The Why of Digital's Deadly Sins
Kill the ad-supported model and you kill a lot of other things, some of which we need to survive
Of all the criticisms of my work in media, one stands out.
“Tom, you give great answers to questions, but you don’t explain well enough how you got there.”
So it’s not just Common Core Math that’s obsessed with showing one’s work. People want to understand why you landed where you did. In my case, it’s a belief that the advertising-supported model for content and utility in digital is profoundly broken. It’s also a belief that it’s fixable if we truly have the will to fix it.
We’re (almost) halfway there
In this Substack, we’ve so far discussed three of digital media’s deadly sins:
Arrogance
Obfuscation
The Great Decoupling
We’ll get to the other four in the coming weeks, but first I think it’s important to pause a moment and look at the cumulative effect of those first three.
Obfuscation is as big as the digital media business. While it’s true walled gardens hide details of delivery, whether your ads reach the right target, or even whether you’re getting the ads you’re paying for, it’s also true that this happens on the open web. It’s especially true when purchasing display media programmatically.
Decoupling audience value from publishers is also a wide-ranging problem, affecting anyone who writes content or writes code. It means that ad tech companies are capturing much of the value publishers ought to be monetizing, and it pushes publishers not toward making good content and good applications, but toward engagement at all costs. The user sees this in the form of bottomless content rabbit holes that seem to string the reader along and dangle the payoff just out of reach, or rage-filled comment sections and rebuttal content.
That we push all of this arrogantly, with an “evolve or die” smirk on our faces, only takes away from any sympathy anyone might feel for us as we continue to destroy the ad model. Which is why I think our arrogance is the worst sin of all.
But where is all of this landing us?
We’re killing hard news
One effect that hits me rather hard is the erosion of hard news.
At my core, I’m a news person. My undergraduate degree is in Journalism and Mass Communications, from the school that had the first formal journalism program in the history of the country. The first thing I did when I graduated college was start a newspaper in my hometown.
It wasn’t very long after the commercial explosion of the web that we began calling printed versions of newspapers the “dead tree edition” – as if they were an outdated invention soon destined for the trash heap. And newspaper subscriptions declined precipitously in the years since the mid-90s. There are the exceptions – The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and a handful of others I subscribe to and dutifully write off on my taxes every year. Largely, these represent the newspaper brands that were able to weather the first dot com boom by paywalling stories and building online subscription revenue. It’s important to note that not every newspaper can do this – especially in local news.
BECSPK
I went to the deli the other day to get my kids some bacon, egg and cheese breakfast specials, as Long Islanders tend to do. There, I saw a copy of Newsday sitting out. It had two stories that immediately hooked me – a front page article on the effects of soccer on brain health (my two boys both play travel), and a story on how New York State government is beginning to think of artificial intelligence from a regulation standpoint.
Newsday is the paper I grew up with. I used to read it every day, starting with news and eventually getting to editorials, political columnists, Dear Abby and Ann Landers, and Doonesbury and Bloom County. It was once the fourth most powerful newspaper in the country, servicing millions of Long Islanders. I have books in my library that have been written about this newspaper.
And it’s so pathetic now. It’s much smaller than it once was. And thinner.
News, not necessarily newspapers
And I have to remind myself that I don’t necessarily want to save newspapers. I want to save news.
The withering of hard news is observable on the face of offline news media. But perhaps the best way to measure the effect is by looking at the vacuum created by weak news. It’s getting harder to discern what is happening on the ground in Ukraine and Gaza. (We’ve always had the Fog of War, but can we agree it’s getting thicker?) We’re less able to support our positions on issues with citable facts, and instead lock ourselves within the safety of unchallenging political narratives. And you’re tired of hearing about how we’re more polarized in the U.S. than we’ve ever been.
These negative effects are partially the result of a weakened advertising model, the magnitude of which is not very well understood because it happened at the same time the media landscape was disrupted and transformed.
These stories show my work
Back to that valid criticism of my work in the space – that I don’t show my work.
That’s what this Substack is about. Showing my work and how it shaped my opinions of digital media as a participant since digital’s beginnings. Showing the work means I’m going to have to make it as entertaining as possible by filtering that perspective through a bunch of stories about my formative experiences along the way.
Plunking down $2.50 for that copy of Newsday - as opposed to the 25 cents I used to pay when I was a kid – bringing it home and noticing how it has shrunk over the years, and then thinking hard about all that’s happened over the past three decades – it’s difficult to avoid feeling a bit responsible for it.
Destroying the ad-supported model is destroying news. We need a thriving news business to operate a democracy. And we need democracy to make governing ourselves tolerable. That’s how I’ve landed where I have.