John Herrman

For some publishers unsettled by a fast-changing online advertising business, sponsored content has provided much-needed relief. In recent years, publications large and small have invested in teams to make sponsored content — written stories, videos or podcasts that look and feel like journalistic content — hoping to make up for declines in conventional advertising. To varying degrees, they have succeeded. Younger companies like Vice and BuzzFeed have built whole businesses around the concept. But as the relationship between publishers and social platforms like Facebook grows closer — and as more straightforward forms of advertising are devalued by ad-blocking and industry automation, the role, and definition, of sponsored content has shifted.

Now, publishers, social media companies and advertisers are negotiating new relationships. Audiences have migrated away from news websites and toward Facebook and other social media destinations, which for a competitive price can provide advertisers access to larger and more finely targeted groups of people, challenging the value of a publisher’s own channels. With a weaker claim over audiences, publishers have been left to compete for advertising on different terms, leaning less on the size or demographics of their readerships, and more on the sorts of campaigns they can engineer for advertisers — campaigns that are then used across the Internet.