2) Why don't you actually read some of the BuzzFeed news: http://www.buzzfeed.com/news
They have writers from NYT and WSJ amongst others on their staff. Put aside your prejudice and actually see for yourself.
3) Wikipedia isn't a business, but their business arm Wikia makes all their money on advertising. StackExchange makes all their money on advertising (those job postings are ads and other banners on their site). However both companies are not in the content business because all their content is user generated. That's why they have no costs other than technical upkeep.
A real content business requires people to actually create that content so your examples aren't relevant. Sure we can replace everything with direct subscriptions but that doesn't scale and severely limits the access to and quantity of content available. Those are the facts in the industry, there's no denying that, no matter how much you hate ads.
I did. Sorry to tell you, but they seem as "hard news" as CNN. It is infotainment. Most of the topics are still about what is popular, what can generate clicks and what can polarize. There is nothing in there that I feel I would pay to see investigated, studied or analyzed.
(1) and (3) The point I am trying to get across is that any kind of business is supposed to exist to support some kind of need for society. The "advertising industry" only fulfills any social utlity when it manages to efficiently connect producers to their target consumer.
If to do that, it needs to steal attention from people, it is not doing its job properly.
If the "advertising industry" ends up providing a system that makes people consume only things from the producers with more capital, instead of the best product, then the industry is not doing its job properly.
If the "advertising industry" ends up creating by collateral a huge mass of well educated people that depend on this "meta-work" of producing content that can be pass for journalism or entertainment, then it fails to fulfill its social function.
>> Wikipedia isn't a business, but their business arm Wikia makes all their money on advertising.
Society benefits from something like wikipedia. I can donate $25/year like I do to Wikipedia, and hope that enough people will contribute to it to keep it running. Good thing that Wikia can bring some funds and not have to rely on many more people. But if Wikia ceased to exist, people can still find ways to keep wikipedia around. If society loses wikipedia, we would lose a lot.
Now, if for some reason Wikia was not being profitable, do you really think society would be worse off? Perhaps for historical and cultural reasons, it would be bad to lose it - just look at all the work from the archive.org people. But look at Geocities: do you think society is that worse off without it? Would we be worse off without Wikia?
>> Eyeballs = attention = what advertising is all about.
To come back to my point: I do believe that there are cases where business manage to provide the social function of advertising (establish a communication channel between producers and consumers), but this "produce content and try to monetize it" with ads is not one such case.
- The content that gets produced is of dubious quality (because the focus of the content producer is not in the quality of the content, rather how much of the people's attention it can grab)
- There is no real connection between content producer and the producer paying for ads. So content producers may end up becoming crap-pushers without even knowing.
- It makes for an uneven field for smaller producers. We live in an era where the cost of producing, processing and distributing information is almost zero. The balance of power could be completely in favor of the people. We HAVE the means of production of wealth in our hands. But because of advertising, we give this power back to the Capital owners. You describe your work as a "marketing platform for top brands". Let me tell you one thing: I WANT BRANDS TO BE DESTROYED. There is no real value in brands, except for the brand owners. They stiffle innovation. They created consumerism as a lifestyle.
I am all for free-market and minimal intervention on business. But you state a equation like this one where "attention" as something that can be extracted value from WHEN IT IS NOT FUCKING YOURS! It is immoral and you don't even see it.
You also seem to have some idealistic idea of what advertising is. It's not some efficient marketplace to connect people. It is an industry about attention. And no it's not "stealing" as everything in the world competes for attention. It's more of paying to capture that attention as best it can. There is no greater "social function" here.
Society benefits from all things. Again YOU cannot judge this based on some random questions about Wikipedia vs some entertainment publication. The careers of those mentioned in that publication and their livelihoods and families certainly benefit from it so it's all relative and there's no right or ideal.
There might be misaligned incentives for some publishers choosing to maximize revenue (that's not the bad thing since they are businesses) by focusing on improving ad load rather than content. That doesn't mean there's something wrong with advertising, only that that business has become focused on selling ads rather than producing content.
The whole last part of your statement makes no sense to me. Destroy brands? Why? What's that do? Do you know what brands are? They are just reputations, but at a higher level for corporations and product lines. You should read this: http://www.economist.com/news/business/21614150-brands-are-m...
Attention can absolutely be extracted, it doesn't have to "belong" to someone because it's an abstract thing in itself. There is no "attention" tangible good. You have as much of it as you want. It's just a way to think of the value exchange. I'm not sure what you're so confused about but calling others immoral certainly isn't the way to prove your point.
When I mention a "social function", I don't mean a "public service". I mean in the utilitarian sense. Every economic activity has a social function. If you consider yourself to be living in a free society, for every kind of activity you do you are expected to provide some kind of good or service that is of interest of others. If it is considered to be beneficial only to one of the parties, it is not going to happen (unless it is done by force, but then we don't have an actual free society)
From brick layers to gas stations, from restaurant chefs to prostitutes, from Venture Capital Fund Managers to shoe makers to Hollywood. That is the case even to advertising. Advertising's "social function" is to inform the consumer public about what is available in the market at large, and to give to producers a chance to showcase their offerings. This may sound "idealistic", but it shouldn't be.
You seem to be focused on the "business" part of the things. As in "how to make money to keep that activity?" For society, this doesn't matter. If there is any other way to fulfill that need, the business is obsolete and can (should) go extinct or adapt into something else.
You have the arrows reversed: you want society to accept that the business needs to exist, and that it should change to support it. In fact, it is the business that needs to change to always support the needs of society.
Yours is the corporatist view. This view is what brings us the continued influence of RIAA and MPAA and DRM. It's what brings us poor-quality American cars. It is what brings "Food, Inc" thanks to subsidies in the corn industry. It is what brings us a society that is so drowned in "cheap" entertainment that leads to this dystopia we live in (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusing_Ourselves_to_Death)
> Destroy brands? Why? What's that do?
I don't say in the sense of setting corporate places on fire. I mean in the sense of being able to convince people that most of the time, there is a "brand-free" version of a product that is of equal or superior quality but that costs less.
Think of things like consumer electronics: most of the audio equipment or LCD panels can be virtually the same, yet people are so bombarded by ads from the "reputable brands", they can't even conceive or looking for an OEM factory.
Another example: at least in São Paulo I remember going to the mall and seeing "designer" jeans that would cost $100. Those jeans were produced in many different small shops around the city, spec'd by the "designer". The uncle of a friend of mine ran one of those shops. He would sell the "unbranded" version of the jeans for $15.
Another example: Go to any supermarkets, and you find "white label" products that are sometimes produced by companies that produce the very same "branded" version. The contents can be the same, yet the branded one will cost more.
What is the benefit of "brands" in these examples? How are the advertising companies helping people in making better informed decisions?
Also... please, Buzzfeed partnering with the White House is a sign of "quality news"? The quote "If you want something in the paper, that’s advertising; you want something kept out, that’s news" comes to mind.
> It's FAR better to have democratic and free access to content rather than tying it to direct payments and vastly limiting access and amount. That is going backwards to the entire intent of the internet and the spread of information.
That is a false dichotomy. You can get free access to content without relying on ads as your revenue stream. Wikipedia is not a business and does it. Stackoverflow is a business and uses the careers site as the main revenue source. We don't need an "Ads industry" to have quality content.