I do think it's wild that over the last 365 days almost every non-profit newsroom (including many NPRs and big names everywhere) have lost major funders and each time it's treated as an individual story and no one asks if there is an underlying issue.

https://twitter.com/semafor/status/1779634511719903724

Every non profit journalist I know is talking about how no one has money any more and it's wild to me that no one has even tried to explain this phenomenon which sure feels like a systematic issue and not a bunch of random coincidences.

An interesting little fact about Vice's content: a full site archive, including saving outbound links, was performed by the volunteer Archive Team last year and it took ~six months to capture all the Vice content across all the languages they publish in. They've published a lot! This is getting a bunch of activity so I'm going to add, Archive Team is a really cool collective of volunteers who do work on their own to save the history of the internet and if you have a little extra cash, maybe support their efforts! opencollective.com/archiveteam

I hesitate to consider the collapse of The Messenger as a broad story about the state of the media. Remember, they launched an ad supported site intended to grab traffic from social and search without a working sitemap and incredibly broken ad tech

https://twitter.com/Chronotope/status/1658152442599551002

The Messenger's fatal flaw was it was run by incompetent people who didn't know what they needed to do, how much money was needed to do it, or where to put the money when they had it. Yet I'm sure every funder & leader will go on to continue to be considered Media Thought Leaders

1. It's fkin mid October.

2. "Ad Manager will not accept US National, IAB Canada TCF, US Privacy String, US States Utah, or IAB EU TCF v2.2 as part of GPP support." uhhhh ok.

support.google.com/admanager/answ…
Google is also announcing here that it will entirely ignore (rightly so) the thrice delayed depreciation of the USPAPI by the IAB.

It will also entirely ignore US National settings in the GPP, which was the mode the IAB has generally been pushing.

So @TheMessenger has launched its new website. Let's take a look! Image paths imply they are on WordPress and `cms.themessenger.com/wp-admin` takes us right to a Google Login, so WordPress seems to be behind the site. Ok! ... Interesting little fact popping up in the response headers: `X-Powered-By: WP Engine Atlas`. I think this is an interesting choice b/c I don't usually think of WP Engine as a top-tier host. (They're fine, this isn't an insult, it's just a different scale than say... WP VIP)...

Wow. This is a REAL BAD response from NYT.

Like... forget analysis, they refuse to even engage with the issues, talk to the claims, or bother to engage the editorial unit in the response.

https://twitter.com/laurahazardowen/status/1625983931810971649

I mean, for comparison, when Bar* We*ss penned her shitty letter and quit while insulting the NYT outright, NYT's response was headed up by an editor. Sulzberger AND an editor responded on Bennet.

What sucks the most about NYT's BS described here is that it is all standard operating procedure for anti-trans narratives to get smuggled into mainstream reporting. We've seen these same exact tactics processed into the Guardian's reporting as well. nytletter.com NYT's failure here is ethical, empathetic, but also, it has failed at media literacy, it has failed to employ basic media criticism, it has failed to pay attention to its peers and it has failed to learn the lessons from 2016, or G*m*rG*t* where there were similar tactics...

Also, hey, for the ATT case, if *buyers* can't figure out how to do privacy-friendly targeting well enough to show up instead of shady gold scammers who pay literal bottom dollar, I don't think it's radical to suggest that some of the problem comes from buy-side failing to adapt. Like... I know you want to have perfect individualized ad targeting, but it isn't going to happen on iOS and the likelihood you can pull it off is falling everywhere else too, so its time to figure out how to target differently.

Gotta say, I'm not sure implying that @amyklobuchar, Anna Eshoo, and everyone interested in advocating for consumer privacy or antitrust action against big tech is an "extremist" is something I would do as head of the IAB, but I guess that's just me. linkedin.com/posts/rubensch… Is it a prerequisite that to lead the IAB you must make an unhinged speech? Because they're batting 2 for 2 on leadership saying wild stuff.

lol are you fking kidding me?

help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-p… hahahahahahahaha WTF

"Additionally, we allow paid advertisement/promotion for any of the prohibited social media platforms."

At the rate we're going I expect performative bans against those who reported on the harassment of g*m*rg*te next. Seems Lorenz has been permanently banned from Twitter for breaking a "rule" where:

- The rule did not exist when she is alleged to have broken it
- The alleged rule breaking occurred off-platform
- Her account didn't have any links anymore to alleged off platform rule breaking

A lot of people speculating on what 4D chess game Msk is playing with Twitter...

But honestly he's acting exactly like a 13 yo boy who has just been given moderation powers over his favorite forum and I don't think you have to look deeper than that. He personally carried a physical sink into Twitter HQ to make a bad pun. I don't think he really plans ahead or thinks particularly deeply about anything, he just tells people to go do stuff that makes him sound smart.

And he appears to have followed that up by tearing down Twitter Spaces as a feature across the whole platform, making it unavailable to everyone in the hope no one will hear him be mad.

https://twitter.com/JohnPaczkowski/status/1603615569793515520

https://twitter.com/dril/status/549425182767861760?t=lcmAcSiQf8MQTq7uAEGmIA&s=19

This fundamentally misinterprets why a lot of people pay for subscriptions to publications. Yes, not every subscriber to every paper uses that publication regularly. But they aren't paying for units of news to consume. They're funding coverage. americanpressinstitute.org/publications/r…

https://twitter.com/noam/status/1596626221756223488

News organizations aren't taking advantage of readers by 'promising them X units of News Product that they will want to consume' and then not doing some activity that is enough to bring them back each month. Readers pay for news because they believe in the mission.

There are two publisher perspective problems about micropayments that most don't get:

- payment processor fees make them unreasonable to do solo
- you bundle multiple pubs? Why should I be giving you an extra percent to build your aggregator & destroy my acquisition funnel? I have zero inside knowledge about Scroll / Twitter Blue but I'd take a lesson in seeing how their general acceptance by publishers was accompanied by how they never launched an aggregator/reader platform and let pubs still do what they wanted with reg and paywalls.

This is quite a thing for Post News to claim when right now the only premium news provider I've found is Reuters, who is republishing wire stories you can read for free on their website for money while WSJ has uhhh this.

https://twitter.com/profgalloway/status/1596265219797520387

Also... I don't know who Simon C Holland is, but if he is on Post... uhhhh I don't know how to find him.

I have some concerns about Post that are only getting deeper. So people are asking for more detail and the answer is hard to put into solid points because it is more Vibes than facts but some things:

...

Entirely the wrong framing. The digital advertising community has endangered itself by using tactics known to be unfriendly to consumers, and unethical. Then they continually shot themselves in the foot by ignoring these changes coming at them for years.

prescottenews.com/index.php/2022… None of the FTC's actions should be a surprise & while attempting to make yourself too big to fail has been an obnoxiously common tactic in the US economy lately, I have no sympathy for those who try it and even less for those who, as it seems will happen with ad tech, fail at it

Self hosting Mastodon as a personal instance is a neat trick I see some of you are doing, but it's just as bad for your experiance as joining the main instance. It's not really how you're going to get the most out of the tool. Let me explain: See the thing is that Mastodon is decentralized, but more importantly it's federated, which means it's capable of being meaningfully decentralized... but still having centers of activity. The point isn't decentralization, it's to find a center you want to live in...

Yeah, this seems like a really bad idea for publishers to do.

https://twitter.com/Ryanbarwick/status/1557767005318553600

I think it's bullshit that any entity would consider *all* incentivized traffic invalid. That's incredibly dumb... what are the advertisers doing that's different from publishers buying traffic?

The thing that most people don't seem to understand is that surveillance capitalism means that the systems of ad tech can be very good at tracking you individually, great for use by cops, pretty nifty for propoganda, and still terrible for satisfying standard marketing outcomes. If they can't take a stand for privacy on ethical terms then at least Brands should be more upset that they are the majority of funding for a panopticon that serves their interests less effectively than any other participant.