Advertising

Google gives $10,000 in credits each to 35,000 nonprofits worldwide every month to buy ads on its search engine. But Google found that some ads received few clicks and announced in December 2017 that it would stop funding groups that generate clicks off less than 5 percent of their ads in two consecutive months. Grant recipients called it a wake up call to pay attention to Google after years of focusing on social media marketing. But despite rushing to comply, several said they could not do so in only two months and that their accounts may not get funded for March.

House Commerce Committee Chairman Greg Walden (R-OR) launched an attack on the market power of large tech companies. "I’m not looking for a lot of regulation, I’m looking for responsibility," Chairman Walden said. "If responsibility doesn’t flow, then regulation will." Chairman Walden raised multiple areas for possible regulation:

According to Facebook, during the 2016 election, President Donald Trump’s campaign actually paid higher rates to advertise on the platform overall than Hillary Clinton’s campaign did. But, Facebook's chart does not show what the Clinton and Trump campaigns would have paid for an apples-to-apples ad buy.

[Commentary] No matter how you look at them, Russia’s Facebook ads were almost certainly less consequential than the Trump campaign’s mastery of two critical parts of the Facebook advertising infrastructure: The ads auction, and a benign-sounding but actually Orwellian product called Custom Audiences (and its diabolical little brother, Lookalike Audiences).

[Commentary] The indictments brought by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III against 13 individuals and three organizations accused of interfering with the US election offer perhaps the most powerful evidence yet that Facebook and its Instagram subsidiary are harming public health and democracy. The best option for the company — and for democracy — is for Facebook to change its business model from one based on advertising to a subscription service. Facebook’s advertising business model is hugely profitable, but the incentives are perverse.

[Commentary] The Mueller investigation of Russian efforts to influence the 2016 presidential election is shining a welcome light on the Kremlin’s covert activity, but there is no similar effort to shine a light on the social media algorithms that helped the Russians spread their messages. There needs to be. This effort should begin by “opening up” the results of the algorithms.  The government should require social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter to use a similar open application programming interface.

Rob Goldman, Facebook’s vice president of advertising, posted a series of messages on Twitter that were meant to clear up misconceptions about Facebook’s role in the election. Instead, he plunged the company deeper into controversy. “Most of the coverage of Russian meddling involves their attempt to effect the outcome of the 2016 US election,” Goldman tweeted.

The US indictment handed up against three Russian companies and 13 individuals shows starkly how ill-prepared the tech giants were for the type of aggressive influence campaign the Russians allegedly mounted. The details also suggest it won’t be easy to stop such tactics in the run-up to the midterm election in less than nine months, say researchers who study social media. Facebook, Google parent Alphabet, and Twitter have more than 100,000 employees and $150 billion in annual revenue combined.

As bad as scraping for advertising revenue might be, there’s another way the Facebook threat could actually get worse: Instead of continuing to be a primary platform for news companies and trying to strike relationships with them, the company could decide to simply wash its hands of news entirely, either because it isn’t generating enough revenue, or because it has become too much of a political headache. To really come to grips with what its size and influence have wrought both in journalism and society at large, Facebook is going to have to not only change its outlook but also its culture

Claiming that ad-blockers have cut "deeply" into its revenue, the media company Salon is asking some readers to bolster its bottom line — by helping the site generate cryptocurrency.