Advertising Marketing PR, Social Media

Should editorial brands sell their social network followers to advertisers?

Is there a big difference between a media company turning its owned website over to advertisers and turning over their social media profiles to advertisers? That’s the question I’m pondering after reading this story about Wired working with third-party content producers on an ad campaign that would appear both on the Wired site and on select social media profiles.

From my perspective the audience expectations are much different between on-domain and on social accounts. While advertising – particularly now native advertising – is pretty much the norm for editorial sites now, the basic promise on social is that the audience is connecting with the brand, who they want to hear from whether it’s for deals, insider news, breaking updates or any of a number of other reasons.

So I’m not a huge fan of editorial brands selling their social audiences to advertisers. Wired is by no means the first to do this, there are a half dozen others I could probably find. I get why they do it – revenue is revenue – but to me it seems to be an example of breaking the core contract between the brand and the audience.

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