…many sites relied on Facebook and Google to build their audience. But just as many financiers were pressing to see more tangible financial results, Facebook changed its algorithm to favor posts from friends and family rather than news organizations.
Some new digital media firms saw audience declines. Others scrambled to alter their business models on the fly, making expensive bets on video that did not pan out.
Lifson writes,
Tech change – the same factor that birthed digital media and created hell for newspapers and magazines – is now bedeviling websites.Read more here.
...This trend is particularly hard on general interest websites like AT. A website based on skiing, harmonicas, or hamsters can always generate good advertising rates from companies wanting to sell ski equipment, harmonicas and accessories, and hamster food or equipment to people. But we compete with every other website out there, and in addition, we suspect (but cannot prove) that blacklists exist telling advertisers which sites to avoid bidding on ad space in the digital auctions that channel ads to websites. Fewer bidders equals lower rates. As a result, the compensation we receive from ads (based on a price-per-thousand exposures) has plummeted by about half. Even as our readership grows and is the largest in our history, the money we receive from ads has plummeted.
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