The news business is a key part of the solution

Don Marti is a strategist in web ecosystem and open source business issues. He is an invited expert for the Privacy Working Group of the World Wide Web Consortium and has written or edited for several internet-related publications. 

The news business is so deeply into a crisis that it’s understandable to miss that it’s only part of a larger set of problems affecting the entire economy. As Big Tech’s AI features drive a Traffic Apocalypse for news sites, an international study showed that AI assistants misrepresent news content 45% of the time— regardless of language or territory. News has it bad, but the alarming traffic and revenue numbers are symptoms of a larger trend: a shift to a lower-trust society as a result of some deliberate technical and policy decisions by Big Tech platforms. News as a business suffers, but things are bad all over, and news will have to be a key part of the fix.  

We didn’t, of course, start with a perfectly trustworthy environment before Big Tech. A certain amount of hustle and overselling by inventors and new companies has always been a thing. What’s unfamiliar in recent times is the combination of large, oligopoly companies with the failure of those companies to make an effort to go legit as they grow up. 

While American business culture has always celebrated “fake it ’til you make it,” we have pivoted to “make it, then fake it even harder.” A scam culture, Professor Tressie McMillan Cottom wrote in a New York Times op-ed, “is one in which scamming has not only lost its stigma but is also valorized. We rebrand scamming as ‘hustle,’ or the willingness to commodify all social ties.” 

While American business culture has always celebrated “fake it ’til you make it,” we have pivoted to “make it, then fake it even harder.”

Past boom and bust cycles had deceptive players, but some of our deceptive companies are big enough to occupy roles in the market where people expect  respectability, and an overgrown hustle is systemically risky. “There is something specific about our current culture,” Cottom wrote, “that makes scams feel more dangerous than they were in the past.” Not surprisingly, the 2025 Edelman Trust Barometer reported that social media is the least trusted industry sector measured and is getting less trusted over time.

Like many social trends, the recent shift to a lower-trust society began with a technological shift. When Google got started, instead of relying on a few large servers running expensive proprietary operating systems, the developers figured out how to spread the load across a large number of cheap PCs running Linux. From a software industry point of view, the decision to treat everyone else’s product category as a commodity makes a lot of sense. As a software industry decision-maker, the last place you want a dollar of profit to show up is at another software company — they’ll use it to squeeze yours out (remember Lotus 1-2-3 or Netscape?) Commoditization is the safe play in software, where every large player in the market is one code release away from being an existential threat to any other player.

But applying the same principle to the advertising and publishing business is a bad fit. 

Commoditization is the safe play in software, where every large player in the market is one code release away from being an existential threat to any other player. But applying the same principle to the advertising and publishing business is a bad fit. 

The business of ad-supported content works best with a positive feedback loop, where a high-reputation publishing brand lifts the reputation of the brands whose ads appear in it, and ad revenue enables publishers to produce more content, grow reputation, do more for brands, and so on. Big Tech’s first step in eroding trust was in breaking that feedback loop. In 2007 Google bought Doubleclick and began to build a monopoly in not just search advertising, but the advertising that appears on other sites.

Because users can be tracked from one site to another, Google makes money by following users from higher-value, trustworthy sites to the least expensive site where ads are  saleable at all. And for every good ad that Google can sneak onto a bad site, cross-site tracking also leaves some good site stuck with a less trustworthy, lower paying bad ad. Cross-site tracking was recognized early on as an economic loss for higher-value sites, but creates even more problems for consumers and for honest sellers. 

In Tailored Cheap Talk: The Effects of Privacy Policy On Ad Content and Market Outcomes, professors Pedro Gardete and Yakov Bart found that a message sent with better knowledge of what the recipient is likely to want to hear is less persuasive. A widely seen ad, if deceptive, would get attention from competitors, regulators, or journalists, but a personalized ad can deliver a deceptive message to a specific set of victims. A reporter on the financial-tech beat probably doesn’t have the personal qualities that Meta’s ML uses to select who gets the precious metals investment scams on Facebook. Print had an advantage that Big Tech took away from the web — when I see the same store keep advertising in the local paper, I can count on it being legit, and not just targeting me. Big Tech’s move to commodify publishers and divert revenue was not just harmful to publishers. Because advertising personalized to a user cannot convey a useful economic signal the way that an ad tied to the content can, this decision also made it harder to build brands online.

A widely seen ad, if deceptive, would get attention from competitors, regulators, or journalists, but a personalized ad can deliver a deceptive message to a specific set of victims.

Later advertising platforms such as Meta’s went on to make even more deception-friendly design decisions. Meta has chosen technical and policy options that make crime easier to do and harder to spot. For example, Ad Library is designed to show only “active” ads, those that are running this very minute, making it easy to hide a trademark-infringing ad from the real brand. Independent crawling of ads is blocked by policy, so image search tools like TinEye can’t help search for scam ads. In Meta Custom Audiences, unlike every other direct marketing medium, legit advertisers can’t see when their list is used without permission. Meta offers a “Download Your Information” tool to let users see who is using their info for targeting but often provides nonsense or fake company names. While run-of-the-mill scams and trademark infringement are a drain on the economy, the big state-operated disinfo operations use the same methods as the small-timers. 

The results influence our security.  

“There is evidence that foreign adversaries are influencing veterans through social media by impersonating veteran service organization and veterans themselves,” Army Maj. Jessica Dawson and Lt. Col. Tom Arnold wrote in Defense News. “Unfortunately, there is no mechanism within the military to identify, assess or defend against this threat — a threat that is not viewed as a vulnerability by security firms.” The commodification strategy led to a less trustworthy advertising business, and ultimately a national security threat. The problem will only get worse as Big Tech makes more efforts to push more AI-generated content. While legit publishers make efforts to deny their content to AI crawlers, disinformation operations of all kinds are willing to feed them.

The commodification strategy led to a less trustworthy advertising business, and ultimately a national security threat. The problem will only get worse as Big Tech makes more efforts to push more AI-generated content. While legit publishers make efforts to deny their content to AI crawlers, disinformation operations of all kinds are willing to feed them.

There is an opportunity to reverse the trend, starting with understanding the connection between what people understand as privacy threats and the kinds of deceptive communications that are harmful to the news business and to society as a whole. If the rise of surveillance advertising has given us anything, it is a better understanding of what “privacy” really is. 

On the W3C Privacy Principles team, we found that the “privacy” that people want is different from what many “privacy tools” and “privacy regulations” can provide. Privacy harms tend to fall into two categories: deception and discrimination. Someone has used the information they have to either give me false information, or treat me differently based on some fact they know about me. 

When Big Tech succeeds at “violating privacy” what they’re really doing is facilitating deception and unfairness, and driving distrust. Effective privacy laws — by limiting cross-context tracking — will help to reduce deceptive communications by limiting commodification of publishing.  State privacy laws, unfortunately, have over-focused on compliance paperwork for normal companies while missing out on opportunities to address the fundamental problems of commodification and loss of trust. 

There is an opportunity to reverse the trend, starting with understanding the connection between what people understand as privacy threats and the kinds of deceptive communications that are harmful to the news business and to society as a whole.

In one sense, saving the news business is harder than it looks, because the news crisis is part of a bigger trust crisis. But on the other hand, the bigger crisis means that news organizations are an indispensable ally for many other players. Building a coalition of allies who will benefit from a higher-trust environment is no longer optional.

Coming soon, Part 2

While the surveillance advertising oligopoly squeezes the news business, it’s putting an even bigger squeeze on every company that relies on advertising. Today’s surveillance business has outgrown the old-fashioned world of numerous “cookies” and “trackers.” The targeting most likely to  affect real people is happening inside machine learning systems at a few Big Tech firms. Consolidation and obfuscation are a big setback for users and legit sites — but the impact is even more of a crisis for advertisers, who face a customer acquisition cost crunch rise as Big Tech firms maintain double-digit growth rates while taking control of a majority of the ad market.

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Cite this article

Marti, Don  (2025, Nov. 5). The traffic and revenue crisis for news is a symptom of Big Tech’s economy-wide trust collapse. Reynolds Journalism Institute. Retrieved from: https://rjionline.org/news/the-traffic-and-revenue-crisis-for-news-is-a-symptom-of-big-techs-economy-wide-trust-collapse/