Meanwhile, Vox Media has progressively solicited reader donations to support its news arm, Vox.com. Vice Media has reportedly considered cutting Vice World News to improve its odds of a sale.
If digital media publishers once believed that the Wild West of the open web would unlock new capabilities for financing the news, the opposite now appears increasingly true.
Instead, the same bogeymen that have always plagued the news business—namely brand safety and weaker opportunities for content alignment—continue to do so, and they have been joined by new, digitally-native existential crises.
A host of unsolved challenges
News has never been a terrific environment for advertising, primarily because marketers have little control over the context in which their ad appears, Miller said.
The highly valuable audience of news readers has long mitigated this concern, but brand safety issues remain a key source of anxiety for marketers. In fact, due in part to keyword blocklists, which are rarely updated or revisited, the value of news inventory has remained far lower than verticals like lifestyle or sports content, according to 2022 data from supply side platform Sovrn.
These factors join a laundry list of other realities that make ad-supported news a challenge.
News often lacks the kind of endemic alignment offered by other categories of content, and it offers only limited opportunity for alternate revenue streams such as affiliate marketing, according to media analyst Charlotte Henry, author of the newsletter The Addition.
Reporting the news costs more than producing most other kinds of written content, and it has only a short, often cyclical period of relevancy. Combined with the brand suitability concerns that depress ad yields, the result is an expensive product that generates comparatively little revenue.
These concerns dovetail with headwinds native to digital environments. The steady decline of open-market programmatic yields means news publishers increasingly need to strike direct deals with marketers to generate meaningful ad yields, a luxury only premium publishers can arrange.
Likewise, signal loss due to cookie deprecation and shifting privacy legislation have made vast swaths of the digital inventory nearly impossible to monetize.
Social platforms—the primary sources of scale for many of these publishers—have pivoted away from news in recent years, turning off the traffic spigot and leaving publishers to find their audiences elsewhere.