Nieman Foundation at Harvard
I had an idea for a joke website once. It was about at all the gross, exploitative, soul-debasing ads you see at the bottom of news articles or tucked into sidebars on a lot of sites. The headline was going to be the very clickbaity “YOU WON’T BELIEVE WHAT THESE 1990s STARS LOOK LIKE TODAY.” But instead of a 71-photo slideshow of unflattering pics of Jenna von Oy, clicking through would take you to a bunch of red giants and white dwarfs taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, each followed by a more recent image. 1990s stars, get it? Hardy-har-har! Take that, curiosity gap!
Those rows of vaguely nauseating boxes are, if you believe the companies that make them, a tool to let “people discover content, products and services that may be of interest to them,” sparking over 250 billion “monthly discoveries”! They “find and engage over one billion relevant users across premium publishers at massive scale on the world leading native discovery platform,” creating “meaningful engagements” and “unique and relevant ad experiences.”
The better term for them is chumboxes. They take their name from the angling strategy of throwing a bunch of chopped up dead fish parts — blood, bone, gristle, any other leftover waste products — into the water to attracting bigger living fish to reel in. It’s #content to put next to content, relying on its human prey’s basest, most animalistic instincts in its hunt for clicks.
(The term “chumbox,” which is wonderful, was first popularized in this 2015 Awl piece by John Mahoney, though there is some evidence that the term predates it. This 2014 Alene Vincent tweet is the earliest reference I can find online to this usage. “Chumbox” coiner: Step forward and accept your laurels from a grateful online public.)
Chumboxes have been the target of Internet derision as long as they’ve been around — because they put unwanted viscera in front of our eyeballs, because they often play on the worst human biases, and because they, maddeningly, have long found a home on some of the most esteemed and prestigious news sites in the world. Why would a quality publisher, one trying to catalyze its brand equity into ad and subscription dollars, sully its pages with this dreck — diseased skin, vegetables that look like diseased skin, pasta that looks like worms, racial stereotypes, teased nipslips, brain pills, bikinis, toenail fungus, meat left out too long, erection supplements, BUY GOLD NOW, household objects that cause cancer, household objects that cure cancer, and bitcoin?
great chumbox alert pic.twitter.com/Grvz9VTUC4
— Charlie Warzel (@cwarzel) March 22, 2017
there's something viscerally disturbing about this chumbox entry pic.twitter.com/wLX3DPWis8
— Dom DiFurio (@DomDiFurio) September 25, 2018
It's a mystery of the modern media that such high-end content can be followed by such a low-end chumbox. pic.twitter.com/x7DVegW7bJ
— Tom Gara (@tomgara) June 19, 2015
Speaking of trust in news organizations … why would you think putting this at the bottom of a news article page is a good idea? (as seen on https://t.co/ioWyzPT9B6) pic.twitter.com/saNbgFe9GT
— Nick Diakopoulos (@ndiakopoulos) July 29, 2019
$1,000 to anyone who can explain this chumbox headline/photo combo to me pic.twitter.com/1HDZUCmvDR
— Dino Grandoni (@dino_grandoni) September 19, 2017
You wouldn't think it would be possible for something as terrible as chumbox ads to hit a new low, but here we are. pic.twitter.com/JYA1ePkHKL
— John Overholt (@john_overholt) November 4, 2015
These chumbox ads look like a slot machine in a twisted nightmare pic.twitter.com/mupP0Yzj83
— Myles Tanzer (@mylestanzer) January 7, 2015
Bad news: Just saw a pic of myself at the end of a news article I was reading
Good news: I'm apparently a millionaire pic.twitter.com/OZ9pionDlO— drewtoothpaste (@drewtoothpaste) May 6, 2017
WTF Weather Channel? pic.twitter.com/5W0lAo1BPQ
— John Overholt (@john_overholt) July 9, 2018
The reason publishers, even ones that care a lot about their image, put chumboxes on their webpages is blissfully straightforward: money. (It’d be worse if it was some industry-wide fascination with deformed vegetables, right?) The two leading companies in this space, Taboola and Outbrain, go around to publishers and offer them a lot of money — often paid upfront — in exchange for that digital real estate. I’ve spoken to lots of business-side digital media people over the years, and their consistent explanation has been: We know it’s gross, but it’s actually a lot of money. And it’s reliable money, at least compared to the vicissitudes of all the other digital advertising they try to sell.
Reading @YasmeenSerhan's interesting piece in @TheAtlantic on French President Macron's proposed legislation to combat "fake news". It is accompanied by these no doubt strictly factually based and entirely accurate "from the web" ads. Again,on the Atlantic https://t.co/hRjMDUp9Qa pic.twitter.com/YjNJLDa3qS
— Rasmus Kleis Nielsen (@rasmus_kleis) January 17, 2018
💯 and all too often folks don't realize that the people tasked with having to make a decision to keep an Outbrain/Taboola are thinking about keeping their colleagues employed. I've never worked with someone who earned a bonus b/c they signed up for a chumbox.
— Noah Chestnut (@noahchestnut) January 17, 2018
Yes! And this is where leadership *matters* and is often lacking. Lack of clarity over an org's goals, patience, and how it invests are so key and lacking from too many places in our industry.
— Noah Chestnut (@noahchestnut) January 17, 2018
We've generated over $1.3B+ for publishers over the past 3 years [https://t.co/3vP16H12Sl], we're profitable and we're rapidly expanding. We have over 35 open positions and are looking to hire great people. Want to join us? Apply here! https://t.co/NNPTgeg8M4
— Outbrain (@Outbrain) January 24, 2019
so you're saying the Washington Post chose, on this article about the Senate voting down a bill to reopen the government, these irrelevant ads? which is fine! just curious on how you see these being good content to serve readers who just finished reading the news. pic.twitter.com/2rlAkhjPkt
— Petrus Smedes (@joshsternberg) January 24, 2019
So, thanks to publishers’ never-ending quest for reliable revenue, we’ve ended up with bizarre situations like stories decrying a particular chumbox ad being immediately followed by that exact same chumbox ad, a statement with its own retort.
Chumboxception: a @voxdotcom article deriding "chumbox" advertising as "garbage" is unironically followed by… an Outbrain chumbox promoting the very ad the story deconstructs! 🤯 https://t.co/GgheHoeRjS pic.twitter.com/uEX6ic3hGg
— E.W. Niedermeyer (@Tweetermeyer) May 9, 2019
there’s something particularly arch about that intelligencer ‘everything is fake’ piece ending with a taboola chumbox that’s also broken pic.twitter.com/1Gz636jT5N
— ́ (@boarlord_) December 28, 2018
All that takes us to today’s news that the industry’s two giants, Taboola and Outbrain, are merging after years of talks:
The aim: to bulk up to a customer list that will now number 20,000 online properties and an audience of 2.6 billion to compete better against the likes of Facebook and Google, online advertising giants that present the biggest competitive threat to both adtech startups and the publishers who are Taboola and Outbrain’s customers.
The two companies, both founded out of Israel but headquartered in New York, describe the deal as a merger, but the combined entity will be called Taboola, with Taboola’s founder Adam Singolda securing the CEO slot. Further, Taboola is paying Outbrain investors $250 million in cash plus a 30% share of the combined companies. The merger is creating a company that will be valued at $2 billion, making the transaction value of this deal $850 million.
[…]
Between Taboola and Outbrain, the companies now have ties to a list of the biggest online media properties around today — with the combined group now working with CNBC, NBC News, USA TODAY, BILD, Sankei, Huffington Post, Microsoft, Business Insider, The Independent, El Mundo, Le Figaro, CNN, BBC, The Washington Post, The Guardian, Spiegel Online, El País and Sky News.
Taboola and Outbrain have positioned themselves as something of the last chance saloon for media companies that have continued to base all or at least some part of their business models on advertising.
Whatever else you think of these companies, reducing the competitive set from two to one will likely mean less money for publishers. No longer will a news site be able to push Outbrain to match Taboola’s offer, or vice versa. Those upfront payments will probably get smaller.
For all the well-earned snark thrown their way, Taboola and Outbrain cut a lot of big checks to publishers. Those checks will likely slim down. https://t.co/PHnUy4tYZQ
— Brian Morrissey (@bmorrissey) October 3, 2019
They cut great deals in a land grab. That competition goes away, guarantees go down.
— Brian Morrissey (@bmorrissey) October 3, 2019
On one hand, that’s bad news. Publishers need all the money they can get! But on the other, perhaps making these deals a bit less attractive might lead some publishers to consider the reputational damage they do themselves when they give over prime real estate to elephantiasis clickbait. Especially at a time when publishers are relying less on ad dollars and more on revenue direct from readers, removing the yuck barnacled to their brand might have a return of its own.
