The news is in trouble. It’s not just the mass closures of newsrooms – it’s also the physical and ideological attacks on journalists.News websites are plastered with ads, but more than half of the money those ads generate is siphoned off by ad-tech companies, with the lion’s share going to just two companies, Google and Meta, whose ad-tech duopoly has allowed them to claim an ever-greater share of the income generated by ads placed alongside of news content.
Once, tech platforms promised that “behavioral advertising” would be a bonanza for both media companies and their tech partners. Rather than paying commissioned salespeople to convince firms to place ads based on a publication’s reputation and readership, media companies would run ads placed by the winners of a slew of split-second auctions, each time a user moved from one page to another.
These auctions would offer up the user, not the content, to an array of bidders representing different advertisers: “What am I bid for the right to show an ad to a depressed, 19 year old male Kansas City Art Institute sophomore who has recently searched for car loans and also shopped for incontinence pads?” In an eyeblink, every ad-slot on the page would be filled with ads purchased at a premium by advertisers anxious to reach that specific user. And that user will like it! They will be grateful for the process and all the “highly relevant” advertisements it dangled under their nose.
Such an arrangement has numerous moving parts. The “ad-tech stack” includes:
- A “supply-side platform” (SSP): The SSP acts as the publisher’s broker, bringing each user to market and selling their attention on the basis of their “behavioral” traits; Content was cut in order to protect the source.Please visit the source for the rest of the article.
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