Denton removed the post against the wishes of the editorial staff. The latest bloodbath: Gawker Media, where Nick Denton's flagship site has fallen into chaos following a reviled Gawker post outing a Condé Nast executive who tried to hire a male prostitute. As they say in Heathers, whether to rage-quit or not is one of the most important decisions an editor can make. The best reason to take a top media job at this point is so you can one day make a big show of quitting it. So we’re at a point where advertisers expect publishers to buy ads for their ads - even when it’s not particularly effective.There's a new trend in media, and it's publicly resigning prestigious editing gigs on principle. Just so we’re absolutely clear, bought traffic for individual posts from Facebook represented 0.003 per cent of organic. That compares with total Gawker Media traffic in excess of 600m pages per month. In case anyone missed the key line, 20,000 page impressions bought from Facebook. Taking an excellent Gawker post from a million views to two million views with a $500 Facebook spend seems like a no brainer, but becoming reliant on Facebook to prop up every story we publish is a great way to create a rickety business model akin to Upworthy or ViralNova. The strength of our editorial wildly eclipses any amount of traffic we could or would purchase it’s effectively a drop in the bucket.Īnd yes, our advertisers are fully aware that we’re promoting their sponsored posts on Facebook and Twitter…in fact the only reason we do it is because so many advertisers expect it now.Īs for whether or not it makes sense for editorial to try buying Facebook promo, I personally think it makes sense for certain stories that are already organically successful. The company we use to buy those ads is a company called Simple Reach, which was actually started by some guys who were tangentially involved with Buzzfeed’s early traffic experiments.īut to be clear: The traffic we’ve purchased on Facebook and Twitter for promoted stories has equaled less than 20,000 pageviews in total over the course of the last 2 months.Īgain, the sole purpose of buying this traffic is to provide extended reach for branded content to an audience not currently on our site, not to artificially boost traffic numbers. James from the Gawker Ad Team here, wanted to just provide some context to what Cook & Co are talking about.įor posts that are published on the Kinja or individual brand Kinjas (like Netflix, for example), we do occasionally utilize Facebook and Twitter ads to reach a wider audience for stories that are organically performing well. My only concern, and the one that motivated this piece, is to challenge anyone who claims without warrant that an artificial boost is the product of natural forces. In practice, the distinction between “bought” and “earned” popularity is pretty artificial. That’s Adorno-esque “culture industry” territory there. I don’t see such buys as a problem in principle, provided that 1) a media organization is very transparent about them and 2) said media organization doesn’t then promote ad-buy-related successes as the successes of “organic” content. I prefer, as I think you do, earning them.Īgreed with John. As for editorial, I don’t really like the idea of trumpeting our numbers when some of those were simply purchased. For the record, I’m agnostic on the idea of doing it for ads-not my side of things, though I do think it’s important to be open about the business model. And Joel Johnson, our editorial director, is exploring the idea of buying Facebook ads for editorial posts. Nick, I am reliably told by people in the ad department that Gawker Media does in fact actively buy Facebook traffic for sponsored posts. Oh, for the record, we’ve tried a few experiments with bought traffic. Not that there’s anything wrong with Buzzfeed buying traffic on Facebook. The conversation is happening right now as I type this, so there may be more gold to come, but a few highlights.

(“Buying traffic” in this case meaning paying Facebook to promote your stories within its walls.) Over at Gawker, there’s an interesting discussion going on in the comments of this story about Facebook, BuzzFeed, and the impact of buying traffic.

LINK: ➚ | Posted by: Joshua Benton | February 11, 2014

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