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An ad appeared on the website of the American Prospect, featuring two cartoon people staring deeply into each other’s eyes. “Take this gay test to determine if you are gay, straight, or bisexual,” the text read. If you clicked, you entered the “Am I Gay Test,” which brought you such questions as “Do you think you are gay?” (The possible answers: “I’m not sure,” “No,” and “Yes.”) Mitch Grummon, the Prospect’s publisher, told me this prompt kept popping up. It was a programmatic ad or, as he put it, “scammy stuff that is antithetical to the brand because of clumsy keyword targeting.”
Recently, the Prospect announced it would do away with programmatic ads. The decision wasn’t necessarily because of this ad in particular, but more broadly because of an incongruity between the Prospect’s values and what this type of advertising represented: “The reader’s attention, behavior, and personal data become a commodity, packaged and resold through a supply chain riddled with fraud, opaque middlemen, and unscrupulous actors,” Grummon wrote. “And we, as a publisher, must admit to being an accomplice in that transaction.” David Dayen, the magazine’s executive editor, put it to me another way: the main beneficiaries of this kind of advertising are Facebook and Google—companies that the Prospect often writes about. “We’re reporting on court cases where it shows that Google is found guilty of being a monopoly, or Facebook is engaging in certain practices with its advertising,” he said. “And yet we were sitting there, in some way facilitating the continuation of this business model. And the contradictions, I think, became too great.” So far, the change seems to be working out: in the month since moving away from programmatic ads, the amount of time people spend on the Prospect site has nearly doubled.
Programmatic ads are, generally speaking, a type of advertisement built from surveillance that follows a reader from place to place. They are more tightly controlled in Europe, via the General Data Protection Regulation, but in the United States they run rampant: everything from Am I Gay? tests to miracle diets to pictures of belly fat and “Doctors hate our posts kind of stuff,” Joshua Braun, an associate professor in the journalism department at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, told me. He described the initial idea of programmatic ads this way: the “long dream,” he said, was that “you could reach exactly the consumers you wanted, as an advertiser.” A person interested in sneakers could be delivered a sneakers ad at exactly the right time and place. And small websites—recipe blogs, independent journalism—that “might not have the brand reputation to deal directly with the brand-name advertiser” could just put a widget on their site and run ads, monetizing the traffic to the site.
But, Braun noted, a 2019 study by researchers at the University of Minnesota, the University of California, Irvine, and Carnegie Mellon University concluded that the payoff for publishers wasn’t that great. “When a user’s cookie is available publisher’s revenue increases by only about 4%,” the study found. This translated to an increase of just .00008 of a dollar per advertisement, according to the study. “Behavioral targeting has been completely overhyped in its value for publishers from the day it was first invented,” ran a quote in the Wall Street Journal article about the study, from Michael Zimbalist, a strategy and innovation officer with a long background at the New York Times.
These slim returns line up with the Prospect’s experience running programmatic ads, Grummon told me. It was a lot of work for relatively little gain—and very likely some user-experience loss. Increasingly, he dreaded the work of putting together a programmatic ad stack: “I know how to do it,” he said. “I’ve done it before.” But “this is not what I want to do with my time. I’d rather spend this three months thinking about how to make the site better for readers, as opposed to, like, onboarding five different ad tech sellers and then hooking them up into the site, and then dealing with the invoices and the billing, all the reporting, and all the analysis to, like, squeeze a little bit more ad revenue out of the site.”
Part of these calculations, too, involved headline and article optimization, a way of thinking Grummon found distasteful, if not at odds with the Prospect’s mission. If he were running a business that depended on ad impressions, Grummon told me, he’d have to think in terms of what got people to click: someone who churned out hot takes in response to, say, Trump posting a photo of himself as Jesus. The idea here would be to generate a blast of lucrative readerly anger—a shorter, sharper form of attention than that which is generated by reporting on, for example, election spending by AI PACs, something the Prospect has been following ahead of the midterms. “Being able to toggle ads up to a site and put some cash in the bank is an attractive thing,” Grummon said, “but I’ve always tried to think, to the extent I can, a little bit longer-term and, like, put the readers at the center of what we’re doing. It’s not just a moral high ground, but like, I think this is also a good business play.”
Sweetening the deal was support from a board member at the Prospect: Eli Luberoff, who founded a company called Desmos (“beautiful free math”) that offers a graphing calculator online, gratis, to anyone who wants it—namely, sixteen-year-olds taking standardized tests. “He just thought it was bullshit,” Grummon said, “that kids had to pay a hundred and ten dollars to do the math” on their Texas Instruments calculators. As Desmos grew, Luberoff didn’t put ads on his site; years later, talking to Grummon, he asked why the Prospect even felt the need. “What if you didn’t?” Grummon remembers Luberoff asking. “I said, ‘What do you mean?’ He said, ‘Well, I think it’s a good long-term play for the Prospect to take these off and to really focus on reader revenue, and what if I just took the risk away?’” Luberoff offered to bankroll an experiment: a year’s worth of no programmatic ads, with a safety net in case it didn’t work. Since last month, this “long-term play” has appeared to be working, Grummon told me: not only have users spent more time on the site, a recent membership drive added almost five hundred new recurring donors to the Prospect. Ideally, these gains will compound over time.
Still: “I’m a skier,” Grummon told me. He thought about how, in skiing, there are certain “no-fall zones”—places with no room for error. Falling would be fatal. If he was wrong about taking away programmatic ads, maybe he wouldn’t make payroll, and would have to ask Luberoff for help. But then again, maybe running programmatic ads was a kind of no-fall zone itself—just in the longer term, and for the journalism, not the finances, of the Prospect. Grummon, who grew up in Michigan, remembered visiting an article on his local news site when he was back in town. “I’ll load it on my phone, and it’s unusable,” he said, thanks to all the ads. “If my browser crashes, I can’t get to the content. There’s multiple autoplay videos, and that happens four or five times, and you’re like, ‘I’m not clicking up that link.’ And I think our hope is that the reverse happens. After years of having a respectful, well-designed experience for our readers, we deepen that bond and that trust, and then when we do ask them for their email, they say, Okay, I trust these people.”
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