'Forbesgate' and how publishers and advertisers can do better.
The Forbes ad scandal can prompt a better future online
By Christopher Brennan
Imagine your job is to fill up the advertising spots on a subway train. You are proud of the service that you offer, getting people from place A to place B, and you want to find $100 from advertisers who can help support you, pay the conductor, and keep the train rolling.
The big businesses in town are rubber companies.
The local agencies come to you and say they have posters they want to put up for new tires. But they have a hard time proving that their advertising is working, and they have a lot of other places they could put it, so they don’t want to pay much for each ad.
You need a way of making sure you can get your $100 so you start increasing the number of ads in each subway car, from just a couple to eventually covering all of the seats and handles. At one point you start searching riders’ pockets to see if you can prove they own a car. It’s still not enough.
Eventually, you decide to build more subway cars and attach them to the back of the train, filling them with tire advertisements that are not working in the hope that quantity will fix a problem of quality.
This sounds silly. Why advertise tires to commuters who are actually just tired? Why doesn’t the subway guy advertise products that might land better with the audience, say inflatable rubber mattresses? But scenarios like this are still playing out in digital publishing. There is still a gap between the audience that advertisers want to reach and the audience they do reach.
Forbes scandal
Which brings us to Forbes. With the industry at large facing declining ad revenue, Forbes began to sell ads on a secret, second site called www3.forbes.com. Major companies like Procter & Gamble, Disney and McDonald’s all paid for ads on what they thought was the real Forbes, but what was in fact the second site with a different audience, according to reporting from Adalytics and the Wall Street Journal. Previous research has shown that showing ads on this type of clickbait-y ‘Made for Advertising’ sites is essentially worthless in helping those companies hit their goals.
Sketchy Made for Advertising stuff is not new (we wrote about it here) though the fact that Forbes was accused of doing it has had a huge impact in the ad world. It was shocking only to those who haven’t seen the struggles of digital publishers to connect with an audience.
The surprise is not the alleged Forbes strategy, the surprise is that we haven’t seen more people trying it in desperation, focusing on maximizing one metric, revenue, at all costs.
So what happened to Forbes in the digital age?
Diving into Forbes’ output tells us a lot about the landscape they have operated in over the past 15 years. Overtone ran 1,000 articles on Forbes.com from around 15 years ago, before major management changes, and more recently. First, let’s look at a breakdown of the story types from these two distinct time periods. Some changes in content type are to be expected – online publishing has changed a lot over the past 15 years – but others point to red flags.
Take the next chart, below. The overall number of news stories in the samples hasn’t dramatically changed, so looking at blunt article tags like ‘news’ or ‘business’ won’t sound any alarms. But by analyzing each article’s content we noticed a huge swing from deep-dive news reports and investigations towards more general, resource-light, reporting.
It’s similar with opinion. An Overtone content analysis shows a dramatic shift from deep think pieces to quick-hit hot takes.
That change in article types and decisions with www3.forbes.com are intertwined. Highly clickable articles were distributed via recommenders on other people’s sites. This was done to make as much money as possible from any in-bound traffic. Some of those pieces we traced are, predictably, not very substantive.
It’s easy to see how a publisher can tip into a downward trajectory, reducing quality to produce more content to chase ad revenue based on clicks. But then ad revenue slumps because the quality is low, so the publisher needs to produce more content. Limited resources mean that content is more and more like filler, so audiences disengage. And that’s how a publisher gets caught in a death spiral.
This cycle would be broken if publishers could offer some of the crucial insight they have into their own audiences for use in the systems that run advertising. But that cannot happen until publishers and advertisers alike have more substantive analysis of content.
A way forward
Into this world of competing for clicks has come generative AI, where it is easier than ever to flood the zone with content designed to game these advertising systems without really caring about the reader. We are now in a world where AI entrepreneurs can openly boast about stealing web traffic through creating low quality AI content at scale.
Yes, that’s a threat to publishers but it’s also an opportunity to demonstrate the value of well-researched, thoughtful work.
Artificial intelligence presents an opportunity to fight fire with fire. By having AI models fine-tuned to “understand” nuances in articles, it plays a role in rooting out bad practices such as Made for Advertising, or conspiracy theory websites that no reputable company really wants to support with their ad dollars.
It also creates an opportunity for publishers to really show off what they have, which is insight into their articles and their audiences. Whereas before technology could only assess articles at the click or keyword level, more advanced AI models can now unpack what an article is trying to do and the experience someone is having while reading it.
This is something advertisers want that has been missing online. To return to the subway analogy, when an ad is shown on the subway, the person making that ad knows exactly what experience the passenger is viewing it is going through, like a morning commuter looking up at a banner for an energy drink that asks “Tired?”. That level of caring about the content is almost completely absent in the online ad ecosystem, where keywords provide very little insight into what someone is reading and the main way of serving ads is by sucking up as much personal data as possible and tracking someone around the internet.
With language models a new way, more like the subway, is possible, and it plays right into the knowledge that publishers, who are sitting on a gold mine of insight, already have. All of this while having a better relationship with readers and letting their personal data remain private.
Tone
Some outlets are already looking into this. The New York Times is working on using AI for ad placements and is currently in testing, Axios reported. In Spain Henneo is also working on personalised advertising with AI.
For everyone else, Overtone is pleased to announce that we were awarded an Innovate UK Smart Grant to fund creation of a “tone” model that can look into types of articles like tragic, sensational, inspiring or humorous. Not only can this help publishers understand how to combat problems like news avoidance (more on that soon) but it can also refocus the ad side of the business on something more tangible and human.
We see this as an important next step in helping publishers unlock the value they have that has been lost in the world of clicks and keywords. Overtone is putting together a working group of publishers and other interested parties, starting with an event in London this spring and continuing for 2024. Click the link below and send us an email if you’d like to be a part.
Interview
Alessandro De Zanche is an expert in data, advertising, and audience strategies. He worked at News Corp and Yahoo!, and now consults for different clients after seeing the industry from all sides. His Not Just Adz newsletter is a must read. You can check out our interview with Alessandro here.
Announcements and Events
Christopher is currently in Perugia, Italy for the International Journalism Festival, with support from VRT Sandbox and the Seeds & Growth programme. Reach out to him if you are there!
Newsletter assembled by Christopher Brennan and Kevin Donnellan