Time to Fight Back Against the Advertising Censors

Are we in the final stages of mainstream media dominance? Over the last 15 years the market has certainly shifted – the mainstream’s sluggish adoption of nascent technology and that technology’s ever expanding reach has opened the door to new media. 

It takes a long time for a whale washed up on a beach to decay to just bones. Scavengers pick over the rotting carcass for years before it finally disappears. One could argue that since 2020 the decay of mainstream media has quickened in pace. The mainstream media’s bias and lack of integrity is unravelling. Whether it was the failure of the mainstream to interrogate the Covid narrative, the one-sided and often mistaken coverage of the BLM protests after the murder of George Floyd or the lack of interest and then cover up of a certain laptop, perception of impartiality is difficult to justify.

What has stopped mainstream media asking the most pertinent and relevant questions? Recent events highlight either a lack of journalistic integrity or, more concerning, ideological capture. The New York Times is no longer the paper of record, seemingly reporting Hamas press releases verbatim. The once great BBC seems to be more interested in teaching about white privilege, while the Associated Press is now the communications arm of the climate change lobby.

Dissenting opinions, alternative and independent views and traditional values are being deconstructed to an alarming degree. This has left many people feeling unseen and de-prioritised in the cultural conversation.

Reading, viewing and listening figures are all down across the mainstream. The public is departing the mainstream in droves. But the question is, where are they going? 

Figures show they are going to new media. Joe Rogan is now arguably the world’s most powerful journalist; his popularity is largely due to him offering long form content where viewers and listeners get a better understanding of the issues than they would from clickbait headlines or snippets. Matt Taibbi, an American author, journalist, podcaster and former Contributing Editor for Rolling Stone, broke the Twitter files on his Substack, and Dr. Carl Heneghan and Dr. Tom Jefferson, two medical researchers whose Covid advice was different from the Government’s, can review and respond to the U.K.’s Covid Inquiry on Substack.

Funding

Traditionally the mainstream was funded by advertisers. Brands would place ads for their products and services in the pages of publications and pay for the privilege. Potential customers would see the ads and buy the products or services. With the digitalisation of the news this moved to website ads and then led to the centralisation of ad inventory. This all worked out quite nicely for everyone. But then…

Independent news media represent a double threat to the established mainstream. Firstly, the mainstream is haemorrhaging readers, viewers and listeners to them; advertisers pay per impression in the digital world, thus less impressions mean less advertising revenue. Secondly and more dangerously, alt-media sites are subverting the mainstream media’s control of the narrative.

Wiser men have written about the censorship industrial complex, a phrase coined by Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger; it is a growing, international, multi-billion dollar sector. The establishment has a number of tactics to censor and thwart independent publishers. Some are easy to spot, while others are more covert. YouTubers and podcasters can simply be taken off the platforms: Jordan Peterson has had a number of episodes taken off YouTube and Dr. Robert W. Malone has been banned completely. It is a little more difficult to impede independent news publishers. One way is for the Global Disinformation Index (GDI) and other NGOs like NewsGuard and Graphika to deem alt-news websites to be ‘unsafe’ because they publish ‘misinformation’ or ‘disinformation’ – often relying on ‘fact-checkers’ funded by these websites’ mainstream rivals – thus removing their ability to sell advertising space. Media Matters monitors media outlets for “conservative misinformation” then notifies activist journalists so they can take “direct action against offending media institutions”. They sometimes do this in nefarious ways – as revealed in the recent Musk lawsuit. 

The big social media platforms offer a new way to connect with users. But with the exception of X, they do not tolerate free speech. Calling a man dressed up as a woman a man will get you banned on Facebook and Instagram quicker than you can say “XY”. YouTube has what it is calling a ‘hate speech’ policy that is applied so arbitrarily that it is near impossible to guess what content it will tolerate and what will be removed because it’s ‘hate speech’. 

Twitter 1.0 said it was not shadow-banning but the Twitter Files revealed that was clearly a lie. Twitter 2.0 is better than Twitter 1.0, but it still shadow-bans some content under a policy described as “freedom of speech, not reach” and we know Google tweaks its algorithms to promote content it approves of and suppress content it doesn’t.

The mainstream media and their backers are doing all they can to suppress and demonetise independent media creators. 

Independent media funding 

Yet against all odds, independent media channels are thriving, attracting millions of page views, viewers and listeners.

Without access to advertisers and with the sword of Damocles hanging over them, independent content creators are forced to rely on donations from supporters and fans or premium content subscription models. 

Independent media are what they say, independent, and so trying to get them all in one place is a bit like herding cats. However, there is now a way to seamlessly advertise across all independent publishers. Through my agency’s new advertising platform, you can simultaneously reach the readers of the Daily Sceptic or Spiked, access viewers of Triggernometry or Real America’s Voice, or sponsor the Zero Hedge Debates. 

Uncommon Ad Space, a new advertising platform my agency has created, represents a unique opportunity to promote your brand to a largely untapped audience of millions of fiercely loyal, independent thinkers and heavy purchasers. The mission is to bring independent media outlets together in one place so brands and advertisers who want to reach this market can do so easily. Not only can brands get access to a rapidly growing audience, but they can also help support independent content creators and circumvent efforts by the censorship-industrial complex to demonetise them. 

As the utopian globalist ideologues abandon everything of value, beauty, truth, justice and genuine merit, they create huge opportunities for independent websites and content creators. New media are the future. Old media sites are rapidly piling up in the dustbin of history. 

 Lee Taylor is the Managing Director of marketing agency Uncommon Sense. You can contact him on email here. Find Uncommon Ad Space on X. The Uncommon Ad Space website can be found here.