Why news publishers will probably never solve their keyword blocking problem

PLUS: Bill Simmons walked so Pat McAfee could run

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Why news publishers will probably never solve their keyword blocking problem

The WSJ wrote about the increasingly pervasive problem of adtech keyword blocking, which keeps most programmatic ads off news websites — even when the content is neither controversial or political:

News organizations recently began publicizing studies that show it really isn’t dangerous for a brand to appear near a sensitive story. At the same time, they say, blunt campaign-planning tools wind up fencing off even harmless content—and those stories’ potentially large audiences—from advertisements.

Forty percent of the Washington Post’s material is deemed “unsafe” at any given time, said Johanna Mayer-Jones, the paper’s chief advertising officer, referencing a study the company did about a year ago. “The revenue implications of that are significant.”

I think the biggest problem for publishers is that advertising supply far outstrips demand, and so brands have absolutely no incentive to place their ads next to political content when they can just reach those same audiences on channels that never ever touch political topics.

Ironically, this entire trend of keyword blocking stemmed from the actions of a few well-meaning progressive groups who started screenshotting display ads on right wing websites and then tweeted them at the brands associated with those ads; this led to many of those brands blocking right wing hate sites in their ad buys.

But whereas those progressive groups probably hoped that their campaigns would force brands to be more selective in their ad buys, what actually happened was that adtech companies simply rolled out keyword blocking tools. That's because ad agencies are still incentivized toward scale and arbitrage, and hand-selecting a few premium publishers provides neither.

So this leaves news publishers in a bit of a pickle: how do you incentivize advertisers into paying a premium for your advertising inventory when they can simply reach your audience elsewhere? When you factor in that display ads aren't very effective anyway, then you'll quickly realize that these publishers have neither the carrot nor the stick to force brands back to the table. That's why none of them have really solved this problem even though the trend has been apparent for years.

How PayPal might be siphoning away your affiliate revenue

Wow, this is extremely fucked up. Honey, a free browser extension owned by PayPal, sponsored a bunch of huge creators to promote its product, which ostensibly scours the internet for discount codes in order to find the best deals.

But once you've downloaded the extension, Honey basically swaps out all affiliate links with its own affiliate links. So if a creator gets their followers to click on a product link and purchase it, they get absolutely no commission while Honey, which did absolutely none of the work of driving the sale, gets the entire commission.

This has huge ramifications. It potentially affects any creator or publisher that uses affiliate links — regardless of whether they've even heard of Honey. Some think Honey may have siphoned away tens of millions of dollars from publishers, if not more. If you monetize with affiliate links and saw an unexplained drop off in revenue, Honey may well be the culprit.

What’s especially amazing is that this scam has been mostly ignored so far by the mainstream media and is almost exclusively being covered by creators. I just did a search on Google News for “Honey” and “Browser” and only a handful of legacy media outlets have taken notice. The New York Times, for instance, has a huge affiliate business through its Wirecutter site, and yet as far as I can tell it hasn’t so much as mentioned it. I can’t find any evidence that the Washington Post, LA Times, The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal, or CNN have covered it either.

Do sports teams underpay their social media managers?

If you’re really into watching pro sports, you’ve probably noticed that many teams have built up their internal media teams to give fans more access to the players. It turns out that the social media managers who operate these teams’ accounts are underpaid compared to those in other industries:

In [a social media manager salary survey], we created a chart that ranked median salaries by industry—sports was the third lowest paying industry, sandwiched between non-profit and education. When I tweeted in shock that this was the case, I heard from many sports social pros that the teams take advantage of the fact that there are hundreds of fans who could easily replace you. Management tells you that. They make it known that you are expendable. There are also expectations of 24/7 coverage, unrelenting fan trolls, and bad behavior within the organizations. To an outsider, doing social for your favorite sports team sounds like a dream but the reality can be brutal.

What the success of MrBeast’s Amazon show means for other creators

MrBeast claims his Amazon Prime show is the "#1 unscripted series launch in Prime video history."

That sounds good, but what does it even mean? Was Amazon even heavily invested in unscripted programming originally? I know Netflix has gone big on reality TV, but I'm struggling to think of any breakout reality shows on Amazon. So that may have been a low bar to clear.

Many view the success or failure of Beast Games as a bellwether as to whether creators can succeed in traditional Hollywood. Previous experiments with creator-led shows have seen mixed results, but in many of those cases there was lots of meddling from studio executives. In this particular instance, MrBeast had complete creative control over the show.

Spotify rolls out more creator-friendly monetization policies

Spotify officially launched its podcast partnership program. It's only available to podcasters who upload their episodes directly to the platform, and it pays out a 50% revenue share for all ads that are inserted into episodes.

There's an eligibility requirement — 10,000 streams and at least 2,000 unique listeners in the past month — but I think that's a good thing. It weeds out the bad actors who might try to upload thousands of low-quality podcasts, and it also ensures participating partners get a bigger chunk of revenue.

There's still not a great way for podcasters to tap into Spotify's massive subscription revenue, though. Currently, their only way of doing so is by uploading video versions of their podcasts, but video watching likely makes up a tiny percentage of overall podcast consumption on Spotify.

My guess is that the music labels still wield a lot of influence and they'd balk at the notion of their payouts being siphoned away from podcasters. Musicians already love making a stink over the claim that their streaming payouts are too low — a claim I don't really agree with — and they'd love nothing more than to launch a fresh round of attacks the moment there's any perception that Spotify might cut their earnings.

Still though, Spotify deserves credit for being one of the few major tech platforms to develop a clearly-defined, meaningful revenue share for creators. That's more than can be said for TikTok, Meta, Snapchat, and virtually every other huge platform other than YouTube.

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Why didn’t Gannett ever launch a local/national news bundle?

Reuters and Gannett just announced a new partnership that will allow the former to syndicate content from the latter:

The new bundle, available in the first quarter of 2025, will be sold by Reuters; Gannett will get a cut of the sales revenue, Gannett chief content officer Kristin Roberts told Axios.

Customers can access Reuters' national and international coverage, combined via a bundle with Gannett's national news coverage from USA Today and its local news coverage from the more than 200 national publications within its USA Today Network.

The bundle will include feeds of ready-to-publish stories, photos, graphics and video from both entities for media companies to license. It won't include access to games and puzzles from Gannett's newspaper brands, said Alphonse Hardel, the head of Reuters News Agency.

What's always flummoxed me is why Gannett never went for the low-hanging fruit of bundling its national news content (USA Today) with its local content across hundreds of newspapers.

Here's how it would work: Gannett would move all its newspapers under a single domain and then sell a bundled subscription that gives you access to both USA Today and its entire network of local news sites. That kind of bundle would drive massive value for the average news consumer and would allow Gannett to differentiate its offerings from other national outlets like the Washington Post and New York Times.

This Reuters deal sort of adopts this framework, but it makes Gannett reliant on an outside company and weakens the direct connection it has with its subscriber base. Why does it need Reuters to execute a strategy that it could have adopted years ago?

After I posted about this on social media, I received a reply from Paul Soldera:

So I actually worked with Gannet on some of their local content strategy, and they did do a version of this. About 10 or so years ago they moved all of their local publications to a single tech-stack online so they could provide a sort of consistent look/feel, and used USAT national stories as part of that local web feed. Just doing this was a huge undertaking, and one they were a bit concerned about given how loyal the local reader base was to the local publication, and not necessarily USAT. You could subscribe to the local sites, so in some way they were bundling national and local, just not in an obvious way.

They were also concerned about the ‘hard news’ reputation on USAT, so maybe the Reuters play is a way to bolster that perception a bit?

Here was my response to Paul’s thoughtful comment:

Thanks! So my idea would involve more than simply bundling USA Today with a single local newspaper. It would basically be a frictionless subscription to all of Gannet content, including its entire network of local newspapers. Every newspaper would still have its own homepage, but it would be a subdomain of the main website (eg, gannet[.]com/USAToday)

Every sports league wants to run its own media operations now

We're seeing more and more professional sports leagues beef up their in-house media capabilities, not only to produce even more content, but also to aid the big tech streamers that have lots of money to shell out for broadcast rights but no internal capacity to film the games and matches:

Yes, the sports rights they control are worth billions. And yet, some of the new giants eager to strike deals don’t operate in the same way as their traditional partners, which for PGA Tour includes Paramount Global, NBCUniversal and Disney.

Most of the streaming upstarts that have entered the entertainment sector do not field their own production teams for sports. Netflix, for example, relied on CBS Sports to produce its recent Christmas NFL games. Amazon enlisted NBC Sports to get “Thursday Night Football” broadcasts off the ground. Apple worked with Major League Baseball itself to produce its Friday-night coverage of baseball games. Amazon and Netflix have used top-flight talent to deliver play by play, but typically not on an exclusive basis.

Why is YouTube shipping broken AI tech?

So apparently YouTube rolled out a back-end tool that allows its top creators to reply to comments on their videos with AI-generated responses. The video essayist Drew Gooden documented with meticulous detail how terrible this tool is at generating appropriate responses:

It’s incredibly easy to become inured to all the AI slop that’s seeping into every part of the internet, but sometimes you see something so shocking that it jolts you into the realization that tech companies with market caps north of a trillion dollars are regularly shipping products that just don’t work a huge percentage of the time.

Imagine if you bought a TV or a laptop or a blender and you didn’t know whether the product would actually turn on when you plugged it in. Most companies with that much of an error rate would quickly go bankrupt. But somehow we carved out this huge exception for AI tools where we’re just expected to shrug and move on.

I guess one counterargument is that many of these AI tools are integrated into free products and therefore the analogy doesn’t work, but there are actually plenty of paid SaaS products that have shoved AI chatbots into their UI, and some even use these chatbots as a justification to raise their prices.

Google is putting all of its eggs in Reddit’s basket

Tedium highlighted a niche blogger who successfully raised the alarm this year about Google downgrading niche, knowledgeable websites in its search results and replacing them with low-quality publishers:

The air-purifier review site HouseFresh decided to call out a practice that was actively threatening the future of sites like theirs. The husband-and-wife team of Gisele Navarro and Danny Ashton, who run HouseFresh as a part of NeoMam Studios, had seen their site’s fortunes drop precipitously in the span of only a few months, despite their approach clearly being in the spirit of how SEO is supposed to work …

… Recently, large publishers with big brand names and prominent domains, like Rolling Stone and Forbes, have taken to publishing content that essentially got the end-results of what a site like HouseFresh does (make recommendations based on research, bring in affiliate revenue) without doing any of the work.

Something weird is going on with Google right now. On the one hand, huge news sites are seeing their affiliate content dropping from the front page of search results. Google has issued statements that it's simply punishing sites that syndicate third-party content that's unrelated to their newsgathering operations, but I've also seen complaints from publishers who produce all their affiliate content in-house and have still seen a drop-off in Google traffic. In fact, one media operator I spoke to suspects that Google is punishing their site because they use freelancers instead of full-time staff writers to write their content. How Google's algorithm can tell the difference between a freelancer and staffer is beyond me.

At the same time, the operators behind several niche sites say they've also seen their Google traffic crater. I saw a viral post a few weeks ago from a film news website that had to lay off its entire staff and pivot to YouTube due to massive downranking in Google. That article sparked a large outcry from other independent publishers that said they experienced a similar fate.

So who's benefiting from all these shifts? As far as I can tell, it's Reddit. The platform just had a blockbuster year in terms of advertising revenue and traffic, and that success seems to stem from a substantial increase in its Google traffic. While the site excels at cultivating niche communities and sorting comments by quality — two attributes that make it great for answering search queries — I can't imagine it's good for Google's longterm health that it's put all its eggs into one basket, especially a basket that relies entirely on unpaid, anonymous contributions. I wouldn't be surprised if Reddit becomes a magnet for bad actors who aim to exploit its high search rankings to drive traffic to dubious products.

Bill Simmons walked so Pat McAfee could run

Puck wrote about ESPN’s ongoing talent negotiations and its attempts to identify “needle movers” who will entice viewers into flipping on the channel:

]Pat McAfee’s] arrangement is unique, of course, because it isn’t exclusive. The sleeveless former punter built his audience on YouTube before signing a lucrative licensing deal with ESPN. [Stephen A. Smith] is a homegrown talent, but his pending deal also includes some nonexclusive opportunities—if, say, he wants to start his own lifestyle-themed radio show or pop-culture play. (Stephen A. has appeared as a guest on Fox News.) [Mike Greenberg] and [Scott Van Pelt] represent a slightly different tranche of talent: more old school, with radio chops, pre- and postgame bona fides, etcetera—the Posada and Pettitte of this core-four ensemble, you might say.

Pat McAfee's deal with ESPN is incredibly unique within the broadcast world. He basically operates an independent YouTube channel and simply licenses it, non-exclusively, to ESPN for $17 million. He's so independent, in fact, that he's brazenly criticized top ESPN brass with little pushback.

Compare this to an earlier era when the network employed Bill Simmons. Like McAfee, Simmons also forged a direct relationship with his audience via his hit podcast, and he proved himself incredibly adept at attracting and managing talent when he ran Grantland. This didn't stop ESPN from regularly punishing him every time he failed to toe the line, so much so that he eventually quit.

We all know what happened next: he founded The Ringer and eventually sold it to Spotify for a whopping $250 million. Not only that, but The Ringer continues to be the crown jewel in Spotify's podcast network. There's no question that Simmons was vindicated.

Which brings me back to the McAfee deal. It seems like a tacit recognition that ESPN's approach to talent management needs to change in an era when anyone can steal market share with a simple podcast or YouTube channel.