Part 2 of 2
Advertisers are enamored with all the bells and whistles of digital advertising. As a result, traditional newspapers and television struggle to fund real newsgathering by trained journalists. Rumors and innuendos posted by amateurs on blogs and social media platforms are replacing real news — a centuries-old process of refining ethics and standards to achieve accuracy and objectivity as best as humanly possible.
Let me ask you this: Why has Congress exempted Facebook and Google — virtual monopolies — from centuries-old libel and slander common law that tens of thousands of traditional media companies must abide by day in and day out?
To add salt to this gaping wound, the digital ad world is rife with fraud.
In a recent exposé, national website Buzz Feed explained how digital ad fraud works:
The first step to creating convincing fake traffic is to acquire apps used by actual human users. The fraudsters study the behavior of the users and then create bots — automated computer programs — that mimic the same actions. The bots are loaded onto servers that contain specialized software that enables the bots to generate traffic within the specific apps.
In the case of websites in the scheme, the bots visit them using virtual web browsers that help present this traffic as human. In both cases, the fake traffic generates ad views, which in turn earns revenue.
The blending of real humans with bots helps defeat systems built to detect fake traffic because the real traffic and fake traffic look almost exactly the same.
Procter and Gamble just cut their digital advertising by $200 million and saw no effect on sales, leading the company to question the effectiveness of digital advertising.
Digital advertising sells itself as transparent, producing a mountain of data. Only problem: No one knows if that data is real. It’s just images on a screen, easily faked.
Meanwhile, my company’s newspapers and magazines are a real product that you can touch, see and feel. It is not vaporware. It is tangible. It is real. It can’t be faked. Our completely local websites with local ads aren’t connected to the national digital ad networks that are rife with fraud.
In most of our communities, we are the only source of news — just a handful of reporters for tens of thousands of American citizens. We are facing huge challenges to survive. Already there are vast “news deserts” across the American heartland. Corruption proliferates.
Readers and advertisers must support newspapers or they will die. And when they die, they will be sorely missed and hard to bring back. Then Facebook, Google and Amazon will suck out every penny from your communities and give nothing back in return, all the while spying, reporting and profiting from your every word and every move.
Big Brother is here. He walked right through our front door as we lobsters were enjoying a nice warm bath.
Wyatt Emmerich is president of Emmerich Newspapers. Reach him at wyatt@northsidesun.com.
