Knocked Off

I don't normally read Buzzfeed. I'd developed an impression of it as trafficking in low-quality clickbait that isn't of any real value. But when I was trying to understand the market for China-based clothing retailers in the United States, this article of theirs from 2016 popped up: Say No To The Dress. It's a fairly straightforward piece, the subtitle pretty much sums it up: "Using images stolen from across the web, sketchy retailers are selling ultra-discounted clothes to women on Facebook. A BuzzFeed News investigation shows many are linked to one of China's richest men." It's not a particularly in-depth piece of journalism, contenting itself with recounting the deceptions of Chinese fashion resellers, dropping in a few human-interest stories from people who received shoddy clothing and pointing the finger at ShenZhen Global Egrow E-Commerce Company.

What I found interesting about it was the advertisements that were served along with it. Even while the piece excoriates Facebooks for allowing the ads to proliferate on the platform, there are advertisements from other, newer suspect Chinese online retailers displayed within the text.

And "Ninacloak" and "Zolucky" don't appear to have a much better online reputation than the various Egrow brands.

In any event, I was amused by the irony. Buzzfeed News was taking Facebook to task for running ads very similar to ones that they were running themselves. (I was also amused by the irony of the ads running against an article that was basically calling the companies out for being fraudsters. Welcome to the world of automated advertising buys.)

On the face of it, once could presume that one of a number of things was at work. But a couple of the possibilities jumped out at me more or less immediately. One was that for all its indignation, Buzzfeed didn't actually care who advertised on their site, so long as the checks cleared; Buzzfeed wasn't selective about who advertised there. Another was that just as Facebook didn't really have a good way of vetting all of the people who advertised on their site, neither did Buzzfeed, so the ads made it through whatever net was in place. A third possibility, and this is the one that I find the most likely, is that Buzzfeed simply doesn't hold itself to the same standard that they were holding Facebook to. After all, Facebook is the social media leader, at least in the Western world. Buzzfeed news barely makes the list of also-rans in the news business. And beating up on Facebook is always a reliable source of traffic.

In the end, I'm not sure that it matters. The people who read Buzzfeed news are unlikely to change their behavior based on whether the site runs dubious advertisements any more than they are to abandon Facebook. If this sort of thing drove reader behavior, it would have likely changed by now. But I think that's the problem that Buzzfeed shies away from; especially when it works in their favor.