Think of the Advertisers!



A variety of self-censorship, wherein a New Media entity purges itself of "adult" or "extreme" 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 belief 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.

A variation of this trope can be found when traditional media make sudden changes in their editorial stance -- usually but not always to a more conservative position -- in response to boycotts or other threats to their cash flow.

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

Literature

 * One fictional example is Arthur Chambers' newspaper (the San Piedro Review) in the novel (and film) 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.

Live-Action TV

 * The US Public Broadcasting Service, a non-commercial educational broadcaster, doesn't directly interrupt programming with ads. It does accept indirect advertising: announcements that "production (or local acquisition) of this programme was made possible by a grant from X, makers of Y" are bought and paid for by huge donations from wealthy individuals and corporations. These de-facto sponsors are known as "underwriters". Add a heavy reliance on uncertain government funding and, despite the best intentions of Viewers Like You (Thank You), PBS remains just as vulnerable as any other mass medium.
 * Gulf+Western withdrew its corporate underwriting of Newark, NJ-licenced member station WNET to protest a documentary, Hunger for Profit, about multinationals buying up huge tracts of land in the third world. Its CEO denounced the content as "virulently anti-business,  if  not  anti-American."
 * On 12 November 2012, WNET broadcast Alex Gibney's documentary Park Avenue: Money, Power & the American Dream, a pointed exploration of growing economic inequality in America. The programme contrasted 740 Park Avenue, the home of billionaire industrialist David Koch and one of the most expensive apartment buildings in Manhattan, against the lives of poor people living at the other end of Park Avenue in the Bronx. Koch Industries is a huge energy-and-chemical conglomerate. Koch, the conservative industrialist, had given $23 million to public television and was on WNET's board of directors at the time. David Koch was given the last word in an on-air discussion after the programme aired.

Periodicals

 * 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 New Media, it happened with TV, radio and (before that) with newspapers and magazines.
 * Campus newspapers are shoestring operations with limited budgets. Already vulnerable to student governments withdrawing funding or university administrators interfering with distribution, their heavy reliance on ad revenue is just one more chink in the armour. Even the local advertiser might not read the paper (as it serves only the campus), so a small but loud and well-organised campaign can easily pressure sponsors to pull their ads. For instance, a small group of lesbian feminist separatists could mount a campaign to contact every advertiser, claim to speak for all women and denounce a publication as "sexist, racist and homophobic"; the next week, that paper's page count will abruptly drop as half of the advertisers cancel.
 * In 2007, Central Connecticut State University's Latin American Student Organization organised protests against campus newspaper The Recorder. They boycotted the paper's advertisers in protest of a comic strip's depiction of a teenage Hispanic girl imprisoned in a closet and forced to drink urine. Their intention was to coerce student editor Mark Rowan to resign.
 * And no, naming a small Pulaski County, Missouri newspaper the Uranus Examiner is not a good idea. It soon curtailed publication as banks declined to loan it money and many businesses wouldn’t advertise in it.

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 twenty-two individual-language Uncyclopedia projects under the bus in 2019. Instead of honestly disclosing that the project still exists off-Wikia, they merely claim them to be "closed" in an attempt to keep (or divert) the traffic for themselves. There's a long list of other wikis destroyed by Wikia's efforts to delete any project which may offend advertisers; the problem has been growing worse since 2018 in the wake of advertiser backlash on other platforms, like YouTube.
 * 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) and framed as a crackdown on child porn content that accidentally went beyond the original scope, in retrospective it was obvious the purge coincided with their first attempts to attract ad revenue and with negotiations by then-owner SixApart to sell LJ to a Russian conglomerate.

YouTube

 * YouTube had some major sponsors withdraw in 2017 due to their ads appearing alongside "extremist content". They responded by using automated algorithms to "demonetise" some videos (removing the ads) or place them into a "limited state" ("In response to user reports, we have disabled some features, such as comments, sharing and suggested videos, because this video contains content that may be inappropriate or offensive to some audiences"). They placed some content behind age restrictions and censored many videos entirely. Among the false positives: news footage from the Syrian conflict, LGBTQ content, and historical information about the Holocaust. Authors attempting to appeal these automated decisions often find Google to be quite unhelpful.
 * Anthony Fantano, host of The Needle Drop, stated on a tweet that he had to discontinue his meme channel thatistheplan because his videos were getting hit with demonetization.
 * Noble, host of Lost Pause, kept getting demonetization on his Let's Plays of Ecchi Visual Novels, starting in early 2016. Old videos were targeted years after their release, and he received Community Guideline strikes, as covered on Drama Alert. His whole channel was taken down in March 2016, and was re-instated two weeks later. Since then, he switched video topics, going for more general Anime discussions, and does Let's Plays only on occasion.
 * "I got destroyed by youtube and am being forced to change", from September 2017, is a rant against YouTube's advertiser filter stifling his content and his earnings.
 * On August 1st, 2018, Noble was suspended for two weeks on YouTube for streaming LoveKami. This came after he already deleted hundreds of videos on his channel.