Yes, News Sites Need To Get Out Of The Ad Surveillance Business -- But Blame The Advertisers As Well

from the takes-two-to-tango dept

Doc Searls has a great recent blog post in which he rightly points out why Bernie Sanders' "plan to save journalism" is completely misguided and will fail. It's worth reading -- with the key point being that Sanders' plan to save journalism assumes a world that does not exist, and one where heavy regulations will somehow magically save journalism, rather than stifle it. As Searls notes, that's not the world we live in. We live in a world of informational abundance, which changes everything:

Journalism as we knew it—scarce and authoritative media resources on print and air—has boundless competition now from, well, everybody.

But there's an interesting point Searls makes later in his piece, suggesting that part of the problems with the news today is that the old school news publications have bought into "surveillance" based business models -- and nothing will change until they dump that and move back towards brand advertising:

Meanwhile, the surviving authoritative sources in that mainstream have themselves become fat with opinion while carving away reporters, editors, bureaus and beats. Brand advertising, for a century the most reliable and generous source of funding for good journalism (admittedly, along with some bad), is now mostly self-quarantined to major broadcast media, while the eyeball-spearing “behavioral” kind of advertising rules online, despite attempts by regulators (especially in Europe) to stamp it out. (Because it is in fact totally rude.)

He later says:

I think we’ll start seeing the tide turn when when what’s left of responsible ad-funded online publishing cringes in shame at having participated in adtech’s inexcusable surveillance business—and reports on it thoroughly.

And, to some extent, I agree. I've pointed out a few times now that, especially for news publishers, the evidence suggests that there's no real benefit to behavioral advertising that requires sucking up all the data.

But this is not just about the publishers. You may note that we at Techdirt use some tracking in our advertising. Because, if we didn't we'd have no advertising, and no advertising revenue at all.

Every single time I write about this, I point out that we have eagerly approached tons of advertisers, even those who promote themselves as supporting privacy, and offer what we think is a great freaking deal to do no-tracking, brand advertising on Techdirt -- which we think our users would appreciate. And every single time one of two things happens: we never ever hear back or we eventually get passed on to some cog in the advertising machine with a spreadsheet who simply can't understand what we're trying to offer, and the whole thing falls apart. We've had multiple long conversations with large companies -- some of whom are "famous" for supporting privacy, and we point out all the benefits of doing a brand advertising program that doesn't track, and we just get politely brushed off or ignored.

So, yeah, I'd love it if the media -- including us! -- went back to brand advertising that doesn't require surveilling on visitors (though, lots of you already use adblockers, which is totally cool by us). But, since not a single advertiser seems willing to buy such ads, we're kinda left in the lurch. So, as I do every time, I'll again say that if you happen to have an advertising budget and believe that supporting Techdirt in a way that we can highlight that you support us without requiring sucking up data on our community please contact us. Given our experiences so far, I'm not holding my breath.

Filed Under: ads, behavioral ads, business models, doc searls, journalism, surveillance, tracking

Copyright As Emphysema: Bad To Begin With And Only Gets Worse

from the now-there's-a-quote dept

An anonymous reader points me to the comment section of a recent Doc Searls post discussing problems with the copyright system. The post itself is interesting (though covering ground familiar to those around here), but the comment in question has this rather unique analogy from Searls comparing copyright to emphysema:

I won't speak for Bill Patry, but I'm beginning to see copyright (and patents, at least for software and business methods) as emphysema of the marketplace: something that is bad to begin with and only gets worse.

To support that point, he then asks an interesting question:

Can either of you name a single legislative or regulatory instance (in any country) when the concept of copyright has been challenged successfully -- or the scope of its restrictions (in time or any other dimension) has ever been reduced? I can't, but I'm not a lawyer.

It's a good question. I left a comment pointing to the only one I could think of off the top of my head: which was the US's decision that federal gov't documents could not be covered by copyright. That, of course, is a tiny tiny minor push back on copyright, and many other countries haven't even gone that far, preferring to use "crown copyright" to allow governments to claim copyright on documents. In thinking about it a bit more there are two other possible points -- though both are again pretty minor. First is the fact that the 1976 Copyright Act codified "fair use." Before that it existed in common law, but was not directly in the law. However, considering that we basically gave up nearly the entire public domain on modern works, that Act was hardly a step towards less copyright. In fact, it was the single largest step towards copyright expansion in the US's history.

The only other (again tiny) pushback on expansionist copyright law was not from the legislature, but the recent court ruling (pushing back on a legislative expansion) that found a certain classification of works that were temporarily in the public domain couldn't be pulled back under a copyright regime. That case is going to be in appeals for years, and it applies to such a small class of works, it's barely worth mentioning at all.

But, of course, as we were recently discussing, the expansion of copyright has been quite massive during the entire history of the US. But, again, like Searls, I'm not a lawyer (or a historian), so perhaps we can get some others more knowledgeable on the subject to weigh in on Searls' question: what examples are there of legislatures actually decreasing the scope of copyright restrictions?

Filed Under: copyright, doc searls, emphysema, expansion