Think of the Advertisers!



A variety of self-censorship, wherein a New Media entity purges itself of "adult" content out of fear of violating the terms of their advertising server and thus losing revenue -- or to make itself attractive to potential advertisers in order to generate or increase revenue.

This frequently happens when an edgy and unrestricted website which is popular and has a large userbase is heavily dependent upon advertising to keep running, or when such a site is bought by a larger, more conservative firm. The result is the complete removal of all the edgy and unrestricted material which drew in the target demographic that the advertiser or the new parent company wanted to exploit. It rarely involves true Moral Guardians, but rather is motivated entirely by money and the perception that the presence of "undesirable" content on the site scares off more profitable advertisers. It also comes from a perception on the corporate level that the userbase is a commodity to be sold, rather than a community to be served.

Also called "making [site] family-friendly", "kindergartenization", and "kiddening".

Literature

 * As a Deal with the Devil, media becoming dependent on paid adverts (thereby placing their meagre editorial autonomy at the mercy of advertisers) is Older Than Television. Long before the New Media fad, it happened with TV, radio and (before that) with newspapers.
 * One fictional example is Arthur Chambers' newspaper (the San Piedro Review) in Snow Falling on Cedars. Pearl Harbor generated a virulent racial backlash against "the wily Jap" which culminated in widespread internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II. For a small-town journal in wartime, the price of taking a purely-idealistic editorial stance that "prejudice and hatred are never right and never to be accepted by a just society" was the paper paying dearly in cancelled advertisements and subscriptions.

Web Original

 * TV Tropes, of course. See About/The Situation and About/The Second Google Incident for details about the process, in their own words.
 * Tumblr castrated itself in December 2018, giving its userbase two weeks' warning that all "adult" blogs would be shut down. It also published a list of what constituted "unacceptable" content -- including any and all LGBTQ communities but not Neo-Nazi or White Supremacist groups.  (And on top of that, Tumblr staff made a concerted effort to thwart volunteer teams who were hard at work trying to archive as much of the doomed content as they could.)  Prior to December 2018, one quarter of all Tumblr's traffic was generated by its NSFW content; another substantial fraction came from its supportive communities for alternative sexualities.  Within two weeks of the announcement, the Staff account posted a desperate message trying to convince those reading it that things were not nearly as dire as they appeared and begging them not to leave the platform.  Within a month, Tumblr's overall traffic had dropped by fifty percent and just kept dropping, to the point that as of May 2019, Verizon -- who had bought Tumblr to monetize it, and had forced its sanitization -- had begun desperately shopping for someone to take the site off their hands.  See our Tumblr page for a bit more detail.
 * Wikia's crusade against Uncyclopedia, from the intrusive Content Warnings in 2012 (which caused a permanent split in the English-language community, now here and here) to their ultimately throwing dozens of Uncyclopedia projects under the bus in 2019. A long list of other wikis were destroyed by Wikia's efforts to delete any project which may offend advertisers.
 * The infamous Strikethrough and Boldthrough incidents on LiveJournal in 2007, where thousands of accounts were unilaterally suspended and deleted due to allegedly having "objectionable content" related with sexuality, a move that affected hundreds of fandom blogs (many of them from Slash and Lemon writers, but just as many of people who never posted anything objectionable and only had "Yaoi" or "Homosexuality" on their interest list), a literary discussion group for the book Lolita, and even some support groups for survivors of sexual abuse. While originally blamed on a Christian organization (with said organization taking credit for the take down, even), in retrospective it was obvious that the purging coincided with their first attempts to attract ad revenue and with the negotiations where their then owners SixApart sold LJ to a Russian conglomerate.