Week 8 - Insidious Marketing

The first reading, "Industry breakdown: Newspapers still largest revenue segment," didn't come as a surprise as we've heard it class before. I found it interesting that modern media corporations are difficult to classify yet use legacy media as a business model. As companies diversify, why don't they apply new business models? Even the lowest earners still bring some income. Has anyone tried operating more smaller income models instead of focusing on a few traditionally big earners? The revenue stream would be smaller, but less lethal if one fails.

Native advertising is reprehensible. True, it's the consumer's personal responsibility to think critically, but native ads can be very hard to spot. How large of a factor are native ads in the loss of news audiences? The statistics show native ads receive more clicks, but that must be due to the deceptive nature and not always consumer interest.  I'm not easily offended, but many advertising practices manage to. I could type an angry rant on the subject, but feel John Oliver did a better job covering native ads on his Last Week Tonight show.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_F5GxCwizc

Kudos to the FTC for their deceptive ad policy, but I don't think it goes far enough. It probably never will. Government budgets can prove difficult to authorize in sufficient amounts. Even if the FTC drafts a perfect policy, economics will plague enforcement ability.

I don't believe many people still think their online presence is anonymous. The public's aware data mining occurs constantly. I remember an old roommate (around 2002) telling me about malware infecting his system after visiting CNN.com. “Free? New research shows you’re likely paying with your privacy” is an important article, but a little late to the party. It's a known issue for at least 14 years in my mind.
On my home computers, I use a browser plug-in called Ghostery. It's basically an ad-blocker and populates a list of ads/data miners on every page, giving the option to block or not. It finds so many, I mostly "block all" and let it run 24/7 in the background. After this week's reading, I took some screenshots of news sites showing what Ghostery found:

CNN.com, 13 data trackers

Dallasnews.com, 18 data trackers

NYTimes.com, 12 data trackers

Washingtonpost.com, 10 data trackers

Forbes.com wouldn't let me access their site without turning Ghostery off, there's quite a few other websites with the same policy.

Ah, Facebook. I've had a "hate-hate" relationship with the service for most of it's existence, and only began a limited use of it a few months ago. At first, I disliked the idea of people knowing so much about me, but now I have to fight targeted ads too? It shouldn't be a surprise, FB made a deal to share user data with other companies a few years ago. In Australia last year, FB made a deal with Quantium, Acxiom and Experian to combine online and offline data for targeted ads.

http://www.adnews.com.au/news/facebook-makes-data-deal-with-quantium-acxiom-and-experian-to-fuse-offline-and-online-data

The article explaining how FB plans to sell user location data to retailers for consumer targeting reminds me of a scene in the movie Minority Report. In the film, advertisers use retinal scans to identify and target consumers by name. The concept is invasive and wrong, but I imagine tantalizing to soulless companies.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uiDMlFycNrw

The really scary thought is Minority Report's ad scenario is not far off. It's even likely if the public keeps taking little to no action now.

The unfortunate reality of journalism funding is advertising, and that worked for many years. It could still work, provided ad agencies tone down their products. If not, the public may need to demand an updated digital business model for news.

Hell, we should demand one regardless.