Excellent piece! Know why targeting advertisers works in the west and fails in India to get sites like opIndia defunded?

The funding from advertising isn’t the only funding for a lot of these entities. These “small news outlets” are into a lot of businesses... [A Thread] https://twitter.com/sighyush/status/1275437342635909120

1. The most obvious is taking money during elections for “advertising” from political parties. Some get a consistent year round supply.

2. They then also charge individual politicians for their “brand building”.

And it gets way worse...

3. I’ve seen owners of 3 prominent (regionally) YouTube channels and websites become power brokers, getting deals through on commission. The “media” label does give you proximity.

4. In a crazy case, the owner of such a media biz was also handling political hawala!

5. Then there’s revenue from blackmail. A “news website” found dirt on a politician and blackmailed him in exchange for not doing a story on it. I’ve seen this happen twice.

6. Some are funded by huge businesses that just want a foot in the door into the political arena!

In short, advertising rates in India are so low for the crappy “news websites” and YouTube channel that they’d hardly cover the cost of operations.

Their funding is insane and often so murky it’ll shock you more than even political funding would!