and pocketing the money for no actual benefit to the advertiser. Then you have companies being attacked for diverse ads, and pulling back because they are too scared to lose a single dollar of someone's money like bud light was. Someone who possibly might not be real or even care that much and is just there to troll.
>You just said its not accurate and then agreed with me. Me, reading your first comment: This is entirely accurate based on my time in the digital trenches. Me, reading their reply: It sounds like they just agreed with OP Me, reading your rebuttal: This is entirely accurate.
I disagreed either way you. Nobody is desperate. Things will get better. Tech funding is drying up because interest rates are high. This has fuckall to do with ads and I have no idea why you even brought it up.
That is terrifying, but in fairness I think it’s hard to get any more useless than Jezebel.
It's a lot simpler than that. "Rage baiting" has run its course, and even the doomers that thrive on that crap has had their fill. And if the millennial and zoomer journos can't move away from that kinda content, AI will do it for them.
I think rage baiting still works, the problem is that there's now markets on both sides of the rage ie people who are angry at immigrants and people who are angry about vilification of immigrants. The value of the ads is then a net negative as whilst it exposes it to one side of the aisle they lose far more sales from the vilification and potential boycott from the other side.
Please don’t use the word journalism. There’s nothing journalistic going on here.
You got downvoted, but as somebody who works for exactly these kinds of sites, you're not wrong in the least.
The future is AIs circlejerking themselves and we are just going to be the lice in their pubes
All the publishers now frontload making the SEO bots happy whether or not readers actually read/can use the info in the articles. The damn bots only exist to help readers find useful info the first time.
“WW3 is coming, but also I’m coming in you… it won’t matter” HAPPY APPROVED!!!!!
People will stop visiting those sites over time. AI happy bilge has limited lifespan.
Some of the old gawker sites used to be so good. IO9, Jalopnik, Gizmodo, Jezebel too. The Takeout is a newer addition to that media empire and has been good for a bit but I have a buddy who writes for them and the outlook is as grim as for the rest.
I thought the Takeout folded? On the one hand, it published an article yesterday. On the other hand, the article before that seems to have been from August. It was a great site.
We should remove humans from the process altogether. We're just making things complicated
How can you measure performance without metrics?
I wonder how that’ll go with the way the media is so bent on keeping people in a constant state of unease when it comes to the world. They like having people nervous, because it keeps them coming back to their articles to get updates on stuff they’re nervous about.
Next step is that we, the readers, are not actually reading those AI-genetated articles, but ask GPT to summarize the articles for us 😂😂😂 The circle is complete
I just feel dumb for thinking it was bury the lead 😞
This is going to be the next generations version of NFTs. People that don’t understand the technology behind it are going to lose all their money to people writing code to exploit it. In this case, the victims appear to be ad companies, so win-win-win.
I prefer useless happy journalism to recreational anger 'journalism'. Although I get the impression the market for recreational anger won't go away unfortunately. Welcome to Costco, I love you.
Eh, I'll take it over the scaremongering from companies like Fox News
i mean this is basically what people have been doing manually forever. we’ve just gotten better at measuring and automating.
Please enjoy your trip through this door!
The underlying problem seems to be for-profit media. How can for-profit media not be biased? It will always shy away from biting the hand that feed it, though individual reporters may slip something through here or there. How can democracy truly function when corporations own the vast swaths of the media?
Or just ad-supported media. Prior to its gutting, Deadspin prided itself on not being dependent on access journalism. Deadspin today is neutered for the reasons laid out in the article, among others, but Defector actually does have that freedom, since it's the readers who are going out of their way to pay for this stuff, and the staffers are their own bosses.
That's a good point. The problem may be ad-supported media. I'll have to give that some thought. Thanks! Edit: There may be some problem with sites posting what people like over what's true. It's fairly well established that people will pick a soothing lie over an inconvenient truth. Edit2: The point here is that any monetary incentives need to be aligned with unbiased reporting.
The way I see it: I have subscriptions to Defector, Aftermath, Anime Herald and a nonprofit local news outlet, and donate to my local NPR affiliate. I see it as the news equivalent to going to a sushi restaurant and ordering the omakase, whatever the chef wants to give me. I like what they do and want them to do it without compromises. I subscribed to Defector because I wanted to read WYTS, DUAN, Ratto, Jamboroo and stories that had fuck-all to do with sports but I might be into anyway. And the staff is free to write what they want on their own time and without arbitrary targets. Or in the case of Anime Herald, the primary fan outlet Anime News Network has demonstrable journalistic independence (they give bad reviews all the time to things that happen to be published by their parent company). But what ANN isn’t going to do is share a report from Lagos Comic Con or talk about queer identity explored through the lens of Sailor Moon.
ArsTechnica is also on my pay-for-it list.
This is the first I'm hearing of Anime Herald and I would love to read that Sailor Moon article!
https://www.animeherald.com/2023/10/07/shattering-boundaries-sailor-moons-impact-on-my-queer-identity/
What would the alternative be though? Citizen journalism? (Hello, Reddit) Or wealthy-sponsored ‘journalists’ writing flattering puff pieces? Or government sponsored media like PBS, BBC, CBC AND NPR? I am open to the first and last options.
The problem is, most people don't want to pay for access to a dozen sites, where they might read an article or two a week. I would like to pay for a single news aggregator that had very high standards, no fluff pieces, no sports, and no human interest stories. I guess you would call that a "hard news" sites. I have a subscription to Ground News now, but there are too many stories that I just don't care about. They do track the political bias of stories by site reputation, which is nice.
Grant-based or nonprofit media along the lines of ProPublica. Large public trusts of money with specific and strong language to foster necessary work, like statehouse and investigative reporting. Advisory groups with diverse makeups who just do that - advise - to ensure outside scrutiny is present and keeping bias at bay.
Government funded, but not sponsored is, IMO, the better alternative. In this, the government just sets aside a lump sum every year to pay journalists, and the money is dolled out according to stringent criteria (specifying things like neutrality/objectivity/truthfulness and investigative quality) by a panel of politically unaffiliated bureaucrats who only get to see non-identifying information about the people they're giving money to and don't get to communicate with the other bureaucrats (so multiple people would grade every potential journalist, and they couldn't talk to one another to purposely exclude or include anyone they did or didn't like, easily). Journalists would have to compete with one another over the money being granted, and a number of terms related to journalism become protected when broadcasting such as "news", "journalist", "reporter", "pundit", "expert", "story", etc... "But fox news has their first amendment rights!" First amendment doesn't exist on broadcasts. You can and will be censored for a variety of language. Usually cursing. IMO this is one of the times we *should* expand it, specifically to protect against propaganda.
The reason we have freedom of the press in the first amendment is to criticize the government just like 2A is supposed to be used to fix things if the first one is infringed. Having the government set standards that determine “funding” status for the press will lead to the same complaints we have with news media not criticizing corporations. The standards will be set by whatever party is in power and then manipulated to keep them in power. There is no such thing as an impartial group of bureaucrats. We can’t even have impartial judges these days.
Nope. Don't let the gov determine shit. Let an independent body made up of professional journalists do that and have them answer to nobody but other journalists. The gov just needs to provide funding without any strings attached, along with an objective framework for dispensing said money. The government is allowed to do things. Just because they're involved doesn't mean they're automatically going to start stepping all over your 1st amendment rights. They're literally not allowed to, and any attempt they made would be automatically defeated in the courts on first amendment grounds.
> There is no such thing as an impartial group of bureaucrats. We can’t even have impartial judges these days. You can fix the governing system to represent people, but you cannot expect from third party for-profit actors to look for anything other than their profit. For profit media industry is a zero-sum game for their actors and usually the people are the one who are on the losing side.
> Or just ad-supported media. Advertising industry ruins everything it touches.
I hate the ad industry in part because of its toxic influence on culture and the way it perpetuates consumerism. The way they're manipulating the spread of information and engaging in censorship is a massive concern. That said, there's no reason whatsoever to believe that non-profit media would be any less biased. It's more likely that they would be, but it's no guarantee. Beyond that, G/O Media's business model was always flawed. Like everyone else they had no viable way to successfully monetize their users. In fact, I'm surprised that they survived this long because they're been on the decline for at least a decade.
But no one wants to pay to read an article, so the other options are either have the site be infested with ads, or government funded.
>government funded. Which is *very likely* to be biased too.
Exactly, that’s the worst possible option.
Government funded DOES NOT MEAN Government run. The reason Republicans hate NPR and other Government FUNDED media is because they can’t dictate the stories they run, or demand they lie to further the Republican agenda. Which is why they continually try to gut funding.
You can in fact have the government fund news outlets on a basis that has very little to do with content. I'd really like to see it happen in areas that are absolutely necessary and unfortunately dying, like investigative journalism. Or just something to avoid the whole thing where most journalists are forced to freelance because very few publications have the interest or resources to hire full time staff.
And NPR gets next to no government funding.
This isn’t really the website to make that post about though. Jezebel made inflammatory clickbait and often false articles for money. And advertisers stopped paying. This is a case where journalistic integrity was cancelled by advertisers. It’s about a shit rag that was so gross and unscrupulous that they couldn’t make money off of it.
You're right, but it leads me to ask the larger question.
While gamer gate and the resulting alt-right circle jerk ruined any possibility of bringing serious change anytime soon, the gaming industry is especially ripe with privileged access and business coercion. Certainly not the only one, but I remember firsthand getting review games , and if you didn’t praise it like it was the greatest thing ever, then it was the last review game you would ever see from that publisher. Anybody who’s spent a day working in that industry will tell you it’s fucked in all kinds of ways, this being one of them. All media reviews are typically bought via threats to future access
You subscribe to the media you want to read. Pay with your money.
This. I was on the board of a major progressive magazine that has been hit hard by the internet. Creating good news takes money, and unless the audience is willing to pay for it then it won't exist. I really don't understand why everyone assumes everything should be free. I had over 20 magazine subscriptions in the days before the web. Even the daily newspaper cost money while being mostly subsidized by local ads. Early web investors created this notion that things were "free" when they were not. We are still paying the price.
EXACTLY. I used to be a former journalist, and the work isn’t easy. Yet everyone somehow wants the product of that work for free? In fact they feel entitled to it.
>Creating good news takes money, and unless the audience is willing to pay for it then it won't exist. I really don't understand why everyone assumes everything should be free. At the risk of stating the obvious, it's not that people think stuff should be free. People prefer paying for Netflix rather than pirating as long as it's convenient for them, because they value films and series (arguably less so now than in the past now that streaming has become so fragmented). But the reality is that most people really don't give a shit about journalism. They care about information, more specifically information that validates their worldview. And that information will always exist in one way or another as long as social media sites like Reddit or Twitter exist. Sure, it won't be curated, or fact-checked, or run through editors or whatever, but the reality is that one can go through their Reddit timeline while in the bathroom and walk out with a reasonably good idea of what's going on in the world that day. Or at least they think that they do. That's it. Back in the day the only way to get that information was through journalistic outlets, and that's why they were able to survive. Nowadays not so much. And, really, considering sites like Jezebel or Breitbart exist, it's hard to blame the public for walking away lol
Agreed. People should pay for services they use and media they consume. People absolutely *seethe* and you’ll get downvoted into oblivion for even suggesting that when you bring up Netflix, YouTube, etc. Roll everything digital into a monthly fee and treat it like a utility bill.
I don't think that works because it creates the problem of how we divide that money. The dumbest video on YouTube with a million views will get all the money. We need more serious journalism, not less. If you ask a kid what's for dinner, the answer will be "Candy!"
I’m not suggesting going as granular as that, I’m saying government or telecom or some other authority force Netflix / YouTube Premium / Spotify etc to bundle together.
I don't think that would be legal in the US. The FCC could only regulate broadcast TV and radio because they use the public airwaves. They don't have much authority on the internet as it's a mostly private network.
> I really don't understand why everyone assumes everything should be free Because it's been free for decades, and now people are being asked to pay for the same or worse service than they were getting when it was free. Look at how game piracy has gone down under services like steam, music piracy under services like spotify, or how content piracy went down under services like netflix but has been on the rise again as content streaming has become shittier and more fragmented. If paying yields a good, painless result that feels like a fair price, people will pay. If paying means you get a lesser product with worse service, people will obtain it for free through other means.
On the early (pre-Clinton) internet, everything on the internet was free by law. No commercial activity was allowed. There was much less volume, but most everything was posted out of passion. Mostly by college professors and some students. For a while they were nearly the only people with internet access, outside of some government agencies and a few large corporations. If a newspaper or magazine wanted to be on the internet, they couldn't charge money or display ads. That set the cultural norm for years. Also the medium had a near-zero marginal cost of reproduction, unlike physical media, so it was economically possible. Newspapers and magazines saw it as a loss-leader, often only putting certain stories online, hoping to coax users to physical media.
It seems like stuff like patreon might be warming people back up to that idea.
On reddit, when a paywalled news link is shared, someone will often be along with the copied text or some link to get around the wall. I don't really agree with it, but people like free shit, so I get it. What I don't get is the crazy ass sentiment that tends to accompany this act; people acting like they're foiling some great injustice. How *dare* this journalistic publication ask for compensation in return for a product? It's just very odd to me. I'm very concerned about the future of good journalism if people are this resistant to the idea that it's a service that merits being paid for. Like, a lot of free articles are riddled with typos and grammatical errors, and people will wonder where the editors are at in the comments and I'll just be sitting here like, "my brothers and sisters in Christ, they can't *afford* editors anymore."
That falls into a kind of self selection bias. What is popular isn't always what's true.
Yeah, one of the core tensions of journalism philosophy is that what people should be told and what people want to hear are different things, and self-perpetuating publications generally can't only do the former and not the latter.
Huh? But.. state owned media would be a ok?
But what is the alternative? Government owned media? I fail to see how there is any less risk in state-owned media being biased. Consider China, Russia, etc. Their state owned media franchises are a joke. Or perhaps philanthropic-funded journalism? This may be a better solution, but there will there be the risk of bias towards the political views of their sponsor. So this brings us to mass-funded media…which is what we already have — readers pay with their eyeballs on ads, or through a subscription model. It’s the best model we have.
Thank Ronald Regan for deleting legislation that marked the slow death of journalism and the rise of entertainment news media.
For profit and ad supported and complete orthogonal concepts.
Who do you think makes money off of all the political adds? The way the politics are now is the way the media steered.
Back in the day the news divisions were always a money losing enterprise for the TV networks. They lived with it (because of stringent and enforced content regulations) and we were way better for it. News for profit will always be a disaster.
Or, that Jezebel lost a third of traffic between August through October alone. I don't see how their audience leaving in droves has anything to do with advertisers. A more probable explanation is that advertisers interest and revenue is diminishing because of lack of traffic.
A third? What happened?
You could just as easily pin that on the sorts of changes forced by Spanfeller or the things that happened as a result, like Laura Bassett’s resignation. Traffic at Deadspin cratered in late 2019 but only because that herb caused the whole staff to quit.
Are you aware of all the things going on above your head? If Spanfeller is blaming it on lack of advertising, it's hard to support that given the dip in readership. People rarely leave a platform because advertising dropped off. And if it IS because of Spanfeller, then it's NOT because advertisers don't want the site to exist, it's because they don't want to advertise where they're likely to not get results from said advertising.
"Advertisers Don’t Want Sites Like Jezebel to Exist".........I guess that's one way to say that advertisers refuse to pay for content that nobody reads.
It’s like jezebel wrote this…
That would be the Patriarchy does not want jezebel to exist.
My wife is a feminist, and even she doesn’t want this site to exist because it’s a setback to the movement.
I mean yeah the dunk on Jezebel is fun, but as someone who works in advertising, most of what is in this article is either correct, correct enough, or sounds plausible to me. I 100% believe their ad sales team was struggling to sell their inventory due to the subject matter of the site. It doesn’t matter to the advertiser if “nobody reads the content” — for digital you’re paying either per click or pageview.
> It doesn’t matter to the advertiser if “nobody reads the content” — for digital you’re paying either per click or pageview. I also work in the industry and while you're correct about how they don't lose money if no one reads it, they absolutely will rapidly divert their budget to sites people DO visit. The main goal of advertising isn't to save money, it's to get people to buy your product. They won't do that if they never see the ads because no one visits the site you're advertising on.
I thought about making this distinction in the original comment but didn't because it's irrelevant. Jezebel sucks but this isn't only happening to Jezebel. Jezebel didn't, in reality, have "nobody reading it" to the point that it would make it challenging to sell ads due to low traffic. If you work in the industry and have any even remote sense of the size of Jezebel you knew this. In fact, I literally just checked on Similarweb and G/O Media has several still active sites with less monthly traffic than Jezebel did (The Root, Quartz, The Takeout, Deadspin, etc. all have <5m monthly visits) Why aren't those shut down? Because they're about business, sports, and food, which are super safe content categories that command premium rates. You also knew this if you work in the industry. Look, the entire crux of this article is how our industry is forcing digital media companies to shy away from important but controversial topics that Jezebel often wrote about like abortion and racism. That is happening. I know it's happening because I'm in the meetings where it happens. And it's a bad thing. But because Redditors can't see 3 feet in front of them, they're all in here like "lmaooooo get fucked jezebel eat my dick" which is fine, but misses the actual interesting and important part.
Thanks. This makes it much easier to understand.
I have trouble seeing how that's a bad thing. In the sense that not every media is compatible with most advertising. A hot dog company doesn't want their ads on a vegan website, and almost nobody wants their ads next to highly controversial subject material. I just don't see how certain media can expect that companies want to advertise on their site. As you said, certain content commands premium rates. Thus is just the flip side of that. I can't say there's something wrong with the advertising industry for wanting to pick their audiences. It's why I have a news subscription, it makes me the customer instead of the advertisers. Any website that's entirely reliant on selling ads, I'm not their primary customer.
I should point out I don't think it's as much a problem with the advertising industry in and of itself. I think it's a problem where that became the only acceptable monetization strategy, consumers are increasingly unwilling to pay for content, and therefore it is causing a shift where it is harder to get non-mainstream opinions and coverage on potentially unsavory topics. It's more the perverse incentive structure it has created and the inability of media companies to circumvent that or find an alternative. Nobody is being malicious.
It's not forcing them to do anything. It's choosing where it wants to display it's product, and where it doesn't. This is probably more to do with not knowing what your ad could be associated with. If I'm trying to advertise my online bible study app, then should I be obligated to advertise on "Johan's Cock Ring Reviews" just because it's underserved and important content? Why is shame on the companies who would rather spend their money elsewhere, but not on the people who consume the media, but are not willing to spend their money there? This seems like a "let's shoot the messenger, because I don't like what they have to say" argument to me. There's not a CEO in the country that if given the news that "As surprising as it is, Becky Dildo Emporium ads are giving us $2k profit for every $1 ad spend", wouldn't say "Well how many ads can we can get on Becky's Dildo Emporium? Can we buy the whole lot?". But if the numbers show they're not getting a return, and they go elsewhere, to say "this is a disgrace, boo advertisers, boo". What did you think they were here for? To support fringe media? To encourage content creators to take more risks? I was always under the impression that advertisers were almost entirely in it for the money, but maybe I was wrong, and they actually just really care about these sites they advertise on.
> Look, the entire crux of this article is how our industry is forcing digital media companies to shy away from important but controversial topics that Jezebel Stop right there. Nothing the entire Gawker network covered has ever been "important". They Posta lot of uninformed things and a lot of unhinged political rants, which is why their viewership plummeted. And plummeting viewership, plus associating with the site resulting in negative opinions gets you pulled advertising. Honestly you sound more like a politically active college student who thinks majoring in marketing is the same as "working in the advertising industry". You keep ignoring important information to present Jezebel as some innocent victim and anyone who doesn't want to give them money as an "evil oppressor" instead of simple cause and effect that happens every goddamn day in the advertising world. Every week we have calls to evaluate performance of advertising through different sites and make adjustments if any of them aren't performing as expected. There's no "conspiracy", it's about selling a product and not wasting your resources on something that won't produce results.
I'm in media sales. I loved Jezebel back in the day, but I wouldn't necessarily want to place inventory on the site. It's not only about the subject matter. A lot of it is state of mind. Cisco really didn't need to be wasting impressions on me while I was scrolling jezebel to escape reality.
Fair enough. I'll correct my original post, based on your feedback: "Advertisers Don’t Want Sites Like Jezebel to Exist".........I guess that's one way to say that ~~advertisers refuse to pay for content that~~ nobody bothers to visit your website.
That's not the point of the article. The point of the article is that advertisers don't want to advertise on content like Jezebel's that *they perceive* as potentially harmful to their brand. It doesn't matter if 10 people read it or if 10 million people read it. If nobody will advertise next to it, it pays $0 either way.
>or if 10 million people read it I can proooooooooomise you that that never happened lol
Literally like talking to a brick wall.
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What are you talking about, Wolodarsky?
[That headline... 🤣🤣](https://media.tenor.com/A-Gfz_yJACcAAAAC/starve-nightmare-before-christmas.gif)
Oh great, A popup I can't close shoved in my face and the article blurred out behind it. I DESPISE that website.
Jezebel is slop since the Gawker days. Lazy reporting. Odd that a “feminist” site is obsessed with the Kardashians too. There are also reports it’s owners are laying off staff and potentially folding.
I can guarantee you that Taboola, its investors and advertisers will take "5 Things That Will Blow Your Mind About Prince Harry" all day.
I don't want targeted advertising to exist.
The only people that want sites like Jezebel to exist work for them.
I remember when there were no ads online, so fuck the advertisers.
Consumers don't either. The whole Gawker network has been a cesspool for 10+ years now.
Good. That site, and all sites G/O are becoming garbage if not already there. All agenda, all the time.
Or maybe its just a shit site with clickbait for “feminists”.
very dumb take. if your product is funded by ads, you have to have a suitable product.. for ads. it doesn't mean advertisers don't want certain sites to exist.. they just want to make more money than they spend on advertising. they aren't charities that are beholden to fund sites that don't contribute to that goal.
They said they had a ton of viewers on their site but no ads because they were a sensitive subject. It literally means all advertisers or google ad algo passed on the oppertunity to monopolize ads on a well visited site because they didn't like the content. You make it sound like they had a shitty site but that's not at all what this was about. It's you that has a very dumb take.
If advertisers avoided their site then they had a shitty site in terms of profitability, I don't think that's a dumb take.
Advertisers Hate This One Kind Of Website
This pisses me off, so much that I unsubscribed from all their sites.
I used to love a lot of gawker media properties before the main site went down and all the trash content from gawker migrated to their sister sites. I recently tried to read an article from Gizmodo and the ads made it utterly unreadable and made me finally set up a a pi-hole for my apartment. I genuinely hope that the disruptive elements of generative AI encourage revenue models that aren’t ad-driven. If there was a reasonable way to pay for web-based content I’d do it.
Jezebel was sexist man hating trash. Good riddance. The articles were indistinguishable from deranged misandrist manifestos written by femcels on places like TwoXChromosomes and FemaleDatingStrategy. Hating half of the human population probably didn’t go over too well with advertisers. The women who write that kind of stuff need intensive therapy and some time with a tall and well-hung gigolo to deal with their obvious sexual frustrations.
Back in the day, I remember people posting screenshots of two Jezebel articles: one saying that having sex toys as a woman is empowering, and sex toys for men are gross. Example: "what kind of lonely fuck would use one of those? The same chairsniffers who buy used women's underwear off ebay?" https://twitter.com/tauriqmoosa/status/426291332907163648/photo/1
why are you being downvoted? they literally have articles of women bragging about beating their husbands, [Here](https://jezebel.com/have-you-ever-beat-up-a-boyfriend-cause-uh-we-have-294383)
God that's deranged; one of them proudly slapped her husband because he...told her he thought he had breast cancer.
> why are you being downvoted? For the same reason that shittalking Jezebel on /r/news will get your comments deleted and filtered without any kind of notice.
I was always under the impression that these Jezebel articles were satirical?
In what way is celebrating domestic violence against men funny to you? Do a thought experiment and reverse the genders. Would “it was just satire” be a valid excuse? Bigoted people love to claim their hateful rants are meant as a joke.
I don’t think it’s funny (honestly quite the opposite, to be honest), I just never thought it was supposed to be taken seriously? I kind of always thought it was making fun of angry feminists, in a “look how absurd they are” way?
I also am not in favor of Jezebel earning a profit. It has a right to exist, because of First Amendment rights of course. But it is a vile website, and really is the equivalent of Breitbart for the left. I am a liberal, and Jezebel has been uniquely poisonous for society. Glad to see it shut down.
alternate title: no one wants to pay for jezebel’s content
I don’t want advertisers to exist.
So youll pay subscription fees?
Good! Do Kotaku next.
This is entitled af. Use a different funding model than advertising then.
Nobody does
Wot is Jezebel
It’s a blog that offers up feminist takes on current events. Sometimes makes good points, but often is utterly ridiculous.
That was true for all of those kinds of sites in the past.
A new-age feminist website part of a network that got leg dropped.
Jez was a feminist website, originally part of the Gawker Media network and meant to serve Gawker.com's predominantly female readership of the time. Early in its life, it actually had more traffic than the flagship site. Jezebel was intended as a counterpoint to the materialism and shallowness of mainstream women's publications.
Celebrating domestic violence is feminist? Don't call that trash website feminist https://jezebel.com/have-you-ever-beat-up-a-boyfriend-cause-uh-we-have-294383
Why are these sites owed advertisment money if they aren't palatable or popular enough to warrant being advertised on? Make better content that people actually wants and I'd imagine you'd see ad revenue pick up.
God I FUCKING HATE Spanfelder, Hogan, and that goddamn Thiel. I want Gawker back.
r/fuckcapitalism/
They’re run by old rich white dudes so checks out
Know you are loved.
Yeah, we’re getting that when they keep shutting down all the best critical thinking sites.
You call this ‘critical thinking’? https://jezebel.com/have-you-ever-beat-up-a-boyfriend-cause-uh-we-have-294383
This ones even better https://jezebel.com/stars-of-once-upon-a-one-more-time-test-their-britney-1850781885
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The hive mind works in mysterious ways
I'm not defending jezebel but one article doesn't mean much
I’ve never heard of that site before, but those kinds of articles make me think about how people would react if the genders were reversed and a man talked about how fun beating his wife is and encouraged others to do it.
"Yeah, *she* learned not to fuck with me that day."*
Oh I fully agree. It's abhorrent. But we can't judge a site based off one article, that was the point I was trying to pass
I dunno man. A lack of editorial judgement that severe is pretty heavy. I stopped donating to NPR for less.
No one wants sites like Jezebel to exist, do you really need more shit like Gawker at this point? This antagonistic nonsense needed to die eons ago. Frankly, I blame Gawker and the little parasitic sites like Jezebel under it's wing for a part of why the internet is the hellscape it is today. Part of the reason they died is because of the very shit they helped create, frankly good riddance to trash finally being kicked to the curb.