As many publishers are scrambling to figure out a sustainable revenue model, some are turning to unscrupulous means to pull in much needed dough.
Earlier this week, Digiday’s Jack Marshall brought to light the ways in which publishers are indirectly benefitting from porn search terms. Entire landing pages on content sites like Funny or Die might be devoted to terms like “sex,” consequently allowing publishers to gain large amounts of fringe search traffic.
Clearly, these are, “editorial choices, driven by desperate need for ad revenue,” as Andrew Sullivan pointed out in The Dish. These landing pages are auto-generated. His thoughts are, if these pages are automatically created, how come no one is held responsible for removing them?
Brands obviously would not advertise alongside such content, if they knew what their spend was fueling. Even if Funny or Die is not held accountable for their algorithmic page creation, Ron Stitt, the group VP of digital media for Fox News, asks, “Is this really the traffic their advertisers want?” Perhaps not, but this is a numbers game.
You know it’s bad when pornography publishers aren’t happy too. After all, they’re also hurt by these tactics. Mainstream sites are favored as sources by Google because of their supposedly high credibility. The result is your average porn searcher might not get what he’s looking for. Barbara Rice, executive editor of Penthouse, addressed the situation.
From @digiday story: “legit publishers and advertisers benefit from porn while staying above it all.” Um, I’m a legit pornographer, asshole.
— Barbara Rice (@babsrice) May 1, 2013
It’s hard to please everyone.
Image via Shutterstock
-
WTF is cookie stuffing?
Fraud is a well-documented pox on digital advertising, but it’s also an issue for publishers and marketers working together on affiliate marketing deals, too. One of the more tried-and-true techniques is cookie stuffing.
-
Publishers report Q1 ad revenue is pacing 10-25% behind forecasts
Publishers are facing a slow start to Q1 and sales teams have a lot of work to do to regain lost time.
-
Bloomberg, Axios, Politico, other business publishers rethink subscriber retention during the economic downturn
Premium publishers, like POLITICO, Axios and Bloomberg, have to make sure their fees are still considered a necessity as readers recalculate their spending and companies recalculate their expense budgets.
-
SponsoredHow ad tech is tackling waste by optimizing supply chains
Sponsored by Bidtellect The programmatic and digital advertising industry is well aware of the inefficiencies in buying and selling — from auction duplication and volume bias to multi-integrations and reselling — but how did it get this out of control? How can we fix it? A redundant, multiple-step process to ad delivery has become the norm, […]
-
Why Vice, BBC, WaPo, others see new TikTok teams as the next wave of specialist publishing talent
As news publishers craft their TikTok strategies, Digiday spoke with the BBC, Vice, The Washington Post and LADbible to see who’s really behind the posts.
-
Digiday+ Research deep dive: Publishers anticipate a big drop in ad revenue this year
Digiday's survey found that publishers are not feeling great about advertising revenue as 2023 kicks off, with attitudes toward subscriptions and e-commerce shifting as well.
