Guide to Advertising Technology – Columbia Journalism Review

Key results:

• Advertising was fundamental for the development of the modern newspaper and objective reporting. Today's advertising messages, provided through an interconnected system of software programs, data servers, marketing agencies and data markets, still support most of the news production but are under-valued in the formation of professional journalism.
• The dependence of news publishers on advertising technology facilitates the collection and movement of readers 'data through opaque systems, which can threaten readers' confidence in news.
• Advertising technology and its metrics have been found to alter the internal production of news, which could be in contrast to classic journalistic commitments with objective coverage.
• The exaggerated market for programmatic display ads has lowered prices, reducing revenue for publishers.
• Advertising technology is plagued by bot-based fraud, which causes many marketers to shift ad spend on social media and search, further reducing revenue for publisher sites.
• The detrimental effects of advertising technology on the user experience (distracting visual effects, slow loading times and costly user data plans) can lead readers (and revenue from their attention) away from news websites and to private apps and social media platforms.
• The relationship of social media with news publishers represents a dynamic of asymmetric power and has proved to be effective for publishers trying to reach the public, especially local publishers.
• Control of the news display platforms has pushed some publishers to use influencers, which in turn could accelerate the growth of service companies that provide both tailor-made content and algorithm-driven websites to influencers. The platforms have begun to write policies against the distribution of influencers, but they could be difficult to enforce.
• The advertising mechanisms of social media, in particular hyper-targeting, are subject to weapons by malicious actors.
• All journalists, from journalists to publishers, must keep themselves informed about the evolving markets and the consumption of news and information.

Introduction: Why should journalists know how advertising technology works?

Imagine a young woman named Molly, who works as an event coordinator in Chicago. During the planning of a one-day seminar, she and her colleagues have a good moan about the post-lunch slowdown that always afflicts these types of events. To revive the flow of conversation, Molly decides to fill the candy room. Use your personal laptop to go to the Amazon.com retail website and buy several candy packages. The next day, Molly sees that Amazon is suggesting other types of candy for her to browse. Soon, however, he notices that his digital life has been transformed into a land of candy. Peppermint and lollipop meatballs parade on the screen at almost every web site they visit. That night, looking for information on a serious presidential announcement, he visits several reliable news sites and is surprised to see that even the most serious articles are covered with salt water taffy and gummy bears.

Advertising supports the Internet economy. "Advertising technology" is a generic term for the system of software programs, data servers, marketing agencies and data markets that facilitate the sale of user data and the display of advertisements to Internet users, including engines search and social media sites and apps. The vast majority of websites and social media platforms are supported by advertising technology. The publication of news is no exception. In a disturbing way, in journalism schools little attention is paid to the political economy of advertising on news sites. The user experience on all devices, loss of control over what is displayed on publisher sites and the way that loss can affect brand reputation have all been underestimated by professional journalism programs . This is a worrying trend, as advertising technology can influence the production, distribution and perception of journalism in both obvious and subtle ways.

Social media, in particular, have upset the control that publishers once had on information and publicity, and a multi-device environment has overturned the command that publishers have long appreciated the attention of readers. Experimentation in ad formats has overshadowed the once-brilliant separation line between the business and the publishing departments within the news agencies. Ambiguity is now the rule of the day. Jill Abramson, the former executive editor of The New York Times, explicitly reflecting on his values ​​to the past, with a sense of nostalgia: "Maybe I was too hard, but I believed in the wall [between the business and news sides of the newspaper]".¹ This "Guide to Advertising Technology" aims to explain how this has happened and what it means for the practice of journalism today by offering training that can be used in the history and political economy of digital advertising technologies. Start with a brief history of modern advertising in the news and a review of the fundamentals of marketing. The following are technical descriptions of how digital display advertising works, the outlines of the advertising technology space and the material impact that ad tech has on the user experience. The report then examines the resulting patterns of news and ad consumption, as consumers and market forces reacted to digital display advertising and how the marketing industry responded by investing heavily on social platforms and search engines.

We also cover how advertising technology creates incentive structures, which can shape the way journalists and publishers think about producing news, and how advertising technologies risk the relationship between publishers and readers, including a brand of news and reputation. Those journalistic institutions, which have decreed the commitment to inform citizens in a free democracy, voluntarily participate in the technical stack of advertising – which reportedly violated the privacy of readers – is a serious ethical dilemma. Technology and society are built in and built on each other, and journalists need both to do the storytelling required by our democracy.

Finally, it is worth noting that this report is a library case, in the sense that its primary sources, rather than interviews, are general and sectorial press articles, academic literature from the fields of marketing studies and journalism, marketing and business school cases.

Ad review: display, branded, targeted and programmatic

I. From the brand to targeting

To get a context in the world where display ads are bought and sold, it's helpful to offer some history on the biggest advertising themes over the last 30 years.

For the second half of the 20th century, the attention of the advertising industry was focused on the brand. Branding ads are large, broad, image-based messages that associate a product with a set of values. Consumers who feel that these values ​​represent them, or who want to report to others who maintain these values, may be lured into buying a company's product. Branding campaigns take place more often through television commercials, as television has been defined as "consumed branding medium".² If you've ever seen a beer ad that focuses more on parties, girls and good times than anything on beer itself (remember the relationship between entertainment and information), you've seen a branding ad.

Advertisements tend to rely on the brand when many similar, high-quality competitors are on the market:

Companies like Procter & Gamble, General Foods and Unilever have developed the discipline of brand management, or marketing as we know it today, when they noticed that the quality levels of the products offered by competitors around them improved. A brand manager would be responsible for giving a product an identity that distinguished it from almost indistinguishable competitors.³

A good example of this is Coca-Cola versus Pepsi. Coca-Cola and Pepsi are non-alcoholic beverages that, as products, are almost indistinguishable, so a lot of money is invested in their branding campaigns to distinguish them from one another. Coca-Cola pursues associations with values ​​such as iconic solidarity, international community and happiness. Pepsi, on the other hand, looks for quality like progressiveness, energy and youth.⁴
The perception of a brand and brand values, consider advertisers, can have an influence on consumer spending decisions. Procter & Gamble, a consumer goods manufacturer and one of the world's largest advertisers, deliberately advertises its suite of diverse products, including ivory soap, Tide cleanser and Dawn dishwashing liquid as a "brand family" "unified. Marc Pritchard said: "We have discovered many times that when people know a P & G brand, they feel better with the brand, and when they know that P & G has all these brands, they feel better with P & G."⁵ This approach has been exemplified in P & G's advertising of the 2010 Winter Olympic Games, which brought together 18 different P & G products under a banner focused on the brand (rather than the product).⁶

In the midst of branding-oriented advertising, digital display ads were born in the late 1990s⁷. Digital display ads are rectangular ads displayed on websites visited via a browser on a desktop, tablet or smartphone. They come in different formats, which the group of operators in the marketing sector of the Interactive Advertising Bureau names both for their longest edge and for the width-height ratio, such as Horizontal 2: 1, Horizontal 4: 1 and Vertical 1: 2 (see Figure 1).⁸

Figure 1: Acceptable display advertising reports, determined by the Interactive Advertising Bureau, shown on different devices

Display ads must comply with the standards and practices established by the IAB. ⁹ Because the consumer's attention was divided between phones and tablets, alongside television, radio, magazines, newspapers and billboards, advertisers had to compete for the increasingly scarce and precious resource of attention in a market called the "attention economy"¹⁰ and a practice referred to as "the economy of attention".¹¹ Between such rigid competition, advertising has shifted from branding to targeting.¹²

Branding campaigns are designed to attract large parts of the population. Targeted ads are the opposite: they are created to be as persuasive as possible to certain people.¹³ This process is called sight. To understand how ad targeting works, you need to examine what data is collected on consumers and how they are collected.

First of all, the websites collect data about you both from your browser and from something called "Tracking cookies". Tracking cookies are bits of code such as HTML and Javascript that websites deposit on the user's browser. These code bits track users, record and report to the website on which future sites they visit and the things they buy.¹⁴ Websites aggregate all this information into two buckets: 1) behavioral data that have what types of sites you looked at, how much time you spent on them, and if you bought something, and 2) demographic information that they "estimated based on these online behaviors, such as age, education level, family status, income bracket, and interest, this information is then used to customize ads for users with two different parameters: 1) what you do (for example, behavioral targeting is 2) who you are (for example, demographic targeting).

Data collection can also take place on hardware. An example of hardware-based data collection takes place on Google phones and Android operating systems. A journalist a The Guardian requested a copy of the Google data file on them, discovering that Google had saved all the terms they had ever searched for (about 90,000 in total), every downloaded image, every website that was accessed , every event listed in your Google Calendar, what time was the event and every item that the user saved in his Google Drive. The journalist had also linked his FitBit to Google, and Google had recorded all his steps, workouts and yoga and meditation routines. Also, because the reporter had an Android phone with a Google operating system, Google had saved every single photo taken with the phone, including metadata about where and when the photos were captured.¹⁵

Google has made the use of this data for ad targeting transparent to users of its Chrome browser. All Chrome users can access a page called "ad customization" to review demographic and interest-based attributes that have been collected and estimated on them (see Figure 2 for author attributes).

Figure 2: Targeting attributes of the author's announcement assigned by Google

This information is not only useful for direct targeting of ads, but also for targeting ads to people like you. Websites aggregate all the data of their users to create a snapshot of their visitors' demographics, including middle age, ethnicity, where users live and work, income and level of education. These user data, called "inventory", are then used to sell advertising space to brands and advertisers through advertising agencies. The inventory metric for the inventory purchase is the "impression," also known by the number of "impressions" that an ad is apparently published on viewers. Impressions are sold in CPM or "cost per thousand views" a term borrowed from television advertising measured by Nielsen ratings, even if the impressions of digital ads are of very different quality. The "M" derives from "mille", the Latin word for "mille". Advertisers typically set their goals of impressions and spending limits together: "We want to reach [Y] number of impressions and we will spend [X] amount for them. "¹⁶

Publishers may offer alternative pricing models based on other viewer actions (outside of impressions only), such as CPC, cost per click (when a user clicks on an ad) or CPA, cost per action (when a user clicks and makes a purchase).¹⁷

ii. Programmatic advertising

To return to the history of advertising, online ads have exploded over the years & # 90; and in the 2000s. Web sites were increasingly selling impressions to more and more advertisers. Publishers soon managed billions of impressions and thousands of advertisers. In this noisy space, a level of service providers has arisen as ad networks. Ad networks are companies that aggregate websites with comparable inventory into packages, making it easier for advertisers to centralize ad purchases. This way advertisers could buy a large number of ads to show similar users who visit different websites and more effectively hit their impression goals (number of impressions that want their ads to appear on viewers).

Figure 3

All this aggregation and the impressive number of bundled impressions soon led to an environment of confusion in which advertisers did not know where their ads were placed or who was buying them.¹⁸ Soon, advertising buyers sought more transparency about what they were getting for the money they were spending. This led to the creation of "ad exchanges": open platforms to compare the price and quality of impressions and buy them.¹⁹ Figure 3 shows the ecosystem of ad exchanges and ad networks. Advertisers are represented by a green bar on the left and publishers by a blue bar on the right. Here you can see the huge number of service companies that make up the landscape of advertising technology, including advertising agencies, media buyers and data brokers.
²⁰
You can also view additional levels of companies that perform services on user data (remember all data on behavioral and demographic users that websites have collected using tracking cookies). These services include the optimization, verification and analysis of data in more detail to better target ads;²¹ retargeting or targeting your ads to the audience even after they've left your site²² (remembers how Molly kept seeing candy ads even after leaving Amazon.com?)location of ads, or by analyzing data about the buying habits of the ad viewers to determine which ad actually led to the # 39; final purchase.²³ A data broker in the ad exchange business has explained its services to advertisers in this way:

[We can] develop a personalized audience segment modeled on visitors to your site ([this is called] Modeling similar to the gaze); find families who have the greatest propensity to buy specific products or brands (MRI Lifestyle Clusters); if you are sponsoring an AOL page, redirect consumers who have visited it (Sponsorship LeadBack); find the ideal female audience on the sites that are most likely to visit (Subnet Targeting); find women who are looking for information on fashion, home and gardening; explicitly target families with the presence of females (age / gender targeting).²⁴

iii. View ads on news sites

The news institutions publish standards that describe the formats advertisers can expect from them, as well as the terms and conditions that the publisher defines for advertisers. In terms of formatting, these guidelines include visual models. Over it The GuardianThe "Digital Advertising Production Format Guide"²⁵ these include ad formats such as "Cascade", "Expanding Billboard", "Fabric Video", "Filmstrip", "Focus" and "Sliding Doors". The Guardian provides screenshots to advertisers who show how their ads will appear on the news site through a collection of devices (see Figure 4 and Figure 5). The New York Times"Media Kit" ²⁶ similarly provides a complete suite of specifications and previews of its available ad formats.

Figure 4: The Guardian's ad format specifications

Figure 5: The New York Times ad format specifications

Influence of advertising on news: Bloat, Clic and Bot

The advertising technologies ecosystem introduces many problems in the production, distribution and consumption of news. First of all, it has a significant impact on the user experience. Secondly, advertising technology creates incentive structures, which can shape the way journalists and publishers think about producing news.

I. Usability and advertising inflating

The Wall Street Journal recently reported that advertising, in the digital era, is burdened by history: digital ads are drowned with the old-fashioned thinking of marketers who grew up in the brand's era.³⁰ Big advertising ideas based on images that have performed well on television are now being injected into small digital ads,³¹ or they have contributed to larger, more intrusive forms of online advertising, such as "roadblock" messages that occupy the entire screen for a few seconds, which has troubled the user's experience.

In addition to compromising the quality of the user experience, the digital ad technical infrastructure slows down the performance of web browsers. Remember all tracking cookies (for example, JavaScript and HTML) embedded in ads, in addition to the countless transactions and technical complexity of bid auctions in real time, running millions of lines of code and sending data to, and receiving instructions from thousands of servers in milliseconds. This puts a strain on web browsers, burdens news sites and even further interrupts the user experience.

In 2015, a New York Times study found that the Los Angeles Times homepage measured 5.7 megabytes. The journalistic content, however, contained only 1.6 megabytes: about 73% of the data sent to users' devices was due to the ads.³² This has made the site hateful to visit, both in terms of loading times (the ads have requested the site another 7 seconds to load, with an increase of 175% compared to normal loading time) and in terms of costs for users , especially if they were accessing a web page via mobile or tablet, which is more and more the way users view news. In fact, as early as 2015, 99 of the 110 major news websites had more visitors than tablets and smartphones than desktop visitors.³³ "Some couriers, such as AT & T and Verizon, charge fees if they exceed the amount of data, so websites with inflated ads not only require more time to load, but can also contain data consumption and phone bills."³⁴ Users on such data plans pay, in effect, time and money to watch ads that they can cover or distract from the content of the news they are trying to read.

Ad targeting can also further shape the world that readers see online because of the way ads are targeted to a particular audience, which means that some people will be offered different products, services and experiences than others. Professor Joseph Turow of the University of Pennsylvania described this process in the Atlantic:

Consider an imaginary middle class family of two parents with three children. … both [parents] Larry and Rhonda receive advertising from pay-as-you-go services and payday loan companies. And Larry notes sourly on the car sites he visits that the main items on the home page and the ads through the entry level and used models. His bitterness becomes more acute when he describes to his boss the Web of the market he has seen lately. Surprised, she tells him that she has been on the same car sites recently and has the opposite impression: many of the articles are about the latest German cars, and a home-page announcement even offered her a gift to test one to a retailer near his home.³⁵

ii. Ad tech, privacy and security

In addition to these usability, financial and targeting issues, advertising technology also has privacy and security issues. Although publisher specifications require that ads not contain malware, the complex technical infrastructure of advertising has led press agencies to provide dangerous and dangerous code to readers.³⁶

In 2009, The New York Times fell victim to what he called "mischievous exchange of advertising" when what looked like a legitimate advertiser suddenly went to provide malware to readers³⁷³⁸³⁹– "malware" which means software intended to "damage or take other unwanted actions on an IT system." / Autocitemalware It has also been reported that both the BBC and The New York Times they have served ransomware (software code embedded in an ad that "tries to find a back door that can on the target computer, where it will install … the software, which encrypts the user's hard drive and requires payment in bitcoins for the keys to unlock it ").⁴⁰ In another instance of sites owned by news publishers that serve code that violates readers' devices, The Guardian reported that CBS-owned Showtime was captured by extracting bitcoins from its users, in an article titled "Ads do not work, so websites use electricity to pay bills":

Showtime video streaming service in the United States … [was] discovered to send the mining code to users. … Le criptovalute, come bitcoin e i suoi successori, sono supportate da un sistema di "minatori", che corrono per essere i primi a risolvere complicati problemi informatici in cambio di una ricompensa … [This requires an] quantità straordinariamente grande di potenza di calcolo [and] consuma anche un'enorme quantità di energia elettrica … Corto circuito basato sul sito web che: le bollette dell'elettricità sono pagate dal visitatore, ma è il sito che ottiene la ricompensa.⁴¹

Joe Stewart, direttore della ricerca sui malware presso la società di servizi di sicurezza SecureWorks, ha commentato: "Lo sviluppo di annunci multimediali, mini-applicazioni e strumenti di social networking supera di gran lunga la velocità del processo di riflessione sulla sicurezza che si applica a tali applicazioni. ”⁴²

Tutte queste minacce all'esperienza utente e alla privacy dei lettori possono mettere a repentaglio la fiducia che i lettori hanno nei confronti delle istituzioni di informazione. In breve, non dovrebbe sorprendere che le tecnologie pubblicitarie rappresentino un serio rischio per i marchi di notizie e la reputazione. Allo stesso modo, la tecnologia pubblicitaria e le sue demarcazioni di ciò che è prezioso nell'economia dell'attenzione stanno per alterare la pratica organizzativa e professionale del giornalismo.

iii. Notizia? O prodotto che genera entrate?

Al di fuori delle problematiche di usabilità e privacy, gli incentivi e le infrastrutture della tecnologia pubblicitaria possono indurre le organizzazioni di notizie a produrre e distribuire tipi specifici di notizie. Economia di scala dettata dalla pubblicità significa che i dollari diventano tangibili solo quando un gran numero di persone li vede. Indagini giornalistiche⁴³⁴⁴ e studi accademici all'interno delle redazioni⁴⁵⁴⁶ hanno dimostrato che giornalisti ed editori si sentono pressati a produrre notizie e prendere decisioni operative in base alle esigenze delle strutture e delle metriche pubblicitarie.

Poiché l'industria editoriale adotta ruoli organizzativi, routine e metriche ereditate dall'industria tecnologica,⁴⁷ oltre all'industria delle vendite pubblicitarie, sono state prese più decisioni di progettazione orientate alla metrica per modellare il modo in cui le notizie vengono distribuite e consumate. Le metriche di coinvolgimento sono le misurazioni di come un pubblico interagisce con un sito web. Ciò include i clic (quante persone fanno clic sugli annunci su un sito), gli hit (pagine visualizzate), le sessioni (tutto ciò che un lettore fa mentre si trova su un sito), gli uniques (numero di visitatori unici del sito) e altro.⁴⁸ Anche le parole "articolo" e "contenuto" denotano valori e priorità diversi nella produzione di notizie. Mentre il termine "articolo" è usato nel giornalismo ed è apparentemente imbevuto di impegno giornalistico per informare il pubblico con una dedica alla copertura obiettiva, la parola "contenuto" deriva dall'industria tecnologica e denota il ruolo della parola scritta all'interno di una più ampia infrastruttura di fornitura di contenuti costruita per obiettivi specifici, come guidare l'engagement e generare entrate.

La Columbia Journalism Review ha scritto estensivamente su queste motivazioni concorrenti nella sua copertura della partenza del 2014 di Jill Abramson, redattore esecutivo di The New York Timese l'ascesa del suo successore, Dean Baquet. CJR ha riferito che Baquet crede che il tradizionale "muro" tra le sezioni editoriale e commerciale del giornale debba essere offuscato al fine di garantire la precaria sopravvivenza del Times: "Baquet … afferma in modo categorico che il tradizionale divario pubblicitario-giornalistico è diventato un lusso il I tempi non possono più permettersi. … Tirarlo fuori, dice, ha richiesto la cooperazione con il lato economico. "⁴⁹ Jill Abramson, tuttavia, ha osservato il contrario: "Non volevo che l'energia dei nostri giornalisti si concentri sui prodotti che generano entrate".⁵⁰

Angele Christin, una studiosa di comunicazione a Stanford, ha condotto uno studio in una redazione negli Stati Uniti e in Europa, scoprendo che sia i giornalisti che gli editori interiorizzano e rispondono alle analisi e alle metriche della pubblicità e ai programmi di coinvolgimento della tecnologia pubblicitaria.⁵¹ I "programmi di coinvolgimento" sono programmi software, come il popolare ChartBeat,⁵² che misura e mostra le metriche di coinvolgimento.⁵³

Christin ha scoperto che, sebbene diverse nelle loro risposte esatte, nessuna delle redazioni era immune all'influenza dei programmi di fidanzamento. Sia i giornalisti che i redattori hanno tenuto conto di questi numeri al momento di prendere decisioni su quale tipo di storie scrivere, come scriverle e su come gestire, incentivare e promuovere i giornalisti:

Web analytics are used by some editors as performance indicators for managing their personnel, especially when deciding how to promote and compensate journalists. … At several [news] sites in New York and Paris, this correlation between revenue and traffic is even more clear: writers are “paid by the click,” as a percentage of the advertising revenues that their articles attract. They might also receive substantial bonuses when their articles are highly shared on social media.⁵⁴

This is a dramatic shift from prior generations of journalists, who wrote primarily for the approval of their peers and reputational rewards.⁵⁵

YouTube provides a stark example of how engagement metrics change what sort of content is incentivized and algorithmically distributed in the attention economy. Media critic Zeynep Tufekci wrote about a Wall Street Journal investigation reportedly showing that YouTube’s recommendation algorithm pushes viewers toward videos that are ever more extreme, potentially facilitating viewers’ radicalization:

What keeps people glued to YouTube? Its algorithm seems to have concluded that people are drawn to content that is more extreme than what they started with—or to incendiary content in general. … The Wall Street Journal conducted an investigation of YouTube content … It found that YouTube often “fed far-right or far-left videos to users who watched relatively mainstream news sources,” and that such extremist tendencies were evident with a wide variety of material. If you searched for information on the flu vaccine, you were recommended anti-vaccination conspiracy videos.⁵⁶

iv. Fraud and bots

For all of its sophisticated algorithms, complex technical stack, and vast array of service firms, the ad industry is rife with fraud. Advertising writer Akit Kohli notes, “Advertising fraud is typically done by creating fake ad traffic using content-scraping websites or other environments or creating other fictitious mechanisms for delivering ads that are not seen by consumers.”⁵⁷ “Bot viewing” is a common complaint. “Bots” are software programs carrying out automated tasks on the internet (“bot” is derived from “robot,” which is itself derived from the Czechoslovakian word for “work”). “Bot viewing” or “bot traffic” is when such programs are “designed to mimic users and inflate audience numbers.”⁵⁸ Such programs and their services are easily available for purchase online. A Google search for “viewing bots” includes a service for people looking to boost their own videos on YouTube (see Figure 6).⁵⁹

Figure 6

These bots are used to defraud advertisers, tricking them into thinking that millions of people have clicked on their video ad, when some of that engagement was actually non-human. Some Russian-engineered bots even mimic publishers, imitating news websites to steal money from advertisers.

While advertisers thought they were advertising on real websites, they were in fact buying counterfeit ad inventory on facsimile sites visited by bots. The researchers report that the scam affected more than 6,000 top publishers’ websites, including the Huffington Post, The Economist, ESPN, Vogue, CBS Sports, Fox News, even Fortune.⁶⁰

The MIT Technology Review wrote in 2014 that 36 percent of internet traffic was from non-human machines.⁶¹ The Interactive Advertising Bureau estimated in its 2015 report, “What Is an Untrustworthy Supply Chain Costing the Digital Advertising Industry?,” that the ad industry loses 4.6 billion dollars a year to bots.⁶² The Wall Street Journal reported that in mid-2017 Procter & Gamble—which, remember, is one of the largest and therefore most-watched advertisers in the world—cut its digital ad spend by 100 million dollars, with the company’s finance chief saying, “We were serving bots as opposed to human beings.”⁶³ By the end of that year, cuts on digital ads had doubled to 200 million dollars.⁶⁴

The Turn Against Advertising: Blockers, Dimes, and Walls

Given the usability and financial issues for readers, threats to readers’ privacy and devices, how the metrics of ad tech may influence the practice of journalism, and an ad tech system itself riddled with fraud, it’s unsurprising that we’ve seen a consumer and publisher backlash against ad tech.

i. Blockers

Consumers have begun to sidestep the entire infrastructure of advertising via ad blockers. Ad blockers are browser plug-ins (digital tools that can be downloaded and added on to your browser), which block the downloading of embedded code: ad blockers prevent ads from downloading tracking cookies onto users’ devices, and also block ads’ attempts to communicate with their ad-exchange servers.⁶⁶ The Wall Street Journal reported that publishers have become aware of the annoyances their ads create for readers, and the growing backlash, writing:

According to many publishers, ad agencies consistently produce oversized, tracking-laden digital ad files and often deliver them at the last minute without enough time for publishers to push back. This behavior is contributing to how slowly some Web pages are loading, encouraging the growing use of ad-blocking software among consumers.⁶⁷

Since 2015, the popularity of ad blockers has skyrocketed.

Browser companies have also adopted ad blockers: In 2017, Apple dealt a significant blow to online advertisers moving into the mobile space with the automatic inclusion of ad blockers in the mobile version of Safari, the native web browser on the iPhone.⁶⁸ Google followed his in 2018 by making moves to automatically block what it called “intrusive” ads in its Chrome browser, which is employed by over half of internet users.⁶⁹

Even as users and developers alike push toward the adoption of ad blockers,⁷⁰ we’re seeing more evidence that even those ads that do get seen are bringing in less money for publishers.

ii. Print dollars and digital dimes

Not only does the ad experience drive users away from browsing news on the web, but the hyper-efficient market for ads has driven down the value of ads themselves. In what’s been dubbed the “print dollars, digital dimes” tradeoff—first coined by esteemed journalist David Carr in 2008⁷¹—digital ads represent a smaller and smaller share of publishers’ overall revenue picture.

The [NYT’s] revenue source profile has shifted dramatically away from advertising, which accounted for 71% of income in 2000, but only 37% as of the 2016 filing. The shift has been steady and clear: Between 2010 and 2015, print advertising revenues dropped 16% (from 44% of revenue to 28%) and its digital counterpoint only saw a 2% boost (10% to 12%). ⁷²

The widespread transparency, efficiency, and availability of data drove the price of impressions down, as noted by The New York Times in its 2014 annual report:

Digital advertising networks and exchanges, real-time bidding and other programmatic buying channels that allow advertisers to buy audiences at scale are also playing a more significant role in the advertising marketplace and causing downward pricing pressure.⁷³

Not only have market pressures decreased the value of digital ads, but their relative efficacy at actually reaching consumers is in question: one marketing group used statistics released by Google AdWords to calculate that the average click-through rate (or percent of people who actually click on a display ad) is less than one percent.⁷⁴

Publishers have reckoned with the low click-through rates and low comparative revenue yielded by display advertising by experimenting with alternative ad models. One such model is affiliate advertising, which means that an advertiser works with affiliates (i.e., websites and publishers) to place sponsored posts or promoted products, and those affiliates get a commission when a sponsored post or product on their site leads to a sale.⁷⁵ Advertisers obviously will pay more for these higher-engagement actions, but they’re risky for publishers, since the revenue stream is contingent on getting viewers to actually click on ads—a difficult endeavor. The New York Times purchased a product-review site called WireCutter, where some reviews feature affiliate links. If a viewer makes a purchase through one of these links, the Volte makes a commission.

The Times addressed the potential issues of biased reviewing on the “About” section of WireCutter’s site:

Up front: Our writers and editors are never made aware of which companies may have established affiliate relationships with our business team prior to making their picks. If readers choose to buy the products we recommend as a result of our research, analysis, interviews, and testing, our work is often (but not always) supported through an affiliate commission from the retailer when they make a purchase. … There’s no incentive for us to pick inferior products or respond to pressure from manufacturers—in fact, it’s quite the opposite. We think that’s a pretty fair system that keeps us committed to serving our readers first.⁷⁶

Taken together, a stormy picture emerges of digital ad tech. Usability and financial issues drive readers away from news sites, just as the readers that do stick with them are using ad blockers or clicking on ads at severely low rates. Meanwhile, newer ad models like affiliate marketing are risky in that they may bring about biased reporting. It’s no surprise that both publishers and advertisers have begun to look for different strategies.

iii. Paywalls and subscriptions

One way that publishers have turned away from the advertising model is through paywalls and subscriptions. As ad revenue has dropped, the revenue brought in from subscriptions has risen for many publishers. In 2000, subscriptions were only 23 percent of the total revenue picture for The New York Times, but by 2015 that figure had risen to 54 percent.⁷⁷ By building paywalls, publishers can attempt to leverage digital readers’ behaviors and nudge them toward buying subscriptions. A paywall is a digital system to prevent readers from reading content without a subscription.⁷⁸ There are roughly three kinds of paywalls:

1. Hard: all readers need to pay for access to all articles across all devices.
2. Metered: a certain number of articles are free per month, after which readers have to pay for access.
3. Leaky/porous: while only a certain number of articles are free, readers can access content when they come into the news site from a search engine or a social platform.

There’s a psychology at play in building these walls: readers who come into the publishers’ site from a search engine or social site are considered “new” or “casual” users, with no demonstrated loyalty to the outlet.

By showing them free content with either a metered or porous paywall, publishers hope to build reader loyalty, which can then hopefully be converted into a subscription. Some publishers are further customizing subscription packages according to specific audiences, such as the sports fan or readers of crime stories.⁷⁹ However, publishers face a steep challenge in building a paywall that can successfully convert loyal audiences into subscribers, while being porous enough not to lose ad revenue brought in by casual readers. Publishers also must make tough calls about whether to drop paywalls in times of crisis, such as after the September 11th attacks on the World Trade Center. A variety of rationales have been cited by publishers for temporarily suspending their paywalls, including “informing the public during crises and emergencies; increasing exposure to planned events and special occasions; providing wider access to non-emergency content seen as publicly valuable; using advertisers as short-term site-wide sponsors.”⁸⁰ Journalism scholars Mike Ananny and Leila Bighash argue that this heterogeneity shows the variety of subjective purposes to which news publishers are committed.⁸¹

Negative pressures on digital display ads (downward pricing pressures, poor usability, the mismatch between branding-oriented professionals and small display ad formats, privacy violations, and the turn toward subscriptions) have pushed the marketing industry to look for new channels for delivering their messages to consumers—some of which include serving ads on social platforms and through search engines. While there are many social media and search companies, our focus is on the biggest player in each sector: Facebook for social media and Google for search. For our purposes, these two—referred to as the “duopoly” of digital advertising, making by far the most money in the industry—are sufficiently representative of issues for journalists and journalism.

Ads on Social

Advertising on social media platforms contains a complex sociotechnical system of platform companies, advertisers, publishers, devices, servers, algorithms, and readers. This arrangement introduces a number of professional, social, and economic complications into the advertising-news relationship.

i. Walled gardens and the growth of surveillance economics

While some readers use ad blockers to shield themselves from display advertising, others have abandoned the open web altogether and shifted their news consumption to walled-garden apps optimized for the mobile experience and owned by private conglomerates. Examples include Apple News and Facebook.⁸³ According to recent Pew research, 45 percent of Americans self-report that Facebook is a primary source of news for them (see Figure 7).

Figure 7

Just as falling prices for CPMs and the rise of ad blockers began to choke off the flow of cash coming into the ad industry, you can imagine what a boon it was for advertisers to enter into the social media age. Social media’s almost limitless data on users’ lives and centralized control over what users see afford powerful targeting opportunities. Users not only supply data directly, by writing into their profiles details about their favorite movies, music, foods, TV shows, and clothing, but they also perform tasks on these platforms such as uploading photos, tagging their friends, watching videos, clicking on links, marking their “likes,” joining “fan pages,” and sending messages to friends—all of which is recorded and tracked.

The 2018 European Union’s GDPR laws forced social media companies to make available to EU users all of the data those platforms had gathered about them for the first time. When journalists began writing about their experiences downloading and reviewing data that companies had gathered on them, one reporter noted that the size of the file Facebook had on him was equivalent to 400,000 Word documents, and included every message he’d ever sent or been sent, all of the contacts in his phone, everything he’d ever “liked,” every application he’d ever connected to Facebook, and a record of every time he’d logged in and from which device.⁸⁴

ii. From targeting to influencing

Meanwhile, another type of persuasion takes place on social media takes place not through targeting based on behavioral and demographic data, but rather by leveraging individuals who hold persuasive power within communities of consumers. In the ad business, these are called “influencers.” “An influencer is someone who has a strong relationship with his or her audience, [who can] affect their purchase decisions because of the knowledge and authority they have”⁸⁵ within that audience.⁸⁶

Influencers are a popular new strategy in social media advertising for industries from beauty to energy drinks to toys.⁸⁷ Some marketers have termed this “growth hacking,” i.e. growing their audiences by piggybacking onto influencers’ existing social networks.⁸⁸ The news industry itself has used influencer marketing, with publishers Mic, Refinery29, and Slate hiring entertainer George Takei to promote their articles on his popular Facebook page.⁸⁹ Mic saw a triple-digit jump in engagement (measured in comments) on an article once Takei had shared it (see Figure 8).⁹⁰

Figure 8

Influencers have proven so popular that a cottage industry has popped up to offer services between advertisers and influencers. Digiday reported one firm working with over 100 publishers, including Slate and Entrepreneur.⁹¹ In late 2017, Digiday pointed out that such promotions skirted the rules on what is commercial content and what is organic user activity, violating not just audiences’ trust, but also the platform’s own terms of service by making sponsored content look like an authentic opinion or endorsement: “Facebook rules require verified page owners to disclose any commercial nature of the content posted to those pages, something that these celebs do not do.”⁹²

Digiday also reported in 2017 that influencer service firms had begun to design new strategies, offering to step in and replace news with their own content, an option more lucrative for the influencer while cutting news publishers out of the loop.

A growing number of celebrity and influencer pages are using … services that create content for the influencers in-house, then publish it directly to sites they create for the celebs themselves or, in Providr’s case, its own page, where the celeb gets a share of the total revenue generated by the reader’s visit.⁹³

Further, some of these influencer pages, displaying potentially dubious content untouched by any journalistic institution, were created using sophisticated AI tools and tracking software to mimic the websites the user has already visited.

[Influencer services company] Providr uses machine learning to customize the look and feel of its site depending on which influencer page a reader is coming from, to keep them on the site longer and serve more ads. “Our AI learns what a user is more prone to enjoy,” Gary Lipovetsky, the co-founder of Providr, said.⁹⁴

In the overhaul of rules surrounding branded content and content sharing since the 2016 US presidential election, Facebook took steps to address these influencer workarounds. In early 2018, Digiday reported that “page owners were not permitted to accept ‘anything of value’ in exchange for sharing content that they did not have a hand in creating through their pages.”⁹⁵ One CEO of an influencer-services company, however, is less concerned with the new rules and believes the challenging enforcement of these rules will slow their impact, asking, “How is Facebook supposed to know if George Takei posted something because he liked it or if he posted it because he got paid?”⁹⁶

iii. Facebook and the news

Facebook is a social media company offering both desktop and app versions of its popular networking service. The web statistics site Statista reports that “as of the second quarter of 2018, Facebook had 2.23 billion monthly active users”⁹⁷—nearly one-third of the planet’s population.

Following the 2016 American presidential election, it came to light that Facebook and its advertising tools (alongside a number of other social media platforms) were key technologies through which Russian information operations intended to “sow discord among the electorate.”⁹⁸ Jonathan Albright, research director at the Columbia Journalism School’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism, remarked:

Facebook built incredibly effective tools which let Russia profile citizens here in the U.S. and figure out how to manipulate us. … Facebook, essentially, gave them everything they needed.” [Albright] added that many of the tools that the Russians used, including those that allow ads to be targeted and that show how widespread an ad becomes, still pervade Facebook.⁹⁹

iv. News and trust

In early 2017, Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg, said the company would start ranking publishers by their perceived “trustworthiness.”¹⁰² Later, at a Facebook developer conference, Zuckerberg spoke about the early impact these algorithmic changes were having on how news items were displayed on the platform’s News Feed:

"[Facebook] has gathered data on how consumers perceive news brands by asking them to identify whether they have heard of various publications and if they trust them. We put [that data] into the system, and it is acting as a boost or a suppression, and we’re going to dial up the intensity of that over time,” he said. “We feel like we have a responsibility to further [break] down polarization and find common ground.”¹⁰³

Wired magazine noted, however, that the wording of the survey (published in full by BuzzFeed)¹⁰⁴ used for “trustworthiness” rankings doesn’t acknowledge the complexity and multiple definitions of trust, especially its political utility:

Not only do people not trust the media much in general, but their level of trust emerges predictably from their political orientation. Using data from an ongoing multi-subject survey out of the University of Michigan, a 2010 study in the journal American Behavioral Scientist said that three things predicted whether someone will trust the news media: how far they leaned to the left, politically; how trusting they are in general; and how well they think the economy is doing.¹⁰⁵

Similarly, a Pew study from May 2017 found a deep division in trust in the news media along party lines (see Figures 9 and 10).¹⁰⁶

Figure 9

Figure 10

v. Political ad or political news?

Another piece of Facebook’s response to the public outcry over information operations on the platform has been to implement new policies around how political ads are purchased and classified. This includes more strident rules around who can purchase a political ad, labeling every political ad with the name of the person who purchased it, and creating a publicly searchable archive for these ads.¹⁰⁷ ProPublica reported that “Facebook is betting that a combination of voluntary disclosure and review by both people and automated systems will close a vulnerability that was famously exploited by Russian meddlers in the 2016 election.”¹⁰⁸
This policy, however, introduces new complications into the relationship between Facebook and news publishers. A New York Times reporter covered a panel held at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism, which included Times CEO Mark Thompson and Facebook’s head of news partnerships, Campbell Brown, writing:

Publishers have been vocal in their protests of being included in the same archive as political ads. This month, organizations representing more than 20,000 publishers in the United States wrote to Facebook to object to the policy, and some outlets, like New York Media and The Financial Times, have vowed to suspend their paid promotions on Facebook if the policy is not changed. Facebook has agreed to create a distinction between publishers’ content and political ads, but it has not yet built a separate archive.¹⁰⁹

This policy is reportedly acute in its impact on local publishers, who say they may not have the resources to jump over the hurdles now required to steer clear of political-ad blacklisting. Digiday reported:

“In trying to combat the spread of fake news and other disinformation ahead of 2018’s elections, Facebook is putting barriers in front of legitimate news organizations that want to get their stories in front of a wider audience,” … One local publisher called Facebook’s addition of publishers to the political ad policy “wildly infuriating,” saying Facebook blocked promotion of a story about a county fair because the story mentioned a politician, even though the politician wasn’t running for re-election.¹¹⁰

Ads on Search

Turning from advertising on platforms to advertising on search, let’s look at the other arm of the ad duopoly, Google, the world’s most popular search engine. Statista reported that as of July 2018 Google had cornered 63 percent of the desktop search market and 94 percent of the mobile search market, handling nearly 12 billion search queries every day.¹¹¹

i. Targeting to intent

A classic idiom in the marketing industry is that nobody pays attention to an ad until they’re in the market for that product. One way to capture the attention of people who are in the market for a product is to target them with advertising while they’re searching for information on that product. This makes advertising on search engines a valuable endeavor for marketers.

There are two kinds of listings on search engines, one of which is an ad: “paid search” is when a website appears at the top of search results because a marketer paid the search engine for that spot. The other, “organic search,” is when the search engine’s algorithm determines a website is the best match for a user’s search query (see Figure 11, where the paid search listings are outlined in red, and organic search listings are outlined in blue).¹¹²:

Figure 11

Targeting consumers who are in the middle of searching for a product is called “targeting to intent”¹¹³ and takes place at a lucrative spot in what’s known as the “consumer decision journey.”¹¹⁴. The consumer decision journey is the process through which consumers initially and then actively contemplate a purchase, research that purchase, ultimately buy a product, and then experience that product in their lives.¹¹⁵
To illustrate how valuable this spot is, consider this statistic: in 2014, 13 out of the 20 most valuable ad spots on Google Search (bid on programmatically via the platform Google AdWords) included the terms “mesothelioma,”¹¹⁶ because the disease is often searched for by those who are potential clients for lucrative class-action lawsuits (see Figure 13).

Figure 13

You can also see in this figure the high click-through rates (CTR) for these ads. Remember that the average display ad garners a CTR lower than one percent, where the rates for these valuable search terms range from 3.08 to 7.79 percent.¹¹⁷

Google’s advertising practices have come under scrutiny from regulators. In 2017, a European Union court accused the company of antitrust violations, claiming it had tailored its algorithm to push its own invested or owned services to the top of organic search¹¹⁸—an accusation which Google disputes and has appealed, citing regulators’ lack of proof.¹¹⁹

ii. News on search

As digital personalization has grown more sophisticated, some critics have become increasingly concerned that digital news consumption may be taking place within a “filter bubble.” A filter bubble, first coined by academic Eli Pariser in the 2011 book of the same name,¹²⁰ is a state of information isolation wherein digital services like search engines and social media algorithmically tailor content recommendations according to a user’s consumption histories, to the point that the user is only shown information that conforms with their preexisting biases.¹²¹ Recent research, however, has disputed that Google is a vehicle of filter bubbles when it comes to news: empirical testing found that between conservatives and liberals, Google’s news recommendations were consistently identical.¹²²

Conclusion

Without advertising, history would not have seen the rise of autonomous news coverage, free from the yoke of political support.¹²³ Subscription-based models of information distribution ensure that only people with means have access; advertising makes information available to everybody. And without advertising, it’s doubtful that the internet would have grown as quickly, and served so many people all over the globe.¹²⁴ Yet, these infrastructures also brought about unforeseen challenges to the production and distribution of news. Technology investor John Battelle, in writing about the damage that digital advertising has wrought, quoted author Steven Johnson (who himself was quoting economist and Nobel laureate Thomas Schelling): “One thing a person cannot do, no matter how rigorous his analysis or heroic his imagination, is to draw up a list of things that would never occur to him.”¹²⁵

Further reading

• The Daily You: How the New Advertising Industry Is Defining Your Identity and Your Worth by Joseph Turow (Yale University Press, 2013)
• Weaponizing the Digital Influence Machine: The Political Perils of Online Ad Tech, by Anthony Nadler, Matthew Crain, and Joan Donovan (Data & Society, 2018)
• The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads by Tim Wu (Vintage, 2017)
• “Digital Marketing Strategy, Course Overview Note,” Harvard Business School, by Thales Teixeira (Harvard Business School, 2013)
• Frenemies: The Epic Disruption of the Ad Business (and Everything Else) by Ken Auletta (Penguin, 2018)
• Discovering the News: A Social History of American Newspapers by Michael Schudson (Basic Books, 1981)
• “Friend and Foe: The Platform Press at the Heart of Journalism,” Tow Center for Digital Journalism report
• Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy by Cathy O’Neil (Broadway Books 2016)
• “Grappling with the Weirdness of Advertising” Data & Society Points blog post by Caroline Jack (Data & Society Points Blog)

Glossary

Ad attribution—an analysis of ad viewers’ buying habits to determine which ad actually led to the final purchase
Ad blocker—a browser plug-in (digital tool that can be downloaded and added onto a browser), which blocks ads from showing content on users’ screens, prevents ads from downloading tracking cookies onto users’ devices, and also blocks ads’ attempts to communicate with their ad-exchange servers
Ad exchange—open platforms for comparing the price and quality of impressions and buying them
Ad fraud—creating fake ad traffic by way of content-scraping websites or other environments or creating other fictitious mechanisms for delivering ads that are not seen by consumers (see also “Bots” and “Bot viewing”)
Ad network—companies which aggregate websites with comparable inventory into bundles, making it easier for advertisers to centralize their ad purchases
Ad optimization—testing and analyzing data more extensively to better target ads
Ad tech—umbrella term for the system of software programs, data servers, marketing agencies, and data markets which facilitate the sale of user data and the display of advertising messages to users of the internet, including search engines and social-media sites and apps
Affiliate advertising—when an advertiser works with affiliates (i.e., websites and publishers) to place sponsored posts or promoted products, and those affiliates get a commission when a sponsored post or product on their site leads to a sale
Attention economy—the marketplace for the increasingly scarce and valuable resource of consumer attention
Bots—software programs carrying out automated tasks on the internet
Bot viewing/bot traffic—when software programs are designed to mimic users and inflate audience numbers
Branding—image-based messages which associate a product with a set of values
Consumer decision journey—the process through which consumers initially and then actively contemplate a purchase, research that purchase, ultimately buy a product, and then experience that product in their lives
CPM—“cost per thousand of views” (a term borrowed from television advertising measured by Nielsen ratings). The “M” comes from “mille,” the Latin word for “thousand”
CPC—Cost Per Click, paid to a publisher when a viewer clicks on an ad
CPA—Cost Per Action, paid to a publisher when a viewer both clicks on an ad and makes a purchase
Display ad—rectangular ads which appear on websites visited through a browser. They come in several formats, such as billboards, portraits, sidekicks, and sliders.
Engagement metrics—measurements for how an audience engages with a website. This includes clicks (how many people click on ads on a site), hits (pageviews), sessions (everything a reader does while on a site), uniques (number of unique visitors to the site), and more.
Engagement programs—software programs, such as the popular ChartBeat, which measure and display engagement metrics
Filter bubble—theoretical state of information isolation, where users’ digital services like search and social media algorithmically tailor content recommendations according to the user’s consumption histories, to the point that the user is only shown information that conforms with their preexisting biases
Impression—industry metric for buying ad “views,” or evidence that someone using the product selling the advertising saw a specific advertisement.
Influencer—someone who has a strong relationship with his or her audience and can affect their purchase decisions because of the knowledge and authority they have
Interactive Advertising Bureau—the marketing industry trade group that sets standards for digital display ads
Malware—software intended to damage or do other unwanted actions on a computer system
Paid search—when a website appears at the top of search results because a marketer paid the search engine for that spot
Paywall—a digital system to prevent readers from reading content without a subscription. Roughly, there are three kinds of paywalls: hard, where all readers need to pay for access to all articles across all devices; metered, where a certain number of articles are free per month, after which readers have to pay for access; and leaky/porous, where a certain number of articles are free but readers can access content when they come to the news site from a search engine or social platform.
Real-time programmatic bidding—the live auction for viewers’ attention, taking place in milliseconds every time an ad loads
Retargeting—targeting your ads to audiences even after they leave your site
Targeting—tailoring an ad to appeal to specific types of viewers, based on one or both of two different parameters: who you are (i.e., demographic targeting) and what you do (i.e., behavioral targeting)
Tracking cookies—bits of code like HTML and Javascript which can track users, recording and reporting back to a website which sites they visit and the things they purchase

Acknowledgments

Thank you to Emily Bell for suggesting this report, and for our sprawling discussions about ad tech. Thanks to Kathy Zhang and Katie Johnston for their unflagging support, Ava Sirrah for her suggestions, and Sam Thielman for his keen eye on the ad industry and what makes it tick. Thanks to Bill Grueskin and Dr. Adam Klein for their course on the Business of Journalism, which provided invaluable material. Thanks both to Sam and Abigail Hartstone for their eagle-eyed edits. Lastly, thanks to my unflagging advisers Dr. David Stark, Dr. Michael Schudson, Dr. Chris Anderson, Susan E. McGregor, and Andie Tucher. September 2018

Citations

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8. Interactive Advertising Bureau, New Ad Portfolio, https://www.iab.com/newadportfolio/.
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11. Thales Teixeira, http://www.economicsofattention.com/.
12. Joseph Turow, The daily you: How the new advertising industry is definingyour identity and your worth.
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17. Ibid.
18. Guide to Ad Tech in a nutshell, May 31, 2017, https://medium.com/automatad/lets-take-a-look-at-the-history-of-ad-tech-landscape-abf4ced58ac8.
19. , October 19, 2014, https://www.adclarity.com/2014/10/ad-exchanges-vs-ad-networks/.
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24. Joseph Turow, The daily you: How the new advertising industry is definingyour identity and your worth.
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26. The New York Times Digital Media Kit, http://nytmediakit.com/digital.
27. The Guardian Advertising Terms and Conditions, https://www.theguardian.com/advertising/advertising-terms-conditions.
28. Ibid.
29. The New York Times Digital Media Kit Online Ad Specifications, http://nytmediakit.com/specs/digital/online-ad-specs.
30. Bill Grueskin, Ava Seave, and Lucas Graves, “Chapter One: News FromEverywhere,” May 10, 2011, https://archives.cjr.org/the_business_of_digital_journalism/chapter_one_news_from_everywhere.php.
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35. Joseph Turow, “A Guide to the Digital Advertising Industry That’s Watch-ing Your Every Click,” February 7, 2012, https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/02/a-guide-to-the-digital-advertising-industry-thats-watching-your-every-click/252667/.
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38. David F. Gallagher, “Times Site Was Victim of a Malicious Ad Swap,”September 14, 2009, https://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/09/14/times-site-was-victim-of-a-malicious-ad-swap/.
39. Ashlee Vance, “Times Web Ads Show Security Breach,” September 14, 2009,https://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/15/technology/internet/15adco.html.
40. Alex Hern, “Major sites including New York Times and BBC hit by’ransomware’ malvertising,” March 16, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/mar/16/major-sites-new-york-times-bbc-ransomware-malvertising.
41. Alex Hern, “Ads don’t work so miscs are using your electricity to pay thebills,” September 27, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/sep/27/pirate-bay-showtime-ads-miscs-electricity-pay-bills-cryptocurrency-bitcoin.
42. Ashlee Vance, “Times Web Ads Show Security Breach.”
43. Jeff Gerth, “In the digital age, The New York Times treads an increasinglyslippery path between news and advertising.”
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47. Nushin Rashidian, Pete Brown, and Elizabeth Hansen with Emily Bell,Jonathan Albright, and Abigail Hartstone, “Friend and Foe: The Platform Pressat the Heart of Journalism.”
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49. Jeff Gerth, “In the digital age, The New York Times treads an increasinglyslippery path between news and advertising.”
50. Ibid.
51. AngÃĺle Christin, Clicks or Pulitzer? : Web Journalists and their Work inthe United States and France.
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53. Otto Peura, “What do bounce, user, session and other Google Analyticsterms mean?”
54. AngÃĺle Christin, “Web analytics in the workplace: What Amazon and webnewsrooms have in common—and where they differ.”
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57. Guide to Ad Tech in a nutshell,
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67. Mike Shields, “Here’s How Oversized Web Ads Are Encouraging Ad Block-ing.”
68. Marty Swant, “Apple’s Next Version of Safari Will Block Desktop Ad Track-ing and Autoplay Videos,” June 5, 2017, https://www.adweek.com/digital/apples-next-version-of-safari-will-block-desktop-ads-and-autoplay-videos/.
69. Samuel Gibbs, “Google turns on default adblocker within Chrome,” Febru-ary 15, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/feb/15/google-adblocker-chrome-browser.
70. Michael Rosenwald, “The digital media industry needs to react to ad block-ers . . . or else,” September/October 2015, https://www.cjr.org/business_of_news/will_ad_blockers_kill_the_digital_media_industry.php.
71. , “Mourning Old Media’s Decline,” October 28, 2008, https://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/29/business/media/29carr.html.
72. The New York Times Paywall., February 2012 (Revised January 2013).
73. The New York Times Company 2014 Annual Report, February 24, 2015.
74. Mark Irvine, “Google Ads Benchmarks for YOUR Industry [Updated!]”https://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2016/02/29/google-adwords-industry-benchmarks.
75. Neil Patel, “What is Affiliate Marketing?” https://neilpatel.com/what-is-affiliate-marketing/.
76. About Wirecutter, https://thewirecutter.com/about/.
77. Case Flash Forward: The New York Times Paywall, May 17, 2016 (RevisedJuly 17, 2018).
78. Rob Howard, “Three reasons why journalism paywalls still don’t work,”January 5, 2018, https://qz.com/1173033/the-psychology-behind-why-journalism-paywalls-still-dont-work/.
79. Max Willens, “How Hearst Newspapers changes its paywall to drive readerloyalty,” March 5, 2018, https://digiday.com/media/hearst-newspapers-changes-paywall-drive-reader-loyalty/.
80. Mike Ananny and Leila Bighash, “Why drop a paywall? Mapping industryaccounts of online news decommodification,” International Journal of Communi-cation 10 (2016): 22.
81. Ibid.
82. Julie Creswell, “Amazon Sets Its Sights on the $88 Billion Online Ad Mar-ket,” September 3, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/03/business/media/amazon-digital-ads.html.
83. Nilay Patel, “The mobile web sucks,” July 20, 2015, https://www.theverge.com/2015/7/20/9002721/the-mobile-web-sucks.
84. Dylan Curran, “Are you ready? Here is all the data Facebook and Googlehave on you.”
85. Adinject, “Who are Influencers? Get to know 4 Types of Influencers,” Jan-uary 30, 2018, https://medium.com/adinject/who-are-influencers-get-to-know-4-types-of-influencers-f0c984aeba4f.
86. Ibid.
87. YouTube for Brands, 2014.
88. Ana Andjelic, Can luxury brands hack their own growth? November 2015,https://www.theguardian.com/media-network/2015/nov/03/luxury-brands-growth-hacker-marketing.
89. Joanna Walters, “George Takei saga sheds light on the murky world of pay-to-promote news,” November 24, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/media/2017/nov/24/george-takei-pay-to-promote-social-media-facebook-mic-slate-refinery29.
90. Max Willens, “Facebook-thirsty publishers turn to celebrities to worm into the news feed,” October 21, 2017, https://digiday.com/media/facebook-thirsty-publishers-turn-celebrities-worm-news-feed/.
91. Ibid.
92. Ibid.
93. Ibid.
94. Ibid.
95. Max Willens, “Facebook’s new branded-content guidelines will force somepublishers to abandon a business model,” February 12, 2018, https://digiday.com/media/facebooks-new-branded-content-guidelines-will-force-publishers-abandon-business-model/.
96. Ibid.
97. “Number of monthly active Facebook users worldwide as of 2nd quarter2018 (in millions)” (), https://www.statista.com/statistics/264810/number-of-monthly-active-facebook-users-worldwide/.
98. Sheera Frenkel and Katie Benner, “To Stir Discord in 2016, Russians TurnedMost Often to Facebook,” February 17, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/17/technology/indictment-russian-tech-facebook.html.
99. Ibid.
100. Mike Isaac, “Facebook Overhauls News Feed to Focus on What Friendsand Family Share,” January 11, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/11/technology/facebook-news-feed.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=first-column-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news.
101. Josh Constine, “Facebook and Instagram launch US political ad labeling andarchive,” May 24, 2018, https://techcrunch.com/2018/05/24/facebook-political-ad-archive/.
102. Mathew Ingram, “Campbell Brown on Facebook’s plans to decide what newsis trustworthy,” May 3, 2018, https://www.cjr.org/q_and_a/campbell-brown-facebook-news.php.
103. Ben Smith and Mat Honan, “Facebook Has Begun To Rank News Organi-zations By Trust, Zuckerberg Says,” May 1, 2018, https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/bensmith/facebook-has-begun-to-rank-news-organizations-by-trust#.jd4vavbBA.
104. Alex Kantrowitz, “This Is Facebook’s News Survey,” January 23, 2018,https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/alexkantrowitz/this-is-facebooks-news-survey#.njepxpM6X.
105. Adam Rogers, “You Can’t Trust Facebook’s Search for Trusted News,” Jan-uary 25, 2018, https://www.wired.com/story/you-cant-trust-facebooks-search-for-trusted-news/.
106. Americans’ Attitudes About the News Media Deeply Divided Along Par-tisan Lines, May 10, 2017, http://www.journalism.org/2017/05/10/americans-attitudes-about-the-news-media-deeply-divided-along-partisan-lines/.
107. Josh Constine, “Facebook and Instagram launch US political ad labeling andarchive.”
108. Jeremy B. Merrill, Ariana Tobin, and Madeleine Varner, “What Facebook’sNew Political Ad System Misses,” May 24, 2018, https://www.propublica.org/article/what-facebooks-new-political-ad-system-misses.
109. Ben Sisario, “Facebook’s New Political Algorithms Increase Tension WithPublishers,” June 14, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/14/business/media/mark-thompson-facebook-algorithm.html.
110. Lucia Moses, Facebook tweaks political ads policy, but not enough to satisfyirate publishers, June 28, 2018, https://digiday.com/media/facebook-tweaks-political-ads-policy-not-enough-satisfy-irate-publishers/.
111. , “Number of explicit core search queries powered by search engines inthe United States as of July 2018 (in billions)” (), https://www.statista.com/statistics/265796/us-search-engines-ranked-by-number-of-core-searches/.
112. Modern Marketing Partners, Paid Search vs. Organic Search, March 13,2013, https://www.modernmarketingpartners.com/paid-search-vs-organic-search/.
113. Ethan Zuckerman, “The Internet’s Original Sin.”
114. Joseph Turow, The daily you: How the new advertising industry is definingyour identity and your worth.
115. David Court and Dave Elzinga and Susan Mulder and and Ole JørgenVetvik, “The consumer decision journey,” June 2009, https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/marketing-and-sales/our-insights/the-consumer-decision-journey.
116. “The Most Expensive Keywords in Paid Search, by Cost Per Click & Spend”(), https://www.adgooroo.com/the-most-expensive-keywords-in-paid-search-by-cost-per-click-and-ad-spend/.
117. Ibid.
118. Natasha Lomas, “Google fined $2.7BN for EU antitrust violations over shop-ping searches,” June 27, 2017, https://techcrunch.com/2017/06/27/google-fined-e2-42bn-for-eu-antitrust-violations-over-shopping-searches/?_ga=2.183358894.985552415.1532622430-372491574.1532016941.
119. Natalia Drozdiak, “Alphabet’s Google Responds to EU Antitrust Fine;Search-engine giant argues in court papers released Monday that European regu-lator failed to prove its behavior hurt rivals,” October 30, 2017.
120. Eli Pariser, The filter bubble: How the new personalized web is changing whatwe read and how we think (New York: Penguin, 2011).
121. Engin Bozdag, “Bias in algorithmic filtering and personalization,” Ethics andTow Center for Digital Journalism58 Guide to Ad TechInformation Technology (June 23, 2013): 209âĂŞ227, https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%5C%2Fs10676-013-9321-6.
122. E Nechushtai, SC Lewis, “What kind of news gatekeepers do we want ma-chines to be? Filter bubbles, fragmentation, and the normative dimensions ofalgorithmic recommendations,” Computers in Human Behavior, 2018.
123. Michael Schudson, Discovering the news: A social history of American news-papers (New York, NY: Basic Books, 1981).
124. Ethan Zuckerman, “The Internet’s Original Sin.”
125. John Battelle, “Facebook, Twitter, and the Senate Hearings: It’s The Business Model, Period,” September 6, 2018, https://battellemedia.com/archives/2018/09/facebook-twitter-and-the-senate-hearings-its-the-business-model-period.

Elizabeth Anne Watkins is a PhD student in Communications at Columbia University and a contributing researcher at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism.