As publishers, we don’t serve readers or advertisers, we serve shareholders

Like many of you, I’m a parent of kids who’ve never known a world without screens.

It’s not great.

Every day, I see them on their iPads swimming through AI slop, fake news, and nonsense. I try to explain to them what’s real and what’s not, but the onslaught never stops. The scary part is, I understand how this works and what the ramifications are, because of what I do. So do you.

The platforms we originally built to educate, inform, and entertain are being used in both directions: by good faith actors trying to serve their audiences, and by bad faith actors who see an opportunity to mislead or spin up engagement farms for clicks. Once you mix those two together in the same feeds, the audience can’t tell the difference.

We don’t live in a “trust but verify” world anymore. Now, it’s “distrust by default.” I’ll be honest, I don’t know how to solve for that. In real-time, we’re all watching trust unravel faster than any of us can rebuild it.

That’s the part that keeps me up at night.

This shift is directly connected to how the business side of publishing runs.

The incentives are upside down. The tools, the business models, and even the ways we measure success don’t reward quality. They reward whatever grabs attention the fastest and the cheapest.

We’re all chasing the wrong things

Advertisers want attention at the lowest dollar amount possible. Shareholders want short-term revenue. And publishers (desperate to keep up) flood the market with more sellers, more partners, and more ads.

With the old model, you got paid to exist. Print newspapers, linear TV… advertisers had to show up because you were their distribution. But in digital, you only get paid if someone looks.

For instance, we talk in CPMs (cost per thousand impressions). That’s just good branding, because selling one ad for a tenth of a penny sounds like a joke. My kids get $10 from the tooth fairy, and with that they could reach a thousand people on The New York Times. That’s insane.

Think about the level of devaluation baked into those numbers. Nobody wants to admit they’re selling ads for fractions of a cent, so we bundle it up into thousands. A thousand ads for a dollar sounds like a business.

But this verbal sleight-of-hand has warped the whole system.

Instead of focusing on the actual value of an impression, we’re talking in bulk rates. The only way to make a $1.50 CPM work (i.e., “create value”) is tonnage: show endless ads, flood every page, jam every feed. Sure, you could sell fewer, higher-quality ads for $20 CPMs, but that’s not how most of digital is set up.

In the attention economy, sensationalism is what sells

Human attention is finite. There are only so many minutes in the day, and now you’ve got thousands of publishers, apps, and creators all clawing at the same pockets of time. You can’t expand the denominator.

It turns out the easiest way to get someone to look is to be extreme, sensational, and cheap. That’s how you keep the CPM racket going and win the attention game, even if it means racing to the bottom.

When attention is the currency, however, the economics don’t work. Not for publishers, not for quality, and certainly not for anyone who still believes there should be value in what we make.

Even the so-called premium publishers end up playing this game.

A perfect example? The Sydney Sweeney jeans fiasco. American Eagle put her in a campaign, and suddenly the entire internet is talking about it. Every outlet (including the ones that “should know better”) piled on. Why? Because the traffic was there, and the business model says you can’t afford not to.

That’s the part that really stings. Legacy publishers end up chasing the very narratives that low-barrier players create. We’ve gone from, “We’ll decide what’s newsworthy” to “We’ll cover whatever they clicked on yesterday.”

This is why Taboola, Outbrain, and all the “you’ll never believe” widgets exploded. They turn sensationalism into a system. You don’t have to report, you just need a headline wild enough to grab the click.

Even those so-called “premium” or “legacy” publishers are in the game now, too. The vast majority of the big players are now running “Paid Partner Content” under the guise of real content. Why? Revenue. These are supposed to be truth-driving, narrative-setting institutions. And yet here they are, pushing clickbait because they need the money to support their cost structures and show growth to shareholders.

Everyone says: “We want to make publishing profitable”

But if you dig a little deeper, we don’t all mean the same thing when we say that.

For some, “making publishing profitable” means setting the conditions for sustainable, quality journalism to exist without compromise. For others, it means squeezing every last drop of value out of their digital real estate.

That’s why the most valuable asset for any publisher right now isn’t the content they produce, it’s the brand equity of their domain name: CNN.com, NYTimes.com, Vulture.com, BleacherReport.com, Jezebel.com.

And once you’ve got eyeballs on your domain, you can do whatever you want with them. So, we add widgets, code, games, and (obviously) ads. We bolt on whatever we think might squeeze a little more revenue from the attention we so desperately seek.

The audience's expectation is: “I came here for this headline or that story.”

The exploitation is: “Once you’re here, we’ll see how much we can get out of you.”

Look at The New York Times. It’s not really a journalism company anymore. It’s a game company. Wordle, Spelling Bee, Strands, crosswords… that’s where the revenue is. That’s what the business model is rewarding, because national publishers are shareholder-driven. They’re incentivized to keep a growth trajectory at any cost.

Yes, some players are committed to getting publishing right, trying to build something sustainable. Others, however, are playing a different game entirely: building clickbait hubs, flooding the pipes, and juicing whatever gets the most attention, all while claiming they too want to see publishing become profitable.

This is the honesty gap publishers don’t want to talk about, and what others don’t want us to acknowledge.

And look, if you know your product isn’t quality content or fact-based journalism, that’s fine. Just own it. Stop pretending it is. Don’t confuse everyone by saying you want to “make publishing profitable” without shared intent.

We need to stop confusing who our real customer is

It’s not the audience. The audience only exists to be monetized, their attention chopped up and auctioned off to the lowest bidder.

Advertisers aren’t the customers either. It’s not Crest’s job or Proctor & Gamble’s job to support fact-based reporting and investigative journalism. They’re here to push toothpaste and batteries. They’ll go wherever it’s cheapest and most efficient to do that. That’s not bad faith, that’s good business.

In most cases, the shareholder is the customer.

Once you understand that, a lot of decisions start to make sense.

Shareholders want growth at all costs, quarter after quarter. That’s why you see the clutter, the clickbait, the short-term revenue plays. No one thinks this is good for the audience, but no one cares.

The only story Wall Street wants to hear is growth.

It doesn’t matter if you’re torching your brand, chasing junk traffic, or completely gutting the user experience in service of more ad space. As long as the number’s bigger than last quarter, you’ve done your job. Miss it once, and they’ll find someone else who will.

As publishers, this is the game we’re forced to play

Everyone in this business knows the choices we’re making are bad for what many of us view as the real product: quality content and fact-based journalism.

You’ll never hear a single person who does what we do say:

“I love what we do on our site to make money.”

Instead, you’ll hear:

“The pop-ups, the autoplay, the whatever… we need those because of X or Y revenue stream. I have no choice.”

That’s not true. You do.

What most publishers don’t have is the courage (or the room) to take the short-term hit to get it right. I’ve seen it happen.

A business leader at a large publisher pulled ads and took the revenue loss up front. Within weeks, the numbers bounced back; the audience rewarded them. But a few months later, they were back signing new deals with large ad networks who certainly don’t align with “less is more.” Why? Because the pressure to “hit the number” is relentless, and easy levers always come back.

To be fair, I can’t say I would take that leap either.

Do any of us have the courage to say, “Hey CRO, I’m gonna tank revenue for the next three weeks because I think we can make more money by showing fewer ads.” No. The leeway to get that wrong doesn’t exist.

Leaders aren’t giving their teams the space to experiment, to make those kinds of bets and be wrong. So, instead, we keep playing the same-short-term game and telling ourselves it’s our only option.

But here’s the tough love part, and I’m saying this to myself just as much as you:

Publishers do have a choice.

We just don’t like what it costs.

Unfortunately, the choices we’re making are wrecking our product. We keep piling on more ads, more widgets, more JavaScript until our sites crash the Chrome browser on a $3,000 iPhone. That’s not UX, that’s sabotage. And it tells your audience exactly what kind of business you’ve chosen to be in.

Of course, not all publishers are stuck in the same way

The big guys (The New York Times, CNN, The Washington Post), they’ve got domain equity. People will type those URLs forever. They can layer on games or slap paid content at the bottom of the page, and they’ll still exist tomorrow.

On the other end, you’ve got the small independents. Individual contributors who only need 50, 60, maybe 200 thousand loyal followers to sustain themselves. They don’t have to chase millions. They can build direct. They can align incentives, and they’re not beholden to the same shareholder treadmill.

But the mid-sized publishers? They’re the ones who are really trapped.

They’re not small enough to be nimble, and they’re not big enough to coast on brand recognition. They don’t have the room to take risks. They don’t have the leverage to say no. They’re under the same growth pressures, but with far fewer levers to pull.

In their world, taking a smart risk could be the thing that finishes them off. Pull ads, reject a sketchy partner, simplify the experience… if it doesn’t bounce back quickly, you might be done. And most leaders just aren’t willing to take that bet.

Maybe the truth is, the big companies won’t fix this. The mid-tail can’t fix this. The only ones who might are the people willing to bet on themselves, the individual voices, the good-faith actors who can build something sustainable without needing to please Wall Street.

Where does this leave us?

If you’re a publisher, you can keep playing the game as it’s set up: clutter the pages, pile on widgets, serve shareholders first, and hope the math doesn’t break under you. But that’s killing the very product you’re trying to sell. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but eventually you’ll reach a point you can’t recover from.

The harder path is gambling to do it right. Betting on fewer ads, better experiences, direct relationships, actual value. Betting that audiences will reward you if you stop treating them like fractions of a cent.

I’m not pretending there’s an easy solution here. But I also know the only way publishing survives is if enough people say what’s actually broken in this system we’ve built and decide the gamble to fix it is worth it.

Ask yourself, who do we want to win? The growth-obsessed opportunists chasing the lowest common denominator or the real publishers who are actually trying to build something sustainable?

The choice of who we reward vs. who we support will decide what publishing becomes next.