First published in the Daily Maverick 168 weekly newspaper.

Enthusiasts of SpongeBob SquarePants will recognise the Chum Bucket fast food dive, named for the fisherman’s practice of luring fish, particularly apex predators, with mashed-up seafood off-cuts, blood and guts – which is located across the street from its more successful rival, the Krusty Krab. It’s nasty, it hones, and it really does appeal to the fishy residents of Bikini Bottom.

It’s also an apt description for a form of sleazy, exploitative, low-quality clickbait advertising to drive traffic to other sites and webpages through a selection of content spread across a grid of widget images and captions, often featuring celebrity gossip, gross-out pictures, get-rich-quick schemes or miracle cures.

A variation on the banner ad, chumbuckets or chumboxes are often presented as additional reading material, flagged as “recommended”, “you might also like”, “from the web” and “paid content”.

Chumbox or “native advertising” providers such as Taboola, RevContent, Wikihealthier and Outbrain are paid for each reader click on the landing website and then give a portion of that revenue to the publishers.

Traffic flowing through chumboxes is tracked individually and in relation to its neighbours. The content is highly optimised and location-specific, which is why, for example, readers in Gatesville might be shown ads for non-surgical hair transplants in Gatesville, not Manenberg.

Their placement is no accident: in exchange, publishers receive payment, increased traffic, or both.

You might never click on headlines such as “Dissolve body fat with salt”, “Remember him? Wait till you see him now” and “Jesus’ resurrection was real”, but the genre of ads (indistinguishable from the rubbish on some websites) is a multibillion-dollar industry.

Not so funny, is it?

“This is clearly working, somehow,” Eric Hadley, the former marketing chief at Outbrain, now a marketing executive at iHeartMedia, told The New York Times. “You may laugh at these ads, but people click on them.”

The venal content has been found on respected news sites including on BusinessInsider.com, CNN, Fortune, Spiegel Online, Wired, Condé Nast, nymag.com, Slate, The Atlantic, Time and usatoday.com.

Why would a quality publisher besmirch its pages with dreck about skin diseases, listicles of celebrities with ugly (old or young) spouses, gross hygiene, racial stereotypes, erection supplements, dietary cures, get-rich-quick schemes and Green Card lotteries?

The reason is plain to see: chumboxes bring in the dough.

In January 2020, Hamilton Nolan from The Columbia Journalism Review took aim at The Washington Post for pulling off “the neat trick of combing prestige journalism with a shadow of clickbait factory that puts out a steady flow of fast-turnaround aggregated stories grasping at virality”.

The Post’s stories, Hamilton noted, included “snazzy headlines that help tell a story (such as) ‘Officials said he died in a fall. Then his wife admitted to poisoning his water with eye drops’”.

“Reading news online over the past year, I came to realise that more or less every story now includes a beautiful woman. Tucked into modules with names like ‘around the web’ or ‘you might like’, there she is, demonstrating her bosom or backside or pearly-white smile.

“Often she is a celebrity, talking about weight loss, filing a lawsuit, or collapsing onstage. Other times she is a fitness guru, or a fashion expert, or (in at least one case) a ‘former pole vaulter’ who is ‘still smoking HOT’. The women of ‘Around the Web’ are ubiquitous, they are alluring, and they only want one thing – your click.”

Publishers, he says are “horny for cash” so they have a vested interest in the salacious content.

In 2019, The Times reported on the imminent merging of industry giants Outbrain and Taboola, which was to combine their annual gross revenue to more than $2-billion. Outbrain’s investors were to have received 30% shares in the merged company, as well as $250-million in cash, but the deal soon fell through.

These content ads have been popular with publishers for more than a decade. In a 2016 report by Change Advertising, the campaign said 82% of the top 50 news sites were using them. But fewer than half of the links connect to legitimate advertisers, it said, with many routing readers instead to “anonymously registered domains, data-gobbling quizzes and landing pages for more ads”.

In a wonderful essay, “A Complete Taxonomy of Internet Chum” (posted in 2015 on the now-defunct The Awl website), John Mahoney writes: “As a by-product of this optimisation, an aesthetic has arisen. An effective chumbox clearly plays on reflex and the subconscious. The chumbox aesthetic broadcasts our most basic, libidinal, electrical desires back at us. And gets us to click.”

Chumboxes, Mahoney notes, are “daisy-chained together in an increasingly cynical, gross funnel; quickly, the open ocean becomes a sewer of chum”.

No free lunch

But to most news publishers, the struggle to maintain credibility, not piss off readers or risk accusations of spreading misinformation (or that ghastly Trumpism “fake news”) is real, which is why some – including The Post – have stopped posting chumboxes altogether.

Others persist, justifying their use as a small price to pay for the millions earned through partnerships with content-recommendation companies.

Yet the tech commentator for The Margins, Ranjan Roy, in his exploration of the “dark underbelly of ad-tech”, writes that publishers who allow the use of chumboxes should be responsible for the content.

“Those globular masses and secret brain pills are not an ad-tech by-product. They are the creative output of the publishers who present them. These are your websites.

“There is widespread organisational buy-in behind the cognitive dissonance that is an Outbrain module residing below some fourth-estate journalism. Everyone is responsible. Journalists should not say ‘it’s a business thing’ and we should not collectively say ‘well, I guess it supports journalism.’”

Although it might seem like a “win-win” for the media house, it’s not, because everyone loses – especially readers who waste their time on fake adverts.

Ad industry analyst Brian Wieser, the business intelligence president of GroupM, commented to The Times: “The pursuit of revenue, especially in some of the darker days for journalism, meant that publishers would take the money from content-recommendation services, and they might be reluctant to give it up now.

“But the downside is that these ads can potentially diminish the brand of the publisher, especially when they’re run alongside serious journalism.”

Lies and deception

On 12 January, fresh after former US president Donald Trump was spectacularly deplatformed by Twitter, Facebook, Google, Instagram, Pinterest and a host of other social media sites, Vice – which also uses Outbrain links – reported that Taboola’s chumboxes were widely used for spreading disinformation.

David Nyurenberg, the CEO of Valor Digital, told Vice that chumbox providers needed to be on as many domains as possible, even if they’re at the bottom of the page and nobody ever saw their ad, because they still got attribution credit.

“It’s how Taboola can boast that it sees a billion users.

“So they are actively disincentivised from policing their publisher network because turning off publishers will hinder their ability to cookie as many users as possible AND since they charge based on clicks, it is in their best interest for their ‘recommended content’ to be as clickbaity and divisive as possible,” Nuremberg said.

“Controversy gets people to click on their ads. There is no reason beyond a few days of bad press to clean up their publisher and client ecosystem. It would be bad business.”

Beyond the misleading headlines, these companies are also accused of spreading disinformation and conspiracy theories, like a Taboola ad that reads: “Scientists develop nasal spray that decreases the risk of infection by 78 percent.”

No prizes for guessing what readers would associate that advert with.

After it was called out on Twitter, Taboola told Vice that the content violated its services and took it down.

Vice then flagged articles on the conservative Federalist website, which appeared to legitimise chumbox ads indistinguishable from Federalist articles.

Taboola CEO Adam Singolda said: “Taboola invests heavily in manually reviewing publishers we work with and their content, using a full-time content review team.

“We have a strict policy against disseminating fake news. We continuously screen our publishers and, at times, fire any parties deemed to be distributing it.”

Digital fraud investigator Dr Augustine Fou told Vice that the Taboolas and Outbrains of the world “make it easy for disinformation sites to ‘monetise’ because they provide the tech infrastructure and likely also ‘look the other way.’”

“I don’t think they can claim ‘oopsies’ they didn’t know they were helping in this way.” DM168

This story first appeared in our weekly Daily Maverick 168 newspaper which is available for free to Pick n Pay Smart Shoppers at these Pick n Pay stores.