Ground News & me
In this post, I’d like to volunteer some transparency regarding advertisers on my YouTube channel and provide some perspective to that landscape.
I would estimate that between my email inbox, my management, and social media DMs, my YouTube channel gets somewhere between 30 to 40 sponsorship offers per day. I assume this is not unlike most larger YouTube channels, as the majority of them are from 3rd party agencies casting a wide net. I covered this economy a bit nearly 4 years ago, but the only thing that has changed is the volume of messages. You might find it amusing to know that roughly 2/3rds of them are from AI compute resellers (eg. Higgsfield.ai).
I’m very picky and discriminatory when it comes to sponsors, mostly because I don’t want to do them or compromise my content. I also refuse to take money from grants or special interest funds, and those offers that have become more and more prevalent in the last 2 years as I rub up against issues relating to politics and privacy. Fortunately, my Patreon members have kept the lights on in my studio and lab, but occasionally I have to compromise and balance the budget. The thing is:
I find it more ethical to work with a for-profit advertiser than take a grant from a non-profit.
Grants and special interest funding from an organization I’m aligned with seems like free money. But I don’t believe that there is free money. Even in the unlikely event that there are no stipulations or expectations on how that money is spent, I would, in ways, be dependant on an organization’s satisfaction. For example, I have a very good relationship with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and it would be difficult to find any differences in our opinions on policy. But what if Burger King donated a million dollars annually to the EFF and I did a video exposing some sort of rotten beef cover-up at the restaurant chain? What if I wanted to make a really insensitive joke that reflected poorly on the EFF? What if the EFF spent a lot of time and resources supporting a politician I didn’t like?
These are silly and pedantic examples, but that’s how content gets compromised via financial dependency.
Looking at the funding sources for channels like More Perfect Union makes me a little uneasy, and that is by no means a call out. MPU makes excellent, important, and transformative content that I frequently watch. But the organization appears to exist at the whim of the billionaires it often ideologically opposes. What would MPU do if they caught a lead on a story that would harm Fidelity, who has given them over $16 million dollars? I bet they’d do the “right thing”, but what is the “right thing”?
Losing that funding source would effectively kill other videos that are potentially more impactful or important. Maybe the “right thing” is adding up the pros and cons, and putting on the horse blinders. These ethical decisions are tough and there is no instruction manual.
My way of dealing with this dilemma is through Patreon, and occasionally doing an ad read.
I believe that there is not a single person watching my videos under the impression that I’m interrupting the content to talk about an unrelated product or service for any reason other than money.
That doesn’t make it a good thing that I’m in love with, but it’s a way to balance the budget that simplifies and minimizes the amount of leverage I have to give up. If a sponsor decided I was too controversial or something, there would be a line of sponsors wanting to take their place.
The Rareness of a Healthy Relationship
I signed with my management after personally vetting them with another of their clients, who may be one of the most pain-in-the-ass clients for a capitalist management agency, Hasan Piker. My management understands my apathy towards brand relationships, and instead primarily focus on projects using their network and resources.
My partnership with Ground News preceded my management, and the irony is that I used the app for years before ever responding to their emails reaching out. It’s worth noting that a full time Ground News employee had contacted me rather than a 3rd party agency, which is rare. When I did respond, I almost did as a challenge. Even if I used and enjoyed the service, I wasn’t going to endorse a company unless I knew who was invested in it. So a privacy agreement was reached, and I got to view the cap table and a brief history of the company from an investor’s perspective. I dug into it and found nothing nefarious that might involve me with controversy years down the line.
Most advertisers would not find my terms reasonable. These were, and still are my terms:
The ad-time requirement is limited to 60 seconds. I’ve gone over time a bit, but it was my choice. (Most advertisers require 90 seconds - 3 minutes.)
No overall content/script review. I can make a video about farts and they would find out about it when it went public. (Most advertisers require video approval and often ask for revisions.)
The ad is near the end of my video, not in a place that interrupts the flow or retention of the video. (Most advertisers demand placement in the first 1/3rd of the video.)
Payment is strictly CPM, not upfront money or payment contingent on clicks or sign-ups. Anything beyond completing the budget of the video goes to my charity of choice (usually UNICEF Ukraine). I have not “pocketed” any ad revenue on my channel since transitioning it to a non-profit organization in 2023.
Uh Oh.
Recently, more than a few YouTubers posted videos finding Ground News ads to be controversial and used my likeness in their argument. This naturally resulted in a whole lot of totally reasonable and not at all unhinged comments on my 3 videos with Ground News sponsorships. All internet-haterade aside, I’m actually very receptive to criticism in this area. I don’t want to be attached to some controversial entity. I would rather look like one of the good ones!
I’m not really interested in defending a sponsor. I’m not even all that interested in defending my relationship with a sponsor.
But the problem is, there’s not really all that much to defend. I think some of the concerns in these anti-Ground News videos are legitimate, and I think other ones are a bit poorly-researched. I do think that some of the videos I’ve seen seem to just exist with the purpose of finding a problem with the company, ultimately settling on “bad vibes” as the central exhibit of evidence.
I figured before doing another sponsorship with them, I’d write a blog post explaining all of this as transparently as possible for anyone interested in how all of this works in the background, and where I land on the aforementioned concerns.
They advertise too much On YouTube
High five! I agree!
I’ve actually discussed with the company, and they kind of agree too. It seems like their YouTube integrations simply outperform other advertising avenues.
There is another factor to take into consideration. Ground News advertises with the demographic that performs best. If you’re frequently watching BreadTube or contemporary explainer-adjacent videos, a lot of your algorithm-neighbors are subscribing to Ground News. I suppose this is not unlike getting junk mail for tree services after a stormy week. Most people will get exhausted, but some people, for whatever reason, will decide to call the number on the flyer the 5th time they see it. This props up the expense of all the flyers you and your neighbors are throwing out.
The people experiencing Ground-News-Ad-Fatigue probably think the company spends more on marketing than Coca-Cola. But the likely reality is that a narrower slice of demographic is getting pounded with the same ad integrations while someone watching clips of old Reality Shows has no idea what Ground News is. It’s kind of my self-appointed job to make it less painful, so I do try to make unique commentary and keep things moving quickly. But you can also press the → button a few times too.
There’s more to reality than “Left And Right”
This is a good point worth a lot of discussion. I think the first creator to argue this was Friendlyjordies in his video The Worst Sponsor On YouTube. I have to laugh at that title, as I can go down a list of unsolicited emails and pretty much guarantee that every single sponsorship offer is objectively a “worse sponsor” than Ground News.
I mean, come on. From the top of the inbox: PDS Debt, Rocket Money, a long list of gambling ads.
But Friendlyjordies argument, in my interpretation, can be summarized as:
“You shouldn’t need an app to tell you where to find media bias. You should read some Noam Chomsky and learn how to find it yourself.”
I agree with that so much that I’m going to forgive him for the video title.
But there’s nuance to be found too. Firstly, the type of person who is interested in spending their time analyzing media bias every morning is almost certainly not going to subscribe to Ground News. Sorting through bias can be really exhausting, and there seems to be a lot of people who want the convenience of getting a wide spectrum of stories in one place.
I think I’m one of those people.
I also identify closest to egalitarian-libertarian, so I’m very aware that policy discussions regarding contemporary issues are anything but binary. But there also aren’t enough Marxist, libertarian, constitutionalist, or conservative Islamic news publications in my language for their own categories. If there were, they’d be sparse and make browsing the news even more frustrating than raw-dogging the Google News “For You” page. I like the app because it makes news boring, and I think that ingesting news with patience is healthier than ingesting news with emotion.
A lot of times this particular criticism involves the assumption that the Ground News subscriber doesn’t understand that a political compass has many more dimensions than left and right. It also sometimes assumes that Ground News isn’t trying to address this problem and is laughing maniacally while their stupid subscribers fall deeper into the pit of political-binary.
I don’t think most of the company’s users have this problem. I think they just find it to be a simple and useful way of organizing the news.
Aside from that, I’ve bought gift subscriptions for my Fox News-pilled parents, and they seem to enjoy the novelty of having a special lens to view op-eds and headlines from our toxically binary news media. It makes them read headlines they wouldn’t have read otherwise, and if I bought my parents Noam Chomsky books and instructed them to “learn how to spot bias better”, they’d roll their eyes and put them in storage shed.
Using big tech news aggregators comes with a scary price. The stories are algorithmically served to you for profit. On some aggregators, different users will see different headlines. So you can pay a news aggregator to just give you the headlines based on independant scores that seem to have no financial motivation.
I don’t know the internal strategy, but it seems to me like Ground News is relying less and less on left/right bias and focusing more on overall bias ranking and the legitimacy of information. But I’d be first to admit that removing those partisan features entirely would be shelving one of the app’s most amusing features.
They should do a better job of pointing out that Ground News is free. There are just some paywalled features. A lot of critique is framed as “yet another expensive subscription now to read the news” which can be immediately dispelled by simply visiting the website. Of course some of these critics know this, but nuance and context is the enemy of controversy.
I’ve heard some creators and commentators claim that Ground News is actually deepening the binary-partisan divide.
I think that’s a stretch. But I suppose some people idealogically have pretty long limbs.
their investor List is private
I don’t know the particular reason with these particular investors, but I can give you some insight on why this is extremely commonplace.
Most investment strategies are somewhat or fully proprietary. If a VC or angel investor were to publicly disclose the movement of every dollar in their portfolio, there’s a strong chance that data would be used to reverse-engineer their active strategy that they spent time and money researching. Private investments also prevent bidding wars for follow-on rounds. Creating a bunch of noise might invite a competitor to make the equity and terms in your next seed round more expensive.
It also doesn’t help that a lot of VCs happen to be competitive dickheads in general. I’m obviously not disqualifying the possibility that there is a shady reason for lack-of-transparency, as I’m sure that is sometimes the case too. But private VC/Angel/FF investment does not automatically equal nefarious. I’d assume that most investors would like to brag about their collection of equity, but the risks I’ve mentioned above are too prevalent.
Who? What? Why?
The most frustrating critique of the platform is borrowed from the shoddy reporting that Ground News was allegedly created to combat.
What exactly do we know about who runs this business? What do we know about their motives in creating it? How do we know where Ground News gets its information to rate news sources?
It’s the Tucker Carlson method of ignorance-journalism. This involves asking vague questions to arise suspicion and engagement from your viewers instead of finding out the answers to educate your viewers. In this case, the history of Ground News can be learned in a variety of formats from a simple Google search. The company seems more than happy to share their journey with anyone who takes interest and benefits from doing so.
Spoiler: It’s unsurprisingly not really all that exciting of a story.
So. What’s my solution?
An interesting side note:
When the Friendlyjordies video about Ground News came out, I got astroturfed quite a lot in my YouTube comments by my “long time viewers disappointed that I would sink so low as to partner with this scammy service”. When I brought this discussion up in my Patreon and Discord communities, the vast majority of the consensus was that people didn’t care one way or another, or just opted to skip past the ads. A few other people actually told me that they found out about Ground News through YouTube advertising and legitimately liked the service for news aggregation.
One would think that the folks financially supporting my channel on a monthly basis would be the first to be upset about ad reads, but they tend to be the most forgiving. Some of the outrage comes from the nomadic tribe of viewers who tend to view YouTubers like the cast of a reality show, following controversy over content. But one thing I’ve noticed is that the vast majority of it comes from viewers who do not chip in to support the content, thus making it more necessary to work with 3rd parties to produce it. I’d make a bigger stink about this, but I also wouldn’t expect them to just trust a YouTuber to handle their end of the silent bargain ethically. A lot of creators would, and do, enjoy the larger faucet of money pouring in and do things like pay for healthcare and save money for retirement; things that seem to only be shady in the world of influencers while being regarded as “responsible” in nearly every other industry.
As stated above, I’m not sold on the argument that Ground News is a “bad sponsor” or “bad for society”. They are, unequivocally, the most hands-off, trusting, and approachable sponsor that myself or my management has found. This trust and freedom may not be by default, but earned over the years I’ve communicated with or partnered with the company.
But one thing I do know: Every single alternative sponsor either requires more compromise or would pay less, requiring more ad reads in my content annually to balance the books. That’s not even considering that the ethics of those alternative sponsors are either far more unsavory or haven’t been vetted.
Of course, I could just not do sponsors at all and reduce my video budgets, which is something I did for years.
But retroactively, I would’ve never been able to afford legal representation to safety navigate the Flock Safety research, much less testify before Senate regarding it. I’d also have not raised money for UNICEF, which has amounted to a large sum from just 3 ad reads over 2 years. I suppose this puts me in the similar ethical quandary mentioned earlier with More Perfect Union’s model, albeit less consequential.
Is it worth sacrificing research, journalism, and financial support of humanitarian organizations to pass another creator’s purity test?
No. But there is a potential breaking point where an occasional partnership with a sponsor damages the reputation of my content and provides diminished returns. It’s important to note that from my perspective, this is a race to the bottom and not good for anyone.
I welcome alternative solutions, and in a perfect world I wouldn’t need to work with advertisers, but within all of the philosophical analysis and critique of YouTube advertisers, I have yet to be proposed a solution to the problem that doesn’t create a bigger and more tangible problem.
I want to be ethical, and the reputation of my content and research is dependant on my ethics. This is extremely important to me, and I’ve spent a lot of time listening to these arguments with as little bias as I am capable of having. I’m just not convinced that there’s a real problem, and if there is, I don’t have an actionable solution that improves anything. That may change in the future as I want to get this kind of stuff right.
If you made it this far, thanks for reading. If you had concerns about Ground News, or how money worked with my channel, I hope this helped explain the full context better.
