Why We Work
By Stian Remaad, CEO and Co-founder of Adnuntius
What is your higher goal that gets you out of bed in the morning on those days you’d ideally like to pull the covers over your head? For me it is about contributing to a more stable society. Through software.
This may not be self-explanatory to all (or anyone), so here is the link between what we do every day, and what I hope comes of it. I will also say here in the beginning that I will make a few assumptions about the reality in which we find ourselves, and I would like for you to correct me if you know better. As such, this article will not contain too many facts or figures, but more assumptions that probably need testing.
The State of Publishing
Anyone who has worked close to publishing knows that the industry has been struggling for years. First there was the emergence and growth of the internet and the decline of print, a transition in which few publishers succeeded. Many struggled to find a revenue model for the new communication channel, and many ended up giving away digital traffic as an add-on to the more lucrative print campaigns. In hindsight, not a great way to value a new channel that is about to become the largest source of ad spending.
Left: print vs online revenues (source: Wikimedia.org). Right: advertising revenues - newspapers vs Google and Facebook (source: Medium.com).
While the figure on the left above shows the development of publishing’s print versus online revenues, the figure on the right shows that revenue relative to Google’s and Facebook’s advertising revenue. And as we shall get to: these are companies that do not produce content so much as they allow others to share theirs.
Facebook and Google have become essential sources of traffic for most publishers. Publishers share their content on for example Facebook, work to grow their followers list, and overall use Facebook to get attention from users. In other words, publishers have in part migrated from a strategy of building first-party contact towards its readers, to working through brands like Facebook to get some attention.
If Facebook’s algorithms will allow it.
Endorphins and Echo-Chambers - and Assumptions
Let’s leave the problems of publishing aside for a bit, and now ask: why do people spend on average about an hour on Facebook every day, and log in several times daily? While there are many reasons, some seem important to me.
Firstly, because there’s a lot of good content there. Certainly content created by friends and family, but also content created and shared by publishers. In fact, when Facebook went down for more than 5 hours in October 2021, people quickly went to other sources to consume (part of that traffic should be assumed to be caused by the outage itself, as many probably went to find out why Facebook was indeed down).
Where consumers went during Facebook’s outage (source: Niemanlab.org)
Another reason, I believe, is found in how our brains work. We repeat actions that cause our bodies to produce certain chemicals giving us confirmation or feelings of wellness. I am intentionally vague as I haven’t touched a biology and chemistry book since I was a teenager. But rather than staying ambiguous, let me try and express my argument through something that could be considered hypotheses - and I will happily change my argument if more skilled people correct me:
As humans we will repeat actions if these actions cause our bodies to produce chemicals that give us a good feeling, or a feeling that we did something right (which I also assume are two sides of the same coin).
Among those “good feelings” we find situations in which we hear what we want to hear, or get confirmation that we are right in what we believe to be true about the world.
Enter echo-chambers. If I am indeed right about my assumptions then it is only natural (literally so) that we are like getting shown what we believe to be true, and we will in turn feed Facebook’s models with information about what makes us return. This is my third assumption; that models based on return visits can create a spiral in which services like Facebook gives us more of what we like to see.
And less of what we perhaps should see.
While I don’t look at the world as an increasingly horrible place (in fact, for the most part this is the best time to be alive) I also see increased polarization, especially in political views. As a Norwegian citizen located in Oslo I shouldn’t be too loud about American politics. But I cannot help looking at the US as a crystal clear example, where its two-party system combined, perhaps, with echo-chambers, creates two camps that seem to fight each other harder and harder. Rather than debating problems with an understanding that we aim for similar goals but have different ways of getting there, we end up demonizing anyone who doesn’t share our views.
We need someone to educate us, so that rather than floating towards the radical edges, we can be pulled back to the sensible left, and sensible right side of the political spectrum. But who shall do it?
The Fourth Estate and Advertisers
My answer, which is probably obvious by now: the publishers. But that is not going to happen if publishers can no longer afford to pay its writers and fact checkers. And not if publishers are forced into a game where, in order to get viewers, they will have to play ball with Facebook’s algorithms. I believe that publishers have indeed played a crucial role not just as a watchdog over the three other estates; but also as an educator.
If you agree to all this then advertisers also play an important role. First of all, many spend huge amounts with Facebook, and for many good reasons. But there is corporate social responsibility in supporting the press and getting value for advertising at the same time.
Secondly, many advertisers and their agencies put most of their digital ad spending in programmatic channels, where traffic is sold and bought through exchanges (and the largest player in this market by the way, is Google). While many things about programmatic advertising sound great, and many things certainly are, there is a major problem with cost: the British association of advertising ISBA documented in 2020 how half of ad spending does not end up as publisher revenue, but rather go to other sources, hereunder the technology companies.
It should be important to advertisers where their ad budgets are spent, but also how.
Finally we arrive at the link between software and a better society. We develop software to facilitate closer collaboration between buyers and publishers, and to ensure that the technology costs and unknown deltas (see the study above) are not robbing publishers of their fair share. And we develop software to enable publishers to deliver great effect to buyers, even though the tech cost is strongly reduced.
In the end, we hope that this strengthens publishers’ ability to continue creating quality content that educates us, enables a nuanced dialogue, and that keeps us away from over-simplified ideologies that will essentially prevent us from maintaining a stable society, much less improve it.
“At dawn, when you have trouble getting out of bed, tell yourself: “I have to go to work — as a human being. What do I have to complain of, if I'm going to do what I was born for — the things I was brought into the world to do? Or is this what I was created for? To huddle under the blankets and stay warm?” - Marcus Aurelius