We gave up on advertising too soon
A new policy brief on fixing the online advertising ecosystem, two initiatives to get AI companies to pay publishers, Meta courting creators, local crowdfunding without a tote bag and 22 active calls.
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This week on Media Finance Monitor
We gave up on advertising too soon
Two initiatives to get AI companies to pay publishers
Meta tries to court creators, again
How to run a media fundraiser without a tote bag
22 active calls (1 new)
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We gave up on advertising too soon
(by Peter)
Somewhere in the last two decades, a lot of independent media stopped thinking of advertising as a revenue stream and started treating it as a character flaw.
Programmatic advertising and platform intermediaries gutted the model that had underpinned public interest journalism for decades. New technology enabled increasingly grotesque brand safety obsessions, blocking words like "conflict" and "protest", making advertising nearly impossible for hard news. Money flowed to fraud farms, made-for-advertising slop sites, and Google's and Meta's own exchanges, while publishers were left with a pittance and a growing sense of moral contamination.
So, understandably, much of the sector decided that advertising was broken, perhaps irreparably, and urgently needed to pivot to subscriptions, philanthropy, grants, basically anything cleaner. We internalized the defeat completely and built anti-commercial identities around it.
A new policy brief from the Forum on Information and Democracy (FID) pushes back on that consensus. Without being nostalgic for the banner ad era, it argues that the $1.17 trillion digital advertising market is actively misallocating value: toward fraud, slop, and Big Tech’s own exchange systems, while penalizing journalism. It also tries to define policy levers to reshape the market for better outcomes for public interest information.
Before getting to the specifics: it is entirely reasonable to decline certain advertisers on principle, to worry about editorial capture, to draw lines. What is less reasonable is treating all commercial revenue as equally contaminating while insisting that reader revenue, philanthropy, or foundation grants arrive somehow free of power dynamics or dependency. They don't. (See also: The elaborate hierarchy of “cleanliness” in media funding)
FID describes a digital advertising space heavily shaped by Google and Meta, noting that Meta, Alphabet, and Amazon together account for more than 55% of ad market share outside China. It cites estimates suggesting that of every dollar spent on programmatic advertising, only 36 cents reaches the publisher, and that a single campaign is served across an average of 44,000 websites.
Brand safety mechanisms have compounded the problem. A 2024 study found that 45% of Reach's coverage of the Euro final was flagged as unsafe, blocked over words like "shoot" and "attack". A recent French study estimates that 30-40% of news content is excluded from advertising altogether.
One of the brief’s most valuable contributions is the inventory of what already exists. The authors catalogue advertiser coalitions trying to redirect spend toward quality news, civil-society groups building commercial capacity, publisher alliances pooling inventory, alternative adtech experiments, certification schemes, and contextual targeting tools. The picture is not of a sector waiting to be saved, but of one throwing everything it has at the problem even if without much coordination.
The recommendations span four audiences: governments, advertisers, publishers, and intermediaries.
Some fall into the “why isn’t this already standard?” category: supply-chain transparency, measurement standards, basic due diligence for adtech actors. Helping smaller publishers build sales capacity or aggregate inventory (the Ethical Media Alliance is doing interesting work on this in CEE) is similarly uncontroversial. These require no particular love of journalism to support, just a belief that fraud and monopoly are bad.
A second group is promising but messy. Tax incentives for ads placed with public-interest media, government ad set-asides, and verification systems that let news outlets identify themselves in programmatic pipelines could redirect real money. They also invite favoritism, eligibility fights, bureaucracy, and, in some contexts, the long shadow of state advertising as a tool of control. (See also: Media funding, weaponized)
The final group functions more as horizon markers than near-term plans. Mandating a “democratic responsibility” for platforms to support journalism, building public-interest ad infrastructure, or structurally curbing platform dominance would require political alignment that most contexts currently lack.
For years, parts of independent media could afford a certain purity on this question. Commercial money is messy, let’s prioritize other models. That position made more sense when institutional funding was reliable and traffic was growing. Now, with foundation money wobbling and AI making referral traffic increasingly fragile, abandoning commercial revenue looks less like principle and more like a luxury belief.
Independent media was right to distrust the system. It was probably wrong to mistake the system’s failures for a verdict on commercial revenue itself.
Two initiatives to get AI companies to pay publishers
(by María)
The argument that AI companies should compensate the publishers and creators whose work trains their models is now also coming from an AI company. Arthur Mensch, CEO of French startup Mistral AI, recently made the case for revenue sharing in the Financial Times.
His proposal: a revenue-based levy on all commercial AI providers operating in Europe, proportional in theory to their use of publicly available online content, though in practice, usage is hard to measure. The proceeds would flow into a central fund supporting new content creation and cultural sectors. In exchange, AI developers would receive protection from liability when training on publicly accessible material.
Whether that reads as a genuine concession or a strategic move depends on how cynical you are about European AI companies trying to differentiate themselves from American competitors.
Mensch isn’t conceding that Mistral did anything wrong. The current opt-out framework is “unworkable,” he argues, because copyrighted works spread uncontrollably online and the legal mechanisms to stop them are too fragmented to be effective. The levy would replace legal uncertainty with a predictable cost. That’s a reasonable offer for AI companies, but not necessarily for rights holders who may want a say in how their works are used, not just a share of the proceeds.
A month earlier, five of the UK’s largest media organizations announced a different approach to the same problem. SPUR (Standards for Publisher Usage Rights), launched in February by the BBC, Financial Times, Guardian, Sky News, and Telegraph, proposes technical standards, licensing frameworks, and a push for AI developers to access journalistic content through rights-cleared channels. The goal is to reduce licensing friction while publishers retain control and get paid. The obvious catch: it only works if AI developers choose to use it, despite already being able to access most of that content without permission.
The trade-offs are clear enough. The levy makes access easier but reduces control; SPUR preserves control but is harder to scale. Both approaches ultimately rest on the same recognition: that the current situation is neither fair nor stable, even if one requires political will and the other industry alignment.
Meta tries to court creators, again
(by María)
In 2021, Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook’s next chapter would be the metaverse and renamed the company to signal how seriously he meant it. He envisioned replacing the social media feed with a digital world accessed through a headset, populated by avatars, experienced in real time. Five years and tens of billions of dollars later, it hasn’t paid off. Focus and resources are shifting from VR to AI.
While Meta went looking for the next internet, Facebook kept losing relevance. Growth slowed in key markets, and creators, particularly those building video-first audiences, gravitated elsewhere. Zuckerberg acknowledged as much last year: “I just don’t think that a lot of creators today think about Facebook as the primary place they can go.” More than two billion daily users, and the platform still can’t make itself matter to the people who shape where audiences spend their time.
Meta’s answer is the Creator Fast Track: a program designed to lure established voices from TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram into posting Reels on Facebook. For three months, participants receive between $100 and $3,000 a month, depending on audience size. The content doesn’t need to be new, just original and not previously posted on Facebook. Back catalogs qualify. “If you have a great back catalog of best hits, that qualifies,” said Yair Livne, VP of Creator Product at Facebook. After the three months, participants move into Facebook’s Content Monetization program, which is normally invite-only.
This is not the first time Meta has made this kind of offer. In 2018, the Gaming Creator Program attracted streamers away from Twitch and YouTube with financial incentives; by 2021, it had surpassed YouTube Gaming in hours watched. Three years later, those numbers had collapsed as payments declined and audiences consolidated elsewhere. The program was wound down in stages, with full retirement scheduled for 2026. Then came the Reels Play Bonus Program, launched in 2021 to compete with TikTok, shut down abruptly in March 2023. Zuckerberg explained why with unusual candor: “The monetization efficiency of Reels is much less than Feed. So the more that Reels grows…we actually lose money.”
The pattern has not gone unnoticed. “How many times do we have to go through this?” wrote Simon Owens, who covers the media business. His point: until Meta commits to sharing a defined, published portion of revenue with creators, no incentive program will build lasting loyalty. YouTube’s Partner Program offers exactly that, 55% of ad revenue for long-form video, 45% for Shorts. A creator weighing where to invest their time can work with a fixed number. Facebook’s Content Monetization program offers no equivalent figure.
How to run a media fundraiser without a tote bag
(by María)
Journal B is an online magazine that has covered Bern’s city politics, culture, and local life since 2012. Its reporting ranges from the future of the Schützenmatte square to council debates and the local hip-hop scene. The newsroom has five people and publishes more than 200 articles a year, all free to read.
The outlet is financed in equal thirds by membership fees, donations, and institutional grants. Some of these were intended to bridge the gap until cantonal media funding came through, but several expired at the end of 2025, leaving the publication short of 25,000 francs a year.
Faced with that shortfall, the team went to remake it, on one of Switzerland’s largest crowdfunding platforms, asking for CHF 50,000 to secure the next two years. The drive launched on March 10, and 15 days in, 156 backers had pledged more than half of the goal. While most efforts of this kind default to perks like mugs, tote bags or names in the credits, Journal B built a catalogue that reads more like a map of the city.
The coverage becomes the product. Photographer David Fürst has documented Bern for Journal B for years. The team turned his images into postcard sets (CHF 40 for four, CHF 50 for eight) with specific motifs: Bern’s best swimming spots, the Gurten hill after the festival, folk performances in the Reitschule courtyard. These are the newsroom’s own images, printed and mailed. A t-shirt with the logo would have been easier. This is better.
Contributors step forward, by name. Music columnist Fabio Lang curates an exclusive Bern playlist. Slam poet and columnist Jovana Nikic records a custom voicemail greeting for your phone. Ukrainian columnist Svitlana Prokopchuk hosts a cooking class through her local diaspora organization. Each reward is attached to a person whose work readers already know from the site. Backing the campaign starts to feel like supporting someone specific, because it is.
The reward ladder follows the relationship. At CHF 25, you get a handwritten postcard from the editors. At CHF 130, the literature columnist reads your favorite books and sends personalized recommendations. At CHF 500, a current and a former city council president take you out for a beer and explain how Bern’s local politics actually works. At CHF 1,000, the board co-president leads a personal “democracy walk” through the city. The higher you go, the closer you get.
Local cultural venues show up as collaborators. Tickets to the Tojo Theater, Kino Rex, dinner at the Heitere Fahne, a table at Blauer Engel (closing this summer after 30 years). These rewards place Journal B inside the city’s cultural calendar. All four sold out.
The team sells its skills at higher tiers. For CHF 2,500, backers can book a portrait session with the staff photographer or get editorial feedback on any text they’re working on. The newsroom is offering its professional capacity directly: we know how to do things worth paying for beyond articles.
This piece is part of a series focusing on local and community journalism and is supported by the LimeNet project and the European Union.
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