Bubblr vs advertising model invented by porn industry

If you’re wondering why journalists and content creators are getting royally screwed, ethical technology company Bubblr reminds us that the outdated online advertising model was first introduced by the porn industry.

“Through the internet, we now have an abundance of information but fake news is rife with misinformation and disinformation spreading easily since anybody and everybody can now have a platform online. We are overwhelmed with clickbait headlines tricking us into visiting various pages because there’s a need to feed an outdated advertising model that hasn’t changed since the adult industry first introduced it. Cost per mille and cost per click metrics were created by the porn industry to track views and visits for advertising and this model doesn’t lend itself to the creation of quality journalism. These models have encouraged clickbait because it’s not about the content. It’s about the page visit,” said Bubblr CEO Steven Saunders in a video where he shares his thoughts on journalism and why the internet is failing to properly reward content creators.

Free content is killing journalism

As I’ve previously written, I believe in writing for your audience, not for algorithms and advertisers. The goal of journalists and content creators should be to produce quality content, not obsess over page views and other online advertising metrics and how to monetize their content.

So I’m thankful that a company like Bubblr is trying to fix the broken internet, and that its CEO is reminding us of why free content supported by online advertising is killing journalism. Because online advertising was never intended for quality content in the first place.

Many of us who have been in the digital space since the 90s have joked that the porn industry is always the early adopter of technology and promotes digital innovation. Only it’s not really a joke, because the adult industry has really shaped the online world we live in — including how we experience the internet and consume online content.

Porn shaped the online world

This Cracked article may be over a decade old and written in a humorous manner — it’s Cracked, after all — but it’s still a good reminder of how porn created the modern world.

In fact, I’d say it’s even more relevant today, and that porn has gone on to embrace and popularize new technology.

“For example, during the bad old years of the internet, porn sites were the only places that asked you to pay for stuff online: Viewing content via fee-based subscriptions, credit card verification and internet billing systems all originated with and were perfected by porn. Today, all those things are employed regularly by multinational companies like Amazon, E-bay and iTunes. And because the best kind of filthy sex is moving filthy sex, the consumers soon required more than just still pictures to float their lonely, one-man boats. So porn was also one of the first and only businesses to offer streaming videos, helping to popularize the practice elsewhere, and even spurring the development of Flash technology.”

Even data analytics geeks see PornHub’s use of data analytics as the gold standard. As this Quartz article points out, porn sites collect more user data than Netflix or Hulu.

“What’s more, Pornhub, in particular, operates one of the most sophisticated digital data analysis operations that caters primarily to users and not advertisers. Pornhub Insights provides transparency into its data collection—on the most intimate of subjects—by making research and analysis from billions of data points about viewership patterns, often tied to events from politics to pop culture, available to the public. It offers more than many other tech giants do.”

It’s no wonder the porn industry mastered Big Data a long time ago. In fact, you might say they paved the way.

Fixing the broken internet

Founded in 2015 by its CTO Steve Morris, Bubblr’s goal is “to make the internet a more authentic ecosystem”. This is encapsulated in Bubblr’s mission statement: “Our mission is to bring back privacy to users, trust to content and sustainability to the digital marketplace.”

“We believe, and so do many others, that the internet is broken. The current online economic model has evolved by accident, and it wasn’t specifically designed to be like this. It’s an unsustainable model that abuses our personal and behavioral data. It fails to reward content creators, or providers, adequately because of an advertising economic model that is woefully outdated. And it has become so complex and expensive to use as a marketing channel that most small and medium enterprises can’t use it. So it benefits only those with the deepest pockets,” Saunders said in a video explaining the mission of Bubblr.

Talk is cheap, of course, but thankfully Bubblr has the technology to back it up. On April 13, the United States Patent and Trademark Office formally approved the utility patent application of Bubblr covering its Internet-based Search Mechanism. Bubblr had received the Notice of Allowance from the US Patent Office in February.

“The title of the invention is: ‘INTERNET-BASED SEARCH MECHANISM’ and it encapsulates most of the key pillars of Bubblr’s proposed alternative economic ecosystem model, which will be manifested in the Company’s ad-free marketplace. The patent will facilitate end-users in engaging anonymously with subscribed suppliers of goods and services in an interactive manner that is specifically designed for ease of use on mobile devices. Suppliers will pay a flat monthly fee to subscribe to the service rather than the auction-based access provided by the current large platforms. The platform also attributes search ranking to supplier performance rather than the depth of their pockets to purchase auction-based search terms. Importantly, users are in control of this channel and can rate or block responses if they are not relevant to their searches – which results in a negative strike against suppliers in their relevancy ratings. A simple analogy could be that Bubblr’s search mechanism functions broadly similar to how classified ads would function on a Tinder-like app.”

Supporting ad-free journalism

You might say I’m a dreamer, but I believe in ad-free journalism. In fact, I was a founding member of The Correspondent, which was launched as an English-language version of the Dutch journalism platform De Correspondent. De Correspondent had been launched in the Netherlands on Sept. 30, 2013, after the crowdfunding project raised over €1 million (about US$1.3 million then).

“On March 18, Wijnberg, former editor-in-chief of the young-adult-targeted newspaper nrc.next, proposed his idea for a new online journalism platform on Dutch national television. Within 24 hours, his team had raised half its goal, and after eight days, Wijnberg got an earlier than expected go-ahead: 15,000 had subscribed, and many had added donations on top of their subscription fee. In just over a week, in a small country, the Dutch crowdfunding project De Correspondent had raised over €1 million (about $1.3 million).”

The Correspondent was an attempt to bring this same kind of journalism to the US and English-speaking world, but unfortunately while I renewed my membership, not enough paying members did to make the site sustainable. The Correspondent discontinued publishing on Jan. 1, 2021.

“The Correspondent’s staff will be offered a severance package and transition fee in accordance with Dutch labour law. Freelance staff will be paid in full for the work that is still to be published between now and the end of the year. The Dutch union for journalists has been informed about the closure of the newsroom. Several Dutch staff members who worked for The Correspondent part-time will continue working for De Correspondent as of January 1st. Our Dutch journalism platform, De Correspondent, is a different and financially healthy entity that will continue its operations.

“We want to thank you, all our members, from the bottom of our hearts for supporting us. You have made a dream come true by becoming a member of our ad-free journalism platform and we hope you will continue to support independent media in the future. For inspiration, you can visit the Membership Puzzle Project, a New York University initiative that keeps track of membership-based journalism platforms all around the world.”

Journalism is a public trust

Another initiative to promote ad-free journalism is The Brick House Cooperative, a publishing platform designed, owned and operated by journalists who believe that journalism is a public trust.

Maria Bustillos, founding editor of Popula, an alternative news and culture magazine that’s one of the publications in this ad-free media cooperative, wrote about The Brick House Cooperative in a column piece for Columbia Journalism Review.

“But journalism isn’t a zero-sum game to be won; it’s a public trust. A community of journalists looking out for each other, committed to the strength and vigor of the profession before their own individual careers, will be stronger in every way—better at producing stories that matter, better in business, better at serving the public. The Brick House represents this enlightened self-interest. Solidarity is not what we were taught, but it is what we need.”

I had high hopes for the ad-free, member-funded The Correspondent and still love it even if they had to cease publishing. Can The Brick House avoid The Correspondent’s fate? I truly hope so.

At least initiatives like Bubblr, The Correspondent, and The Brick House Cooperative are experimenting and trying to fix what’s broken. Even if they fail, they’re sparking innovation and promoting integrity.

You might say I’m a dreamer. But I’m not the only one.