GDPR has just gone into effect, and the national media is obsessed with issues of privacy and the impact of advertising. There’s also the matter of the spread of biased information on social media; what’s called “fake news”. Maybe it’s time to address a touchy topic, which is the impact of advertising and fake news in tech. I’m not talking about using social media to distribute “fake news” but fake tech news. Is there such a thing, how common is it, and how did we get there? Is there a common element joining fake tech news to “fake news” overall? Most important, is it hurting us, and the industry?
Thirty years ago, technology was starting the most important transition of its time. Not the most important technology, but the most important transition in how users and potential users of technology learned about it. At that time, the premier outlets for technology information were paid-subscription publications. My surveys of the time showed that publications like Business Communications Review (BCR) were top of the heap in terms of credible channels for information on technology. When I visited enterprise CIOs or network operator planners, I’d often see the latest issue of BCR on their desks. You don’t see it today; BCR isn’t published. The reason why is “ad sponsorship” or “controlled circulation”.
I can recall when controlled circulation publications and “qualification” cards emerged. The theory was simple; if advertisers believed that only those who were qualified buyers of a particular technology sector would receive the publication, they’d be more likely to advertise in it, and pay more for the ads. When the process started, the most important question was something like “How much network equipment budget are you responsible for?” Too little and you didn’t get the publication, so editors used to joke with me that if you added up the claimed budget responsibilities of all their qualification cards, the total would exceed the global GDP.
As media evolved from print to web, the controlled circulation model evolved to ad-sponsored websites. There’s no question that this has improved the availability of information on technology. But is it good information? The challenge with this new model is pretty obvious, framed by the fairly recognizable statement that “Whose bread I eat, his song I sing.” When readers pay for news, they get news useful to readers. When vendors pay, not only do the vendors get news they like, the rest of us get that same story. It doesn’t mean that the story being told is a lie, but that it reflects the view of an interested party other than the reader.
Ads on web pages are served when you see the page, so you have to click on an article to see the associated ads. Why did you click? Because the headline looked interesting, so writing headlines is really important in getting you engaged and presenting you with ads. The story? In advertising terms, not so important, because most of the ads you’ll see will come up in the first screen. Give somebody a two or three-thousand-word story to read and they’ll likely see no more ads than if you’d given them 500. However, two thousand words on a single topic will take a lot more work to generate than 500 on four topics, and you’ll get four times the ad impressions with the latter. It’s “better” to have a headline (like “self-driving cars” or “robots”) that grabs interest than one that promises complex solutions to mundane problems.
There’s also a problem of content bias. Who are the sources of information for articles? Many end users of technology have policies that forbid them to talk with the media about project details or plans, for good reasons. Who doesn’t have such policies? Vendors, and in addition vendor announcements usually form the basis for “news”, which after all means “novelty”. Remember the old cartoons where news hucksters had issues whose headline was “Man Bites Dog!” Dogs biting men would hardly be news, but it would probably have been true a lot more often.
Sometimes what the vendor wants to push in a media briefing doesn’t look like it’s going to generate an interesting story, so what’s written isn’t what the vendor intended. I got a call from a reporter about a vendor’s announcement to drop a particular product, and I remarked that given the product had limited value and was likely to have less over time, that was probably a smart move. There was a long pause, then the reporter asked “So you’re saying that the vendor’s product strategy is in disarray?” No, obviously I was saying the opposite, but obviously the story was already done in a “more interesting” form and just a quote or two was needed—if the quotes said the right thing.
Then there’s analysts, among which group I’m generally classified as belonging. I got into this space way back in 1982 with a big survey project for a network vendor that involved talking with 300 users. Getting that many people to talk about the topic was so much a challenge that I kept asking them questions about every six months to keep them engaged, and that formed the basis for my own surveys and reports. Surveys are hard work, expensive, and time-consuming, so it’s important that they provide something that’s going to be useful, something that people will pay for.
In my early days, I also did some contract work for other analyst firms, and in the 1990s I started to see RFPs from them saying something like “Write a report detailing the five billion dollar per year market for xyz.” They’d determined that if the market wasn’t at least five billion, the report wouldn’t sell. Well, gosh, that sounded more like a plot for a novel to me. However, it was exactly what the major buyers of reports—vendors, again—wanted. I got out of the syndicated research business.
Just five years ago, I had another dose of reality. A vendor asked me to confidentially review a research report they’d commissioned (from another analyst firm). They were concerned about the responses and wanted to know if my own work corroborated them. I did the review, and the responses and research were not even remotely like what I’d obtained. The reason was that the target topic was appropriate to enterprise CIOs, but the people surveyed weren’t even working in enterprises for the most part, they were in SMBs.
The problem here isn’t that people are making up tech stories (or at least that’s not a significant piece of the problem) as much as that vendors and the search for ad delivery opportunities have too much influence on what gets published. Vendors pay for ads, they pay for reports, and not surprisingly they have significant influence on each. Does that influence mean the buyer is being fed fake news in the form of information favoring the seller and not the reader? Sometimes it does.
This is the common element between fake tech news and fake news in the current popular dialog. Everything has a perspective. Everything has a central truth. Is that central truth the goal, or is it the goal to present all the perspectives? Right now, according to the ratings, the three major news networks (CNN, Fox, and MSNBC) have two (the last two) that favor a particular (and opposite) political view, and one that favors presenting people advocating both views. The two extreme ones are more popular. Why? Because people who are dedicated news junkies are more likely to want their own positions validated, or their opponents trashed, than to hear what’s actually going on. More viewers, more ad money. In tech, are you better off with a story about a hot topic, or about something that’s really critical to advance the industry? If you want to serve ads, you know what the answer is.
What, then, about our “central truth” that’s supposed to be at the core of every story? Remember “Man bites dog!” It’s often lost in the desire to say something catchy, and so to catch readers. New stuff is interesting. I remember when “Popular Science” ran a story on how we could use nuclear bombs to dig underground reservoirs. It was sure interesting, but I don’t see those reservoirs today. If you planned to dig yours that way, the story didn’t advance the real world a whit, and in fact might have overshadowed practical options and problem-solving techniques.
We can’t advance this industry based on exciting stories about the far future. “Popular Science” in the past is no excuse for letting “Popular Networking” dominate in the present. Networking today needs the opposite of pure promotion, which is pure validation. It’s something that touches everyone’s life, but that hardly anyone understands. We need to make networking understandable, particularly to the people we expect to fork out dollars to make it happen. We also need to understand what those people need in the way of justification, before they pull out their checkbooks.
What do we do about it? There’s nothing that’s going to change the ad-sponsorship business model, but what readers/buyers can do is to recognize that the information they get is often sourced from the people trying to sell them something and influenced by the selling process overall. An “editorial mention” for a company or product should never convince you to buy it, only to visit the vendor’s website and do some direct research there and in related sites.
Remember too that the “sponsorship taint” doesn’t taint everything equally. Some publications, including those I write for (Tech Target’s sites and No Jitter), don’t exert any editorial control on their authors, so if the writers are unbiased you can generally rely on the stories being likewise. They firewall editorial organizations from the ad sales part of their company, which at least reduces and sometimes eliminates the risk of influence. Analyst reports may be sponsored but may also be sold and thus more accountable to the reader. When you read something, ask how it was paid for and what the interest of the paying party is. If it’s not congruent with your interest as a buyer, factor that in as a negative on the objectivity and value of the information.
I could be a problem too, of course, which means I have to explain myself. My own stand is two-pronged. My blog, which this piece is a part of, is totally ad-free and influence-free, and that’s a pledge I make on the blog itself. You can rely on it. The second prong is that in the small number of cases where I write something under my own name for publication elsewhere, I’m almost always paid for it, but what I write is what I believe to be true, and nobody influences it or changes it. If I can’t be assured that my views are published as I’ve written them, I won’t write for that publication or company. I demand real documentation for claims, not verbal comments. Sometimes I’ll demand a demonstration, and if I’m not satisfied then I’m not going to let my name go on anything. Could I be deceived? Possibly, but it will have to happen despite my best efforts, and if I find out I have been, I’ll blog about it in detail. That’s another pledge. I may be wrong about something—I have been in the past—but if I am, it’s my own error and not that somebody is paying me to think differently.
That’s often how bloggers work, since the barriers to publishing them in the Internet age is reduced. I’ve found blogs from truly independent sources to be the best pathway to getting unbiased information, at least if “unbiased” means “free of explicit influence”. Everyone has biases, including me, and you should keep that in mind. The biases arise from limited exposure to the issues, from the background and experience of the writers, and from their own vision of how things should be and should work. Those biases are unavoidable, and you can sometimes net them out of your research by consulting multiple sources. I’m not saying vendors, or reporters or editors or analysts, are lying. I’m simply saying that they have their own agenda, explicitly (vendors) or implicitly (sponsored outlets and reports).
You’re always free to ignore the truth, to find opinions that fit your preconceptions, of course. Fake news works because people do just that. The biggest problem here isn’t media, analysts, or vendors, though sadly they are part of the problem. The biggest part is you the reader, the user, the buyer. In the Internet age you can find a validating resource for any point of view, no matter how limited, stupid, or extreme it may be. If that’s what you’re looking for, then you’re in luck in today’s world. If you want real information, you’ll have to put aside your own prejudices and do some research. In the end, you are what you know, and you buy and use what you decide. Make the most of that power.