How quality content can win in the long run

Digital advertising is broken for many publications.
Back in the days when my job was persuading advertisers to spend money with our business publication, I would talk about the importance of a client's ad appearing next to credible, high-quality content. Editorial environment matters, was the argument.

Google, Facebook, and Yahoo pretty much destroyed that business model. They promised advertisers to deliver their ads to specific demographic groups with little waste -- for example, female executives in Baltimore who have searched for information about luxury automobiles in the past year. And their prices were much lower.

But the importance of high-quality, credible content has just resurfaced in a big way. Some major advertisers in England pulled their ads from Google and YouTube because their ads were placed next to content of extremist organizations promoting hate speech.

Among those pulling ads were French advertising giant Havas, the BBC, the UK government, and The Guardian newspaper. The Times of London first broke the story (paywall).

What this means is that digital publications can compete with Google, Facebook, YouTube and the rest by relying on a relationship of trust and confidence rather than scale -- totals of eyeballs.
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