Marketers/advertisers have clearly felt different about this forever. There's really no doubt that advertisers leaned on newspapers to have certain stories "above the fold" or to not carry or diminish other stories.
I'd say that advertisers are in a good place to know whether people do or don't notice what ads are next to content, or vice versa.
I do notice ads and assume some minimal endorsement of content by the advertisers - we are constantly assured that Internet ads are at least demographically targeted.
I don't know much about TV, but in newspapers print and online, where to put ads has at least for a long time included considerations beyond of just what space is available.
At the news site I worked, the CMS had an per article option to white/blacklist ads from categories or disable them entirely. E.g. so to not show an car advertisement boasting their reliability under an article of an car accident where a child has died.
Or in print news papers (especially weekly ones) you often see that it is structured in a way that the realities about the harsh world and negative stories in general are in the first parts and the paper becomes more and more fluffy and feel-good as you turn the pages. It is in those later sections where most big brands want their ads to be placed.
Also, a lot of things that are pretty normal these days would have caused outrage and protests against the publishers not too long ago.
In my view, people were always easily offended/outraged. Just what causes it, and which views have significant followings and voice changes over time.
True but newspaper advertising has always been untracked for obvious reasons. At most it was adjusted to the target audience of a particular paper and perhaps the type of content in the section.
It's only when the internet came along that advertisers started considering non-targeted advertising as unviable.
Before internet advertising everyone was concerned with newspapers being all ads, subway ads, billboards, naming stadiums, ads on buses, flyers being put everywhere, mail advertising plus everything you see on tv.
Those things still exist. Focusing only on digital advertising when ads are being pushed everywhere is missing the point.
When I studied journalism in the early '90s our professors drew a direct correlation between newspapers that showed ads "above the fold" and those that didn't. According to the profs if they practiced the former they were clearly not real journalistic enterprises. USA Today did it and they used it as a case that proved their point. How times change.
I know I'm venturing off-topic here, but I believe "above the fold" in the newspaper world referred to story prominence on the front page rather than advertising.
I don't recall, even long ago, seeing ads on real newspapers that were both front-page and "above the fold". I imagine "above the fold" wasn't related to advertising until the web existed.
I think all business has to know what they are selling. Google and Facebook know it very well. They sell ads. All their business endeavours hence are to sell more ads.
On the other hand, newspapers seems to not know that they are selling.
If it's content or information, then they don't create enough unique and valuable content that enough people are willing to pay enough amount.
If it's content distribution or platform for opinions or civil discourses, they are almost anachronistic.
If it's ads, they simply don't have enough eyeballs.
Ex-Advertising layout designer here for Hearst. Ads in a newspaper are typically laid out in a pyramid fashion to specifically avoid breaking up news articles into more difficult to read formats. 'Flow' is important when laying out every page. Ads on the web adhere to no such flow and often inhibit the experience of reading. Newspapers want their ads to be as unobtrusive as possible while still being seen. Advertisers on the web tend to scattershot ads and want to be seen at all costs without consideration for the viewer. I can easily skip the flow of ads in a newspaper only looking at those that interest me if I choose, I have no such options on the web and so block them all to be less distracted and able to easily digest content.
The news industry has been aware of this forever; one of the fundamental problems with news being ad-supported is that advertisers don't want their ads next to bad news.
This predates the Internet; it's why glossy Sunday sections exist.
One thing I've wrestled with with the rise of online news and its effects on physical newspapers is how much I miss certain things about the physical newspapers. I don't miss the physical format, but I do think the old-school paper newspapers were much more enjoyable to read than most online equivalents.
At some point I realized that one major issue is that advertising in many of the paper copies was based around content area: if I went to the performing arts section, for example, it would be filled with ads for performing arts events. I loved this as it was actually useful and informative to me. I went to that section looking for performing arts, and that's what I got.
In online news, though, if I go to a performing arts, I don't get informative, unintrusive ads for performing arts events in my area, I get bombarded with random ads for things unrelated to what I'm looking at. Even if, say, earlier in the day I was looking for shoes, I don't want to see ads for shoes if I'm browsing performing arts, I'm interested in performing arts.
What you're talking about is a broader observation about identification of individuals per se versus patterns of interests and behaviors. However, I'd argue that a major failure of online advertising (with very important exceptions, including Google, DuckDuckGo, and many other places) is the recognition that what matters for ads is interest at any given moment, and not interests at any other time. I suppose someone might say "but a good ad is something that gives you what you are interested in even if you might not recognize it" but this is really difficult to get right, especially given that my interests in a given moment can shift from minute to minute.
If I'm moving from, say, shoe shopping to, say, performing arts, I'm deliberately moving my attention away from the former to the latter. Showing me ads for shoes is something that's specifically going against my current attentional goals. It's like saying "hey Honey, I'm done in the kitchen and am going to go into the garage to work on something" and then having some random stranger show up and pull you back in the kitchen.
This seems to be a fundamental screwup with a lot of online advertising: the failure to recognize that I'm functionally a different person from moment to moment, and when I move from one page to another there's a reason for that.
Email surveillance is maybe going even further in a worse direction, in that it's even more decontextualized and time-independent. Part of the brilliance of Google search ads, and things like DuckDuckGo, is that they catch you exactly in that moment when you're looking for something on a specific topic. Newspapers and everywhere else needs to take better advantage of that paradigm. Show me what I'm looking for now, don't take a shotgun guess at what I might want based on what I was doing in the past.
As far as I remember things, newspapers used to carry a lot of advertising. And the face value of a newspaper was more-or-less a nominal amount, I suspect largely to support the distribution network.
I don't recall ever seeing a newspaper lying around with ads cut out or scribbled over - which I guess is a simplistic analog of the ad-blockers and such that modern news outlets are up against. You can understand the push to maintain revenue that's needed to support quality journalism.
At the same time, as a consumer of news, print ads would not be centrally and intrusively tracking your every thought either, so the desire to block modern ads is entirely rational.
Modern advertising methods have broken the social contract that used to exist to help keep things in balance.
No. Newspapers would have article conintued on page # that would break up an article. The ads were not within the article/wall of texts themselves. Those ads also didn't break or hinder the the medium through which the text was displayed.
Your point that ads have always existed is well taken, but if newspapers looked like a local news site today people wouldn't have bought them (its more akin to the free weekly tabloids than a real newspaper). Newspapers used to make money through classifieds in addition to subscriptions. If only there were local-oriented services newspapers could provide - I hope someone figures out a better model soon.
Newspaper ads were way, way more profitable, though. Newspapers were the biggest game in town (everybody read newspapers), space was limited (you need to print news, too), paper was limited (there are N pages in a newspaper), and so on.
In other words, online advertising is sufficiently different in a bunch of fundamental ways such that I'm skeptical of this particular analogy.
That's just my gut, though— I have no data. It would be worth seeing some analysis of how well demographic vs. targeted (?) ads worked. Then again, I'll bet you many folks who buy and display ads have already done the analysis, and that's precisely why this advertising exists.
It used to be normal in the news paper industry to have a hard dividing line between the "news" and "advertising" departments for this very reason. There was always a conflict of interest possible when newspapers reported on the companies placing ads with them. I'm not sure how true this is any more.
Imagine publishing a newspaper funded in a very large part by classified advertisements, embedded advertisements, and obituaries. Imagine me, and a lot of other subscribers, reading only the news in the newspaper and not reading the classifieds or obits.
This model actually worked well for hundreds of years until the advertisers found that online advertisement could be cheaper and more effective than printed paper advertisement.
My habits have not changed. I don't tend to read the ads in papers or online.
I'd say that advertisers are in a good place to know whether people do or don't notice what ads are next to content, or vice versa.
I do notice ads and assume some minimal endorsement of content by the advertisers - we are constantly assured that Internet ads are at least demographically targeted.
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