Thread by @jeffjarvis

"Companies without first-party relationships with consumers won’t be able to use their identity solutions on Google’s demand-side platform."
I spent a decade hectoring news companies to develop their first-party data & competence, to little avail.

https://twitter.com/davemorgannyc/status/1367795036470001673

The way to garner first-party data, I argued, was to build products, services, even clubs targeted at groups, needs, affinities. This is permission-based data (I build a service for parents; you use it; you are telling me you're a parent.) 2/ medium.com/whither-news/i…

This is also why we started a community of practice around commerce at @towknightcenter: to motivate publishers to learn how to build individual user profiling and to gather first-party data (and, btw, to create another revenue stream). 3/

But mostly, I argued that news organizations needed to stop treating the people formerly known as the audience as a mass & instead learn about people as individuals & members of communities. The business case for this is now seen in the need for 1st-party data publishers lack. 4/

Too often, instead, publishers resorted to programmatic advertising + Taboola, commodifying & cheapening their environment & inventory, producing data for others, and doing nothing to build a relationship with--instead irritating--readers. 5/

These are the fruits of relying on page views. I know. When I started news sites, that was the one metric we had & managed to. But it quickly became clear how corrupting that was, leading to cats & Kardashians. We became what we measured. 6/

The privacy panic media led about cookies, targeting, & "surveillance capitalism" (give me a break) opened the door for Google to get rid of 3rd-party targeting & rely on its copious 1st-party data. The big get bigger. Media, be careful what you panic about. 7/

Meanwhile, marketers learned how to build their own direct relationships w/ customers w/out media. I sat with a group of them a year ago; they said the only reason they need media now is their stock price (read: WSJ, FT). They feel no need or obligation to support news media. 8/

Meanwhile, hedge funds took over most newspapers. They will not invest in what is needed for these companies to compete: building product & services to establish direct & valued relationships with users + first-party data + new visions for advertising. 9/

So, having failed at advertising, news retreats like a turtle behind paywalls. Except their products are too often not worth paying for. Those who pay & thus influence the news are the privileged who can afford it or the old who have the habit. Is that a strategy? 10/

In What Would Google Do? I quoted @rishad saying Google rewrote advertising's rules because it had an entirely new population of advertisers who hadn't been able to afford media. Google just rewrote advertising's rules again. 11/

Media can't say they didn't see this coming. Hell, they helped cause it by gleefully attacking platforms over targeting and "privacy." 12/

Our readers took news to Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, NextDoor et al because we did not provide the mechanisms to interact with news those platforms did. 13/

Our advertisers left because platforms enabled them to build direct relationships with customers in ways we did not and because they offered more efficient and efficacious means to advertise. 14/

Meanwhile, publishers think the platforms owe them something. They cash in political capital to lobby (instead of report on) politicians for protectionist legislation. See: Australia. 15/

https://twitter.com/thejuicemedia/status/1365076419760414720

This is why I say if you want to get more tax revenue from Google & Facebook, OK. But what is to say publishers--that hedge funds--that have not invested in journalistic and media innovation should receive a penny of it? Spend it on innovation, access, education. 16/

Publishers are not victims in this saga. With sins of commission and omission, they were willing and witting participants in it. They built their businesses on cookies while demonizing cookies and couldn't see where this would lead; to crumbs. 17/