The time Mumbrella accidentally funded Breitbart
After being informed Mumbrella’s ads were appearing on Breitbart, Mumbrella’s Josie Tutty looks into how and why we had ended up on the alt-right site, and asks where we should draw the line.
Early yesterday morning, the Mumbrella News Twitter account received a message informing us that an ad for our upcoming Finance Marketing Summit was displaying on alt-right aligned, climate change denying, openly misogynistic US publication Breitbart.
UH OH!!! @mumbrella + @Mumbrellanews your ads are on Alt Right hate site Breitbart ☹️
Please dont fund hate speech with your ad $$s Please Block Breitbart from your ad buy@slpng_giants_oz @slpng_giants pic.twitter.com/6ZHVfkPAvt
— Slow Burn (@SlowBurnOz) 26 April 2018
If all you’ve read are those Breitbart headlines and not the articles that follow, then you’re truly ignorant and not accepting of other opinions. Naturally those headlines are designed to shock – hello marketers out there, have you not heard of click bait?! Why is it okay for leftist publications to shock all they want without the same standard applied? Whilst they are right they are not alt right, go and check your facts…you are wrong! Fed up with this Orwellian indoctrination.
It’s perfectly fine for ‘Rightist’ sites to be shocking, but guess what – no one HAS to listen to anything they aren’t interested in or don’t care for. Mumbrella is under no obligation to support sites like Breitbart. If this upsets you, you can always pay for ad space there yourself to complain about it, free speech and all…
Well done on completely missing the point of the article.
Probably just read the headline…
Well said! This Leftist totalitarian intolerance for opinions they don’t agree with, is increasingly toxic. What is wrong with hearing an opinion that dissents from the mainstream? Disagree, debate – but don’t seek to silence. This is why Trump won, and will again in 2020.
Will the stubble-faced hipsters never learn from their rejection and defeat?
Ignorantly Blissful post.
Breitbart is the epitome and the mouth piece of the Alt-Right. If you don’t think this content is ultra right wing I dread to imagine your political sensibilities. Ah the ‘free speech’ argument. Textbook Alt-Right techniques.
Breitbart is no more alt-right than SMH or The Age is alt-left.
@Robbo.
Errrrrm, no.
There is so much not to like about Breitbart…
https://www.buzzfeed.com/josephbernstein/heres-how-breitbart-and-milo-smuggled-white-nationalism?utm_term=.smx30nJ4w#.xl2YyoKWA
So your excuse is basically “because Google”. You tell us there is NO way of running ads on the platform that allows you to be 100% sure you are not funding hate speech. I don’t disagree!
Then here’s a thought. Maybe a better option for Mumbrella would be to stop using the guaranteed-to-fund-hate-speech (also tax dodging and monopoly exploiting, but that’s for another article…) Google advertising platform.
You’d also be working your own self interest in another – possibly far more important – way. There won’t be many people left in media and marketing to read your fantastic website if we all give our marketing budgets to Google.
Come on Mumbrella. Do the right thing.
What other major targeted ad platforms like Google are there? If they exist on that level, and are committed to not placing ads on hate speech sites (or whatever sites the advertiser doesn’t want their campaign to run on), then I’m sure many would jump at it. As far as I know, Google has the monopoly on online ad placement (excepting Facebook, placing ads on its own platform).
If enough marketers and advertisers tackle Google on their methods, hopefully they improve their site category options to better reflect their user’s needs
Breitbart is what people who are in the real media industry would call an enivornmental buy for Mumbrella as you both specialise ina spewing out diarrhea. Its on brand
Had this happen to any other piblisher, you would be screaming blue murder.
…or the fact that you only served one impression, with a click – would mean that SlowBurn OZ would have to be that impression, else how did they get that screenshot!!
So are the people ‘watching out’ for these things actually part of the problem?
People who visit Breitbart have made a conscious decision to visit that website, and people who don’t like it should just stay away. And believe it or not, there are some alt-right Australian marketers out there – do you not want to sell tickets to them?
Wow… Who’d have thought a pretty generic filler piece about Ad Safety would have engendered such a strong response from the great unwashed as the comments posted so far.. Breitbart, Google and Programatic must be the hot button topics for today… Perhaps it was these commenters who gave you your Affinity Audience by having Milo open in one tab and Mumbrella on the other…
Don’t give in to the mob. Breitbart is just undergrad edgy humour designed to annoy Left wing ideologues. You may not like it, but they’re basically saying the same stuff as The Australian in a more provocative way
Should have known that this article about how Google ads work would turn into rants from people defending Breitbart. But to stay on topic, I think the problem really is Google’s, not yours. We’ve seen it on YouTube and we see it with Google Ads. Google needs to be more vigilant on which sites/topics are allowed to carry its ads. And conversely, it also needs to be more vigilant on what ads it carries. I was recently on an article on the SMH and received an ad that said “F–k all night” with an animation of a penis. It was reminiscent of those spam emails that used to be around in the early 2000s – ie, a scam. I hardly think it would meet the standards of the publisher or of Google, yet there it was.
@Jeff
Smart marketeers do not post ad’s to radio, certainly not shock jocks and live TV, certainly being extremely wary of the commercial channels and Foxtel. Very dangerous with the risk of funding hate with live TV and radio.
Isn’t is more of a risk to Breitbart that ‘libtards’ can use google advertising to breach the filter bubble and reach their audience?
Wow, for a media news publication the ignorance is astonishing… How is Breitbart alt-right? I’m sick of this left wing bias, time to play by their rules… Boycott Mumbrella!!!
Were you looking in the mirror when you made that post?
“openly misogynistic” too, apparently.
Typical left-wing take on anything that doesn’t align 100% with their own beliefs. It’s actually called bigotry.
What an ignorant writer, is our Josie.
Robbo. You are male. You are angry about the world. Get out and about, talk to your neighbours and smile a little !
Do you have a media agency?
Good advertisers use a white list nowadays as opposed to the difficult task of updating a blacklist.
In your list of things to do, how about building some trust with your reader/users? Ask them to flag egregious ad placements, state how you’ll respond to their flags, regularly tell them what you’ve done in response and thank them for keeping Mumbrella ethical. You’ve got a community – so use it!
So you don’t run adds on sexually suggestive apps. But what about sexually explicit ones? (language is fun)
I wonder if it’s linked to your ill-judged decision to have that guy from Cambridge Analytica come over…