Publishers rethinking ‘Around the Web’ adverts
YOU see them everywhere, and maybe, sometimes, you click: those rows of links under web articles, often augmented with eye-catching photos and curiosity-stoking headlines about the latest health tips, celebrity news or ways to escape financial stress.
Usually grouped together under a label like “Promoted Stories” or “Around the Web”, these links are often advertisements dressed up to look like stories people might want to read. They have long provided much-needed revenue for publishers and given a wide range of advertisers a affordable way to reach large and often premium audiences.
But now, some publishers are wondering about the effect these so-called content ads may be having on their brands and readers. This month, these ads stopped appearing on Slate. And the New Yorker, which restricted placement of such ads to its humour articles, recently removed them from its website altogether.
Among the reasons: The links can lead to questionable websites, run by unknown entities. Sometimes the information they present is false.
At other times, the images and headlines create a jarring, even disturbing, juxtaposition. An article on Slate this year about misogyny was accompanied by a promotion for “10 Celebs Who Lost Their Hot Bodies.”
“It is not the right look if you’re trying to say you’re a high-quality, upper-tier website – if you have something like this on it – and I think it’s time for us to be honest about that,” said Keith Hernandez, Slate’s president.
These ads are “built on a premise for publishers to maximise revenue – it’s not built on a premise of finding the next great things for your readers to do,” he added.
A report in September from the non-profit ChangeAdvertising.org found that 41 of the top 50 news sites – including the Guardian, CNN, Time and Forbes – embed widgets from so-called content-recommendation companies. Several of those that do not, including the New York Times, pay for content created with advertisers in-house to appear in the widgets to increase traffic to their own sites.
The companies Taboola and Outbrain, both founded about a decade ago in Israel, dominate the industry, followed by Revcontent and ZergNet, said analysis firm Datanyze.
ChangeAdvertising.org analysed the content ads on those 41 news websites and found that 61 percent came from advertisers or other prominent publishers. But 26 percent led to “clickbait” sites that were covered in more ads and lower-quality recommendation widgets featuring sexually suggestive or interruptive images. Almost all of those sites, which appear to be paying for placement, then profiting from their own ads once people v isit, hid t heir domain registrations.
“The vision is to index the entire web and bring the best, most personalised stuff to people,” Adam Singolda, Taboola’s founder and chief executive, said in an interview.
Outbrain, which also creates tools for publishers to direct readers to other parts of their own websites, says its mission is to “help people discover content that they can trust to be interesting, relevant and timely for them”.
Outbrain and Taboola both say they offer tools for publishers to remove potentially problematic content. Additionally, the companies employ teams of people who vet content before it is introduced onto their networks, though they admitted it was a challenge to police those who alter campaigns and redirect URLs after approval. And then there’s the problem of sheer scale.
For Slate, it was worth it to stop supporting the ads, Hernandez said. “If your readers’ trust and loyalty is No1 as the thing you care about most, you can’t have that on your page.”