Gijs Nelissen / Lifelog - All blog posts

How PR firms are trading their authority for a quick buck

Mon, 22 Jul 2024 09:33:00 GMT

As a responsible consumer, If you want to buy a product or service, where do you do your research? You might ask your friends and family, or check TikTok and Twitter. However, if you're like the majority of people, you'll likely look to a search engine first.

As you should, right? Google is, for the time being, the premiere repository of all human knowledge. From a simple search query, you can discover top ten lists, blog posts, reviews, and more. These carefully ranked results are supposedly laid out by Google's powerful algorithm that determines E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness).

75% of consumers in a 2024 study report using online reviews "regularly" or "always" when researching local businesses, and 81% of respondents indicate that they use Google to find local reviews. Google research has become an integral part of most of our daily lives and decision-making. Search-based consumer research has worked for years and will likely continue to benefit consumers for the foreseeable future. Right?

Well, maybe not.

This system is deteriorating rapidly before our eyes. Let's discuss why it's collapsing, who is to blame, and how we can adapt to protect ourselves and our wallets.

Affiliate marketing: what went wrong

Before pointing fingers and assigning blame, let's take a step back and look at affiliate marketing. Essentially, affiliate marketing is a way for brands and marketplaces to incentivize content creators to share their products and platforms. The concept behind affiliate marketing was a good one. It went a little something like this:

Consumers need well-researched, objective information about the goods and services they're interested in buying, but they don't have the time to purchase and test every single item or service.
Bloggers, journalists, and content creators fill this need for consumer research by building a livelihood and a reputation for providing insights and reviews based on their established niche. Examples include software enthusiasts, mommy bloggers, travel hackers, etc.
Companies and marketplaces provide a light incentive for content creators to mention or review their products through affiliate links.
Reviewers and creators fund their continued work through these affiliate programs. The more successful they are and the bigger their audience, the more commission they get from the links.

Now, it's easy to see how the system could be manipulated. Who stops the content creators from explicitly and only reviewing products they get paid for? And what if the "best" products don't provide affiliate links? Does this preclude their products or services from getting mentioned in the supposed "top" lists? The affiliate marketing system incentivizes reviewers to promote the most lucrative affiliate products, not necessarily the most high-quality ones.

The only real safeguard to prevent this from happening is one thing: reputation. Journalists, bloggers, and content creators who want to continue doing what they're doing for the long term have to make sure they're not recommending garbage to their audiences. People don't like being manipulated out of their money, and they will gladly turn on even a beloved creator who greedily shills low-quality products.

The system has a decent self-correcting mechanism. Affiliate links can—and do—get abused, but those who abuse them often tarnish their reputation and rarely become successful in whatever niche they are pursuing. They get called out by audiences for being money-grubbing and disingenuous, quickly losing relevance and credibility.

The real problem comes when media outlets start getting involved and leveraging their own powerful, long-standing brand identity to co-sign and host lecherous affiliate linking techniques. Unfortunately, almost all of them have begun doing this.

The sketchy ad practices

I've written at length about how legacy media outlets are either dying or have to shift focus away from actual journalism in order to survive. Ads are ruining the user experience for many legacy media outlets, and they constantly have to cut corners. Many news outlets are trying to get creative and diversify their revenue streams, including affiliate marketing.

Again, this isn't an inherently bad thing. Including a link to an Amazon listing of a product you're already mentioning anyway isn't going to massively disrupt or harm anyone. The newspaper gets a little bit of revenue, the reader gets a convenient link to a product they might already be interested in, and everybody wins.

Unfortunately, more and more local and global media outlets are taking this too far. They are leveraging the one thing they have, brand recognition and established authoritativeness, and turning it into a way to sell products and services they have no intention of adequately vetting under the guise of "self-sponsored posts" and advertorials.

These outlets, alongside sketchy "digital PR" companies, are working together to trick consumers into assuming they're reading an article from a trusted, journalistic source, but they're actually reading an opaque, unscrupulous ad.

Here's how it works: a marketing or PR firm representing a company approaches a local or global news outlet to write a sponsored post. The marketers pay for the space (benefitting the outlet) and provide the content. The content includes opportunistically placed brand mentions and affiliate links (benefitting the marketing/PR team). The only people who don't benefit? The consumers who have no idea they just read a 2,000 word ad.

Because that's the thing: when you read a news article, you expect there to be ads, maybe in the form of a popup or a sidebar, not for the article to be the ad. Sure, many of the articles have a real-sounding title, are written by a real-sounding person, and may even have an affiliate disclosure somewhere in tiny print.

But when you, as a consumer, go looking for product reviews and information, do you expect to have to research the author and their credentials and read every single line of tiny text? Or do you go into the experience assuming the media outlet will have integrity? Especially when you purposely seek out that media outlet based on brand recognition and respect for the institution.

How SEO plays a role

All of this begs the question: What happened to traditional advertisements? Why don't companies buy ad space on Google or the news outlets themselves? Well, the simple answer is that people don't trust advertisements. The average person's eyes glaze over an ad, thanks to the fact that we all see hundreds of ads per day.

Additionally, we're conditioned to see a "sponsored" tag on the link and not trust it because advertisers have no incentive to be honest. Advertisements can lie to you, and nobody stops them; thus, nobody trusts them. So, instead, marketers and brands are choosing the indirect route by leveraging media outlets to obfuscate the pay-to-play nature of what they're doing. So, more lies.

Which is fine; that's their choice. Outlets and digital marketers can choose to go this route and damage their credibility in the process. But we also need to consider how SEO plays a role in this. Google ranks legacy media outlets highly based on brand recognition and factors like established Domain Authority.

However, Google doesn't seem to differentiate self-sponsored "ad" posts from actual, credible journalism. They're effectively highly-ranking cheap advertorial posts like they'd rank a breaking news story, just because they're being published on the same media outlet. So now, when you use Google to do research, you're getting fed with actual ads in the form of sponsored and paid-for advertisements—but then the bona fide first-page results that you've come to know and trust? Also ads.

The long-term damage to journalistic reputation

Alright, maybe one of these digital marketing companies published a sponsored post in your favorite digital newspaper and got you to buy a product that you assumed would be reputable based on it being, you know, listed in Forbes or Business Insider. It wasn’t, you wasted a bit of money, and there’s not much you can do about it. Big deal, who cares, right?

Well, we all should. Remember back at the beginning when we talked about why affiliate links work, and that's because content creators don't want to destroy their reputation by selling their audiences garbage? More and more consumers are catching onto these "parasite SEO" practices. Soon, the fact that a product is listed in CNN or the Wall Street Journal could no longer mean anything.

Media outlets are playing the short game. They are staying afloat in the interim while doing massive harm to their reputation. You can only burn consumers once or twice before they stop trusting you or your outlet to give credible information. These legacy and local newspapers are banking on the idea that their readers are ignorant of their sketchy practices. But they're failing to consider that the younger generations no longer trust them and they have nobody to blame but themselves.

It's not just the media outlets that must be held accountable for these sketchy parasitic practices. The digital marketers and public relations firms that engage in them also need to be held responsible. They're also garnering a reputation as sketchy corner-cutters who are more concerned about a quick dollar and less about building relationships with the public on behalf of their brands and clients.

The search engines should be aware that consumers are starting to catch on and they should adjust their algorithms accordingly. As artificial intelligence grows and Google faces a disastrous blow to its ad revenue through generative AI search results, they're not doing themselves any favors by religiously linking to legacy media outlets that auction off their reputation to the highest (affiliate) bidder.

If you can't trust Google results, why not just search on Open AI? Or TikTok? Or go straight to Amazon and read the reviews? Some companies think they are too big to fail and think their consumers are too dumb to notice. But I don't believe either of those things are true, and the data shows that consumers are getting tired of it.

What consumers can do to combat parasite SEO practices

Staying informed is the best thing we can do as active and engaged consumers. It's not enough to search "top VPN in 2024" or "top PR software." We have to dig deeper and do more thorough research.

This can involve reading actual consumer reviews on websites like TrustPilot and G2 and checking thoroughly for "sponsored" or "affiliate" disclosures. We must also research the author and see who they're writing for and why. Following the money is always a good way to determine whether you can trust them or not.

And lastly, as consumers, we should give back to the systems that empower us. We need to write reviews and help others in the same way that their reviews help us. Give brutally honest—but fair—feedback about products and services. Reach out to companies and let them know what improvements you'd like to see. And if you're disgusted by the parasitic nature of your favorite publication using this sketchy form of SEO, let them know directly, or indirectly by no longer supporting them.

It's 2024, and it's still hard to cancel your news subscription

Mon, 26 Feb 2024 19:57:00 GMT

It’s no shock to anyone that we’re in the age of subscriptions. Our entire world has been Netflixified, with every service wanting a piece of the action. The average person in 2020 had a baffling twelve subscriptions each, with this number only continuing to rise.

Gone are the days when you could just buy a video game, rent a movie, or purchase a piece of software. No, instead, you have to subscribe. Now, I hear you shouting at whatever screen you’re looking at, “Aren’t you the co-founder of a software that bills its customers monthly?!”

And, to be fully transparent, yes. However, you can criticise a system while still being entrenched in it (at least, that’s what I tell myself so I can sleep at night). But you know what we don’t do at Prezly? Make it really freaking annoying to cancel our service.

People are dumping their news subscriptions – here’s why

I’ve written previously about how newsrooms worldwide are closing down left and right. This is partly because ad revenue is not lucrative enough to sustain operational costs despite having egregiously obnoxious ad placements.

I mean, just look at this shit (and this is Forbes):

Forbes news article

But the other part? People are rapidly cancelling their subscriptions, which media corporations desperately rely on to supplement ad revenue and create a consistent income stream. For example, just in the United States alone, digital and print media subscriptions have dramatically decreased in the past two decades, according to the Pew Research Center. Daily newspaper subscriptions that were once in the lofty 60 millions are now at an abysmal 20.9 million.

Just some of the reasons people cancel their services include:

Increasing costs – Subscriptions for newspapers and magazines have skyrocketed, like the 19% price increase in UK digital news subscriptions since last year. With the economic downturn, the average person has significantly less spending power to invest in unnecessary purchases like paid media, especially when they can get a lot of the same information faster and for free through social media (though you could argue you do pay for this with your attention and soul).
Declining quality – With newsrooms cutting budgets, there are fewer journalists, and the remaining ones are often expected to do more work for less money. Readers now have significantly decreased access to high-quality local news and deep investigative research stories, while publishers simply cannot afford to fund good journalism.
Churnalism – Many news stories just regurgitate other people’s news stories rather than carry out original research and investigation, largely thanks to the aforementioned budget cuts and the speed at which information moves these days. Media has become far more reactive than proactive in telling stories, both locally and globally.
Too much pop culture – Digital news outlets don't have the resources or bandwidth to post things that don't have wide-reaching relevance or interest. This often means that they appeal to the lowest common denominator in the form of celebrity culture. Many news readers simply don't care to pay for petty pop-culture drama.
Media bias – Too many news outlets have become aggressively beholden to their stakeholder and investor interests. This bias seeps out in subtle and not-so-subtle ways, including what stories get told and the general slant of how information is imparted to readers. If you don't happen to politically or socially align with that framing, it can be alienating, if not downright infuriating.

And on and on. There are a million reasons why people are leaving their news subscription services. These cancellations are made even more interesting by the fact that news outlets are making it horrendously difficult to cancel.

Sometimes, cancelling isn’t so easy

A 2021 media survey found that only 41% of American news outlets allowed their subscribers to cancel online. The other 59% required jumping through hoops, often requiring subscribers to engage in some form of in-person contact. This typically entails a phone call or chat conversation where an aggressive salesperson does everything in their power to make sure you don't cancel. They lob discounts, shame tactics, or other “customer retention” psychological hacks to keep people locked in and paying.

A Redditor complains about this practice:

Decided to cancel my New York Times subscription today and to do so you have to open a chat with a representative. Had to wait in a queue for several minutes to get one, then had to explain why I wanted to cancel my subscription and repeat that I wanted to cancel my subscription. At the end of all this, my subscription wasn’t even canceled, my “request is pending,” so I have to follow up again. Seems uncool that a company can make it this difficult for you to stop giving them money every month.

So, after going through all the work of contacting somebody and explaining the situation, news services are deliberately making the process of cancelling slow, inconvenient, and annoying.

Radek | velvetshark.eth on Twitter / X

Why “dark patterns” are awful for media services

To be fair, difficult cancellations are not a problem unique to news subscription services. Plenty of other services, such as gyms and ISPs, make it difficult, too. It's such an issue that governments are starting to get involved, such as the recent recommendation by the United States Federal Trade Commission to create mandatory “click to cancel” regulations and the European Union’s provisional Digital Services Act.

Until governing bodies get more proactive about solving this problem, it's down to the consumers to navigate these infuriating cancellation systems. In the meantime, corporations, including news organisations, are making millions of dollars per year, banking (literally) on you getting so annoyed that you just give up trying to cancel.

And please don't be mistaken – none of this is accidental. The inability to cancel subscriptions actually has a term: dark patterns or “deceptive design patterns”.

dark pattern (also known as a "deceptive design pattern") is "a user interface that has been carefully crafted to trick users into doing things, such as buying overpriced insurance with their purchase or signing up for recurring bills".^[1]^[2]^[3] User experience designer Harry Brignull coined the neologism on 28 July 2010 with the registration of darkpatterns.org, a "pattern library with the specific goal of naming and shaming deceptive user interfaces

Wikipedia - Dark Patterns

And in the case of media services that means intentionally confusing user account settings, and, impossible-to-cancel subscription services.

Needless to say, consumers absolutely hate being tricked out of their money by sketchy business practices. It’s become such a loathed phenomenon that websites have even begun tracking atrocious examples of this specific type of user manipulation.

While you might expect dark patterns from dodgy mobile apps or other seedy services, it feels like a bit of a slap in the face when the world’s most prominent newspapers play these stupid cancellation games.

Gráinne on Twitter / X

Dark patterns erode trust in the industry, and it has to stop

Throughout much of its history, journalism has been a respected institution. At a time when trust in journalism is at an all-time low, the last thing media outlets should be doing is trapping people in their subscriptions.

Media corporations using dark patterns are tacky. They’re manipulative. And while we can hope that some legislation will make this a thing of the past, it’s worth remembering the outlets that never stooped to this behavior even when it was all the rage – and those that did.

Media monetisation is making us stupid

Thu, 01 Feb 2024 13:37:00 GMT

When print media started making the move to digital, newspapers were cautiously optimistic. The transition was inevitable as the internet became ubiquitous. It’s not like the newspapers could simply opt out of digitising. And who knows, maybe hosting the news online could prove to be a lucrative new revenue stream for the already thin-margined print media industry. Right?

Wrong.

Text media monetisation has been an ongoing uphill battle for basically every single news outlet from the moment it started. Corners are being cut on a daily basis, and over 2,000 local newspapers have entirely closed down since 2000, just in the United States alone.

As MIT researcher George Westerman eloquently said, “When digital transformation is done right, it’s like a caterpillar turning into a butterfly, but when done wrong, all you have is a really fast caterpillar.”

The move online, which seemed so promising, has in actuality proved devastating for text media. So, what went wrong, and how is this catastrophic shift turning us all into idiots?

The future that almost was

Back to that cautious optimism. The transition from print to digital was going to be such a great thing and provide a revitalising boost to the print media market. Journalists could cover stories faster, publish updates in real-time, send out quick corrections, and otherwise be far more nimble than print ever allowed.

Not to mention the obvious cost-saving aspects. Readers could access the exact same news without the high costs associated with producing, printing, and delivering physical newspapers.

Win–win, right?

Right?

Why making money from text media is so difficult

Before we can talk about the current tragic impacts of digital media on the average consumer, let's first talk about what went wrong. Why are the remaining newspapers haemorrhaging money? The future looked so promising but took such a rapid nosedive.

Future economists will probably analyse the fall of the media to death because it is fascinating. This reductionist list will likely only scratch the surface of how this massive industry was crippled so quickly and utterly. But here are the main reasons media orgs fumbled the transition from print to digital.

Everything was free for too long

Understandably, but a bit naively, newspapers made banner and on-page ads a big part of resolving their revenue gaps when physical paper subscriptions began to dwindle in the late 1990s. This makes sense in theory – readers paid for physical newspapers and still saw ample printed ads, so why would they take issue with free digital content… and a few ads?

So, they made everything accessible with the expectation that ads would generate revenue. Obviously, this blew up in their faces with the invention and rapid uptake of adblockers. Soon, media consumers were getting their cake and eating it too – all the news media at their fingertips with none of the pesky revenue generated for the media outlets whose print ads were also drying up at a fever pitch.

Unfortunately, by this point, consumers were conditioned to get the news for free. Why would they suddenly start paying for something if they never had to before?

If you don't give them the news, someone else will

Eventually, many digital newspapers started going to the membership and subscription model. But this transition did not happen unilaterally (and still hasn’t, to be fair). Some newspapers began requiring a subscription, while others didn’t. Some allowed for a few “free” articles per month, making it possible for consumers to cobble together a media consumption diet around these restrictions while avoiding paying for anything. Paywalls, in addition, were often leaky and easy to circumvent.

Realistically, many of us find the news through search aggregates like Google News. If one source is blocking your ability to read the story, you could simply go to the next. This is great (albeit a little annoying) for consumers and bad for the media outlets, who expected consumers to be a bit more brand loyal than they turned out to be, particularly their younger readers.

Text is easy to copy

Even if you get somebody to loyally subscribe to your newspaper, what stops them from simply copying the text and sharing it with friends, relatives, and internet strangers? You may be thinking, “When would this happen? When would someone actually take the time to copy and paste news text to other people enough for this to be a significant problem?”

Well, Reddit, for starters.

Reddit is a massive discussion board for people to come together and anonymously analyse the day's biggest stories (and everything else in existence). A user will post a link to a news article, and everyone will very politely and never aggressively present their perspective about said news article. This sort of distribution seems good for news outlets because it means clicks, views, and engagement.

It isn’t.

Unfortunately, for convenience, the poster will often include the entire body of the linked article within their Reddit post. And, if there's a paywall, someone who happens to have a legitimate subscription will copy and share the entire article with tens of thousands of people who otherwise would never have been able to read it without a subscription. This minor issue becomes a much bigger issue when you realise that Reddit on its own has almost 56 million daily active users.

Some news outlets have even taken to copyright-striking various Reddit communities, according to Redditors, but it barely makes a dent in a much bigger problem (for the news outlets). And Reddit is just one very specific example of consumers copying paywalled text to general, non-paying audiences.

Nobody respects (or trusts) writers

So many people assume that because the majority of the population is functionally literate, anybody can be a writer or journalist. With the increasing popularity of AI tools, this sentiment is only rising. It doesn't help that many writers and journalists take massive shortcuts and are essentially forced to cut corners to stay competitive, further eroding our collective respect for journalism.

And even if the average person did respect the institution of journalism, they certainly don't trust it. According to a 2022 Gallup poll, trust in the media is incredibly low. Only 7% of Americans interviewed actually held “a great deal” of confidence/trust in journalism to report the news fairly and accurately.

This again begs the question, why would people willingly pay for something they neither trust nor respect?

People don't read anymore

How many times have you heard the phrase, “I recently read this thing…” and you know they are either going to tell you about a viral TikTok they watched or a headline they read and made a snap judgement about? The reality is that attention spans are shot. The average person is on a constant media consumption overload, and nobody has the time to read a 10,000-word investigative journalism piece unless it’s for a university essay or while languishing on their retirement yacht.

Sure, people are constantly scrolling. But how much are they actually reading?

Why all of this matters

If all of the above factors only affected the bottom line of the news media outlets, that would be one thing. We could collectively mourn the profit losses and continue with our lives basically unaffected. However, this shift away from text media and long-form content, in general, is having some pretty devastating impacts on individuals and our collective intelligence.

Investigative journalism is basically dead. The average attention span is decreasing rapidly. The West’s favourite short-form video platform has over one billion monthly users.

Yes, billion. With a b.

It's not fair to say that the massive shift away from thoughtful, investigative, accessible news media led to the rapid degradation of the average person's ability to think critically and process information. But it certainly hasn’t helped.

The reality is that every political and social party feels like there is news bias and censorship stacked against them. Because the news outlets are haemorrhaging money, they have to rely on overly sensationalised drama to generate clicks and (minuscule) revenue. Rage gets people talking. Making people mad drives revenue. So simultaneously making everyone feel like an angry, righteous victim – well that’s just good business.

Newspapers are no longer interested in the truth (despite already being kinda biased before), but in how the truth can be manipulated and packaged to capture the tiny attention spans of people who are now conditioned to only focus on the things they hate. As one NYT and NPR journalist puts it, there’s an insidious “bad news bias” that has overtaken the news media industry.

So, if you can’t believe the news because it’s all rage-bait click farming and you lack the attention span or interest to peruse dense scientific journals to get your facts (which are often biased as well), what is the average human supposed to do? Who can you trust to be honest for one damn second?

All this is to say, I don’t think the average person is willfully dumb. I think we’re all just doing our best to navigate a completely partisan, profit-driven, rage-based attention economy that is rapidly being eroded by one affiliate marketing-laden news story after another.

The only way out of this mess

Thankfully, I have come up with a comprehensive and completely foolproof solution for this entire problem that will solve the monetisation issue, repair our eroded trust in the media, and save the average consumer a ton of money in subscription fees.

Just kidding.

I have no idea what we're supposed to do about this. I do know that what we are doing isn't working. Even the few profitable news outlets rely on sketchy and ethically questionable affiliate marketing techniques or subscriptions to their largely older, affluent bases (“The No. 1 reason we lose subscribers is they die”).

Any reasonable solution will inevitably take a Herculean effort from both sides: it will require media consumers to willfully invest in paying for the news if they want high-quality, unbiased news coverage that isn’t profit-driven. And it'll require media outlets to report the news in ethical, audience-friendly, accessible ways.

So yeah, we’re screwed.

The history of media monetisation

Mon, 22 Jan 2024 14:46:00 GMT

You know the deal: you want to read about the latest horrifying global event, so you click on the first link, and… it’s paywalled. You go back and click on the second link. Also paywalled (and screaming at you about your ad blocker). Onto the third and fourth articles. Eventually, the global conflict has resolved itself before you find out what the hell is going on.

This is just one symptom of a much larger and more complicated problem: media monetisation. Most of the global media industry is bleeding money and has been disrupted almost beyond recognition. So, how did we end up here? Where are we going? Who broke this system, and how can we un-break it?

I may not have all the answers, but I definitely have a lot of questions.

What is media monetisation?

First, let's establish a baseline. What is media monetisation? Media monetisation is all about who pays for the media and why. Because the media and entertainment industry is valued at a global $660 billion dollars annually, this is an incredibly large, nuanced, and complicated subject. But it’s also a very important one, because the media doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Public opinion and global policy are shaped by the media that people consume, and biased media can have life and death consequences.

Media bias is one of the biggest side effects of this monetisation question, because as the adage goes, if you aren’t paying for it, you’re the product.

Who is paying for the media you consume, and why are they paying for you to consume it? Why would these individuals and corps spend millions, if not billions, getting their perspectives in front of your eyes? Is it possible for media to be unbiased at this point, or are we, as consumers, just expected to unquestioningly consume whatever media is most ideologically aligned with our existing viewpoints? Is this healthy, or is it just further radicalizing and entrenching people in their echo chambers?

Media monetisation is a huge issue. But it didn't used to be. And it doesn’t have to be. Before we can realistically talk about what the media could look like in the future, let’s first look at where we’ve come from.

The history of media monetisation: from the 1600s to now

The legacy of digital media history is far more nuanced than I can cover in one article. However, having an overview of history will establish a starting point to talk about how media monetisation has evolved up to the present day.

Pre-newspapers (pre-1600s)

Before printed newspapers, most news was dispersed through word-of-mouth, town criers, or bulletins in city squares. This method was inefficient. Maybe you heard that your lands were being overtaken by some neighboring empire beforehand. Perhaps you found out when an army was knocking at your door and setting your roof on fire. Either way, the news dissemination was slow, chaotic, and rife with human error, fake news, and mistranslation (kind of like how Facebook is now, if we think about it).

Early newspapers (1600s–1700s)

With the invention of the printing press in the 1450s, mass media was on the brink of becoming a real possibility. By the 1600s, newspapers were popping up throughout Europe, with the Relation aller Fürnemmen und gedenckwürdigen Historien first circulating in 1605. This was thought to be the first bona fide newspaper, but others quickly started circulating worldwide.

Something you may not know if you personally do not own a 1600s printing press, but they are expensive and extremely annoying to operate. The average media consumer did not have a ton of fun money sitting around to invest in print media. So, early newspapers were often funded by political institutions and governmental bodies, and aimed more towards wealthy elites.

Because corruption and propaganda are not new concepts, these Ye Olden Timey papers were often more tools of the state than actual, unbiased news. Think about it: what incentive does a governing body have to be objective when they are the ones paying for the information that is being disseminated? That was a good question in the 1600s and it remains a good question now.

Advertising (1800s–1900s)

The earliest newspapers didn't really have an infrastructure for advertisements. Not that they necessarily needed to, because they were basically propaganda rags. In the 1800s, newspapers realized that they could both propagate and profit through newspaper advertisements. Display ads started popping up to offset the costs, and are still prolific today in both digital and physical media formats.

The 1800s saw newspapers becoming increasingly prominent in society. Literacy started going up, as did newspaper readership and advertiser revenue. It turns out that being able to read the ads directly correlates to their efficacy. The “penny press” news began being circulated in 1830, which made for much cheaper papers, offset by ads and available to even the average person.

Subscriptions (late 1800s–present)

The late 1800s also saw a rise in the subscription model of print media. Folks could sign up for a regular subscription and receive a copy of the paper regularly delivered to their homes. This model existed as the status quo news model for a very long time and still exists today, but has largely moved online, where websites paywall the news behind a subscription model.

Subscriptions ensured that people got the news, whether they wanted it that day or not. This has become a standard practice and revenue generator for media all around the world ever since. Subscriptions, advertisers, big interest donors, and lobbyists all work in tandem to make the rapidly globalized news system function, and regular subscriptions act as a stabilizing force for small newspapers and large media conglomerates.

Classifieds (early 20th century–2000s)

While classified ads have technically been around since the mid-1700s, they only took off in the early 20th century. But once they did, boy, did they take off. Businesses and individuals alike were able to pay a small fee to list their offerings and find buyers and customers. There were even personal ads that acted as the analog Tinder and job-posting advertisements that served as the OG LinkedIn.

Classified ads were a brilliant move. Newspapers could help connect people with a broad readership that wasn't available before the internet, and they collected a monetary fee for every single ad posted. The classified ads section was often pages long, with all those classified ads acting as additional revenue for the newspapers. It's hard to adequately articulate exactly how important classified ads were because they fell out of favor so dramatically, but classifieds were massive revenue generators for newspapers, often accounting for up to 70% of their total revenue.

Eventually, classifieds were overtaken by more modern approaches, like Craigslist and Facebook Marketplace. Craigslist and, to a lesser extent, sites like eBay acted as massive industry disruptors, devaluing the newspaper industry by billions very rapidly. You'd be hard-pressed to find a bona fide classified ad these days, and the annual revenue of classifieds dropped 92% from 2001 to 2011 (and it’s only continued to decline).

Digital advertising (1990s–present)

As newspapers went online, so did their ads. The transition was inevitable as more people joined the web. In a lot of ways, this was a good thing. Environmentally, a lot less paper was wasted. The news could also travel faster and update more frequently, which in theory meant more accurate information. (Oh what fools we were.)

However, many terrible things also happen to the media industry. Local news started dying, with over 2,200 local newspapers closing from 2005 to 2021 in the States alone . Classified ads started disappearing (as previously mentioned), and people began canceling their print subscriptions. This was the death knell for many small, local, independent news outlets.

Ad blockers were another significant blow for the industry as news outlets attempted to subsidize a loss of classified and print ad revenue. If you’ve ever been on a news website without an ad blocker, you’ll know it’s quite the experience.

The move to digital has been devastating for newspaper revenue. Even without a paywall, a print reader is worth 228x more than a digital reader. News outlets everywhere had to aggressively cut back on their more expensive content, like investigative pieces, in favor of smaller, more digestible, more reactive media. Ads were everywhere and ad blockers cost potential revenue to the tune of tens of billions per year (not just for news outlets, but definitely also for news outlets).

Paywalls (2000s–present)

The early 2000s was the Wild West of the Internet. Online, people could find (or steal) practically anything; the only real limitation was the atrocious internet speed. Newspapers eventually realized that advertisements were simply not going to generate enough revenue to keep operating, especially with the proliferation of the aforementioned scourge of the media industry: ad blockers.

As ad blockers became more common, the paywall was born. They pop up in all forms of media. Netflix paywalls movies. Audible paywalls books. And news sites paywall whatever insane thing a world leader had to say that day (any world leader, take your pick). Because of this global shift to housing all news and comms on the internet, people became more primed than ever to pay for subscriptions (and a lot of them).

Some news organizations found revenue in this subscription model (such as the Wall Street Journal), but many others continued to flounder and eventually shutter. As more and more media becomes subscription- and paywall-locked, consumers are beginning to push back on being nickel and dimed for every conceivable online service.

Membership and donation models (2010s–present)

Similar to the paywall, news agencies are beginning to play around and explore different donation models. This is more common in smaller publications with loyal readerships or within nonprofit industries. Additionally, writers and journalists are starting to paywall their own content and thought leadership through newsletters and services like Substack and Patreon.

Consumers are less likely to receive their media from traditional sources, even when those sources can be accessed online, than in the past. A recent Pew Research study found that people are slowly but surely turning to search engines, social media, and podcasts to get their news over dedicated news sites and apps. While news sites and apps are still the primary go-to, they’re increasingly losing their lead to social media, podcasts, and other forms of microblogging.

Additionally, revenue for news services is dropping almost across the board. Few newspapers have been able to successfully maintain (or even grow) in this current news business climate. Newspaper revenue overall has dropped over 15% just since 2017, and the industry doesn’t seem to be doing much to adapt.

The elephant in the room: owners, private donors, and interests

Up to this point, we've discussed how newspapers fund themselves. But this is only part of a bigger picture. You can’t realistically talk about media monetisation without discussing the impacts that revenue sources have on what gets discussed and why.

Private donors, partisan groups, government entities, and lobbyists have political and social stakes in what news gets covered and how. Even advertisers often have strong, vested interest in what gets discussed and what doesn't. It's hard to be entirely unbiased when your next paycheck comes from a company that doesn't want you to run a particular story or tell us a specific narrative.

To be a mindful media consumer, you must know who funds your media and why. Media consolidation has massive implications for partiality and contributes significantly to corporate interest interference and biased reporting.

Some good resources for analyzing media bias and ownership:

This was the first article in the series where I will analyze the objectively broken media monetisation system. Next, we will discuss alternative media monetisation models. If you have any thoughts, reach out to me on Twitter/X. I’d love to hear them.