The New York Times is often held up as an example of "the future of advertising" with their focus on privacy and 1st party data. I would argue that if the NYT is the future of advertising, it's going to suck really badly, and drive even more money to walled gardens. 1/

I love the Times. I've been a subscriber for over 2 decades, subscribed to the digital edition the first day it was available, and use all of the features like Cooking, Games, and, ofc, the news. I am logged in on multiple devices so they should have tons of data on me. 2/

The reason the NYT is a bad example of advertising in the future is three-fold. First, the NYT is building a subs-first company, advertising is a secondary revenue stream. That's awesome, but media cos that can make that their primary revenue stream can be counted on 1 hand. 3/

2nd, if the NYT is the future of ads, ads will be totally irrelevant. Every post in this thread I saw on the NYT with my data-rich profile. If they can't target ads to me, what value can they bring to advertisers? This ad is my fav - as you can guess, I don't use much shampoo. 4/

3rd, the ads on the NYT, for the most part, are low-quality. Since they've dropped 3rd-party data and only use programmatic non-personalized ads, the pool of advertisers that remains is small, and therefore real bottom-of-the-barrel advertisers win. 5/

There are certainly some times where I see a luxury advertiser buying a roadblock on the homepage, or occasionally I see some contextual targeting at work (rug ads on articles about rugs!), but the vast majority of ads that I see there are low-quality and irrelevant. 6/

Again, I am not taking a dig at the Times. Their business strategy is awesome - make world-beating content and monetize primarily with subscriptions. More power to them, but this is a position that only a very small number of publishers are in. 7/

So the next time you see someone say "ads in the future will work the way the NYT is doing it!" you should totally disregard it. That future is terrible and not the one we want, and we need to build better things to support publishers beyond the Times. 8/

P.S. I had been meaning to post this for a while, but this recent thread from @benedictevans inspired me to get it out, read this thread for sure!

https://twitter.com/benedictevans/status/1359862078195044357 9/9