On the internet, truth has become a commodity. “I Supported Hillary Clinton Until I Saw This,” stated the headline on a sponsored story from UpVibes.com that appeared on the New York Post in September 2016. “These Bill Clinton Facts Will Change Your Opinion of the Clintons” claimed another from LifeDaily. Both articles were put on the Post by Outbrain, a leading content marketing network. The most popular English-language publishers increasingly rely on “promoted stories” from companies such as Taboola, Outbrain, Revcontent and Adblade to boost their revenues.
Outbrain and Taboola, both founded in Israel in 2006, are the industry’s largest providers of promoted stories with a collective global reach in excess of 1.5 billion people per month. Aside from headlines questioning Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, these networks are best-known for promoting articles promising an “Incredibly Brilliant way to Check if you had PPI” and news of a “Brilliant PPI Check Taking Britain by Storm”. Promoted stories might recommend “The World’s Cutest Cat Pictures All On One Site”; “Jeff Bridges’ Magnificent Home Is Beyond Stunning” or, bizarrely, “Top 15 Celebrities You Didn’t Know are Black”.
The original promise of such networks was simple: for a modest fee, anyone can reach a huge audience of readers on scores of highly-ranked websites. In return, those sites make a tidy sum from linking their readers to useful content elsewhere on the web. But, at scale, that promise has collapsed. Relevant news is increasingly being replaced with fake ads.
Clickbait isn’t new. Nor is dodgy advertising. But journalism has never had to cope with Donald Trump before. At a press conference on January 11, Trump pointed at a CNN journalist and said “you’re fake news”. The attacks have continued. Much as the fake news entrepreneurs of Macedonia gamed Facebook and Google’s algorithms by peddling eye-catching lies for clicks, so have individuals looking to make a quick buck from other parts of the web guarded by imperfect systems. Across the publishing industry, from The Guardian to The Telegraph and the Los Angeles Times to USA Today, news organisations continue to rely on revenue from promoted stories that, at times, stretch the truth to breaking point. If “fake news” is the latest political and media buzz phrase, then promoted stories are the decade-old elephant in the room.
Outbrain, which reportedly brings in more than $500 million a year in revenue, is bullish about the success of its business. “The average click-through rate on a banner is around 0.01 per cent,” says Gilad de Vries, senior vice president of strategy at the company. That means that for every 10,000 people who see a banner advert on a website, just one will click on it. “There’s a higher chance you’ll survive a plane crash than wilfully click on a banner,” adds de Vries. His company’s adverts – or content marketing, as it’s known in the industry – have a click-through rate of five per cent. According to de Vries, Outbrain is now among the top three sources of revenue at most publishers it works with, though there are no solid figures to back up this claim. The company provides 250 billion recommendations per month. Once only found at the bottom of articles, Outbrain and its ilk are now appearing all over websites. “More and more we see recommendations on the side-rails, recommendations in text or in-feed in your homepage,” says de Vries. Taboola turned down a request for an interview.
Analysis conducted by ChangeAdvertising in September 2016 found that 26 per cent of links served by networks such as Outbrain and Taboola led to what the researchers deemed to be “clickbait”. The analysis, which looked at 312 links across 41 top English-language news publishers, also found that 89 per cent of the clickbait sites it encountered were anonymously registered. For the invisible companies behind these sites, there’s big money to be made.
Here’s how the model works: buy placement for your site on a content network (“What Annalise From ‘Neighbours’ Looks Like Today Will Shock You”), make sure the article is a multi-page gallery, cover it in adverts and, if all goes well, make a profit. The process of traffic arbitrage, where you buy a cheap click for five pence and make six pence from it, is only made possible by advertising networks that operate at huge volume and with little quality control.
Readers aren’t happy. “I wonder whether publishers concerned about fake news eg @guardian ever check the veracity of that stuff ‘recommended by @Outbrain’?” tweeted one Guardian reader. “It’s about time serious media sites like @guardian ditched appalling pseudo content from the likes of @Outbrain”, wrote another. In a statement, a spokesperson for The Guardian said its deal with Outbrain showed readers “relevant Guardian journalism, as well as clearly labelled external content”. The deal, the spokesperson continued, also provided the company with “a source of revenue” in a “rapidly deteriorating commercial environment”.
During the US presidential election, the gaming of promoted stories turned political. As the world’s media grappled with fake news, the advertising surrounding their reports only added to the problem. The following promoted stories were all served by content marketing networks during the month of August 2016: “20 Photos of Donald Trump That Will Change Your Mind” (San Francisco Examiner, served by Adblade); “This Leak Will End Trump’s Presidential Run” (Bleacher Report, served by Outbrain); “Trump’s IQ Will Shock You" (TIME, served by Outbrain); “Ever Wondered Why Donald Trump Doesn’t Talk About His Daughter..." (TIME, served by Outbrain); “Roseanne Barr Thinks the US Would Be ‘Lucky’ if Trump Won” (Huffington Post, served by ZergNet); “Rare Unseen Photos Of Hillary Clinton They Don’t Want You To See” (Mashable, served by Outbrain); “The Terrible History of Trump’s Family That He Doesn’t Want You To Know” (MSN, served by Taboola); “Donald Trump’s Advice For Paying Off Mortgage (It’s Genius!)” (Forbes, served by Revcontent); “This is the 1 video Hillary never wanted anyone to see – will she give up the White House now?” (HistoryThings, served by Adblade).
The lure of a reliable revenue stream is often too hard to ignore for media companies. Facebook and Google account for around three-quarters of the £18.4 billion digital display advertising market in the US and 53 per cent of the UK’s £4 billion industry. That dominance of the UK, according to OC&C Strategy Consultants, will reach 71 per cent by 2020. Online advertising remains hugely profitable for those delivering it, yet terminally ineffective for news organisations that can’t generate the traffic to make the low click-through rate pay. The first ever banner advert, which appeared on early US WIRED offshoot HotWired.com in October 1994, had a click-through rate of 78 per cent. Click-throughs have been in free fall ever since.
Paywalls have gone up, fallen down and gone back up again. The Sun, which used a paywall for two years before scrapping it in November 2015, reported a loss of more than £60 million in 2016. At The Times, the only UK national to remain steadfastly behind a digital paywall, a 2015 profit of £8.8 million became a pre-tax loss of £5 million in the year to July 2016. That same month, The Guardian reported losses of £69 million, shortly after launching a campaign to get more people donating to support its journalism. Even The Daily Mail, oft-venerated as a bastion of digital publishing success, recently announced plans to cut 400 jobs despite increases in digital advertising revenue. The conclusion is obvious: digital display advertising is not a workable business model for journalism. And yet the model persists.
But, at some publishers, things are changing. In October 2016, Outbrain links stopped appearing on American current affairs website Slate. “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,” Keith Hernandez, Slate’s then president, told The New York Times.
“Every publisher can choose their strategy and how aggressive they want to go in terms of the balance between monetisation and reader’s trust,” says de Vries. In late November, Hernandez left Slate – at the time of writing the site is not using Outbrain or any other content marketing platform. “I think it’s unfortunate for the industry, but that’s the way it’s going,” continues de Vries. “And because a lot of publishers are very stressed for revenues they sometimes are willing to sacrifice the quality of the recommendations being served.”
Picking holes in promoted stories isn’t difficult. Take Chandler Riggs. According to a promoted story served by Revcontent to 42 sites for 20 days in September and October 2016, the 17-year-old Walking Dead actor had “quietly passed away”. Responding to news of his passing on Twitter, Riggs joked “i wish LOL”. So what, if any, systems exist to police the billions of links that appear alongside some of the world’s most-read websites? “That’s a difficult question to answer,” says de Vries. The majority of links Outbrain recommends, he continues, are internal – like this article on The Guardian? You might also like this article on The Guardian – but for those that aren’t, there is some moderation. First, adverts are automatically screened to check for malicious code or fraud. Algorithms are also able to tell if a thumbnail image contains, for example, a picture of a woman in a bikini, allowing publishers to set what types of images they are happy to display. “Then there is an actual editorial review, that I think is a team of about 20 or 30 people now,” he says. Outbrain handles around 600,000 new links to content every day.
Faced with such a huge volume of data, Outbrain’s verification problem is not unique. It’s the same failure at scale that causes Google’s algorithms to suggest Barack Obama is planning a coup d'état or Facebook’s trending news sidebar to promote a video of a man masturbating with a McDonald’s chicken sandwich. “There’s no way for Facebook to validate every share that we do in social, and the same goes for Outbrain. There’s no way for us to fact check everything that is recommended,” says de Vries. But on a network that aims to show people relevant content, this failure to tackle misleading or false stories is a blow. “We have zero tolerance for fake news on our network and we take down anything we see as inappropriate immediately, either flagged by our editors or our staff or the users who can write to us,” he continues. To combat the problem of fake news, Outbrain is automatically blocking a few hundred domains from a crowdsourced list of known offenders.
“I think on our platform it is a very small problem,” de Vries continues. The reason? Money. On Facebook, he argues, someone can get fake news to go viral with very little investment. On content marketing networks, they have to pay to get their stories in front of eyeballs. But, once they do, there’s a chance it will appear on some of the most popular websites in the world. “That is not something that we tolerate,” says de Vries, responding to a question about the Hillary Clinton links Outbrain served on the New York Post.
The problem is familiar. As with Facebook and Google, content marketing networks have been used to spread misinformation and erode the importance of facts online. Technology companies have shown they are able to target advertising at individuals with remarkable accuracy, yet when it comes to fake news they are suddenly found to be ineffective. As such, it remains a growing problem that is unlikely to find a quick solution. “Are there cracks? Absolutely. Is it completely impenetrable? Probably not,” says de Vries. “But it’s not just an Outbrain problem. It’s an internet problem, it’s an industry problem, it’s a platform problem.”
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
