Talk:Think of the Advertisers!

More than ten tropes, good solid description, multiple additional categories, the guy who did the work on this deserves kudos. <grin>

Seriously, any opposition to sending this out into the wiki at large?

A day later, no objections. Launching.

I'm specifically thinking of Disney's Song of the South and Warner Bros.'s Censored Eleven, but I wouldn't be surprised to learn other titles had been pulled from distribution because of possible lost sales across the board in a boycott of the company.

The trope description would need some re-wording, of course. - unless there's a better trope to put these into.

That's a hard call. I've written three versions of an answer to this, flip-flopping on yes/no each time.

After considerable thought, though, I'm of the opinion that individual works don't really apply to this trope. That's because they're basically products, and their publishers are sellers who don't rely on advertising revenue embedded in the work to make their money. They may be vulnerable to consumer pressure, but that usually affects a single work, and that's still not the same thing as being extorted into self-censorship by a single point of contact which controls their revenue flow. Even periodicals deal with multiple advertisers and agencies (plus they get their cover prices), so there's no one single "point of extortion" that can impose unilateral restrictions on them. New Media entities appear to be unique in this manner, usually relying on a single service/server to feed them ads and pay them for their display, which when combined with how few reputable online ad agencies there are (ie, those that don't spew scams and malware as a matter of course), leaves them uniquely vulnerable to this kind of extortion.

I could see individual works fitting the trope if those works contain (or are interrupted by) advertising. That would exclude most books, encyclopaedias, videocassettes, videodiscs and similarly-uninterrupted media, but include newspapers, magazines, radio, TV, web. An encyclopaedia watering down its history coverage for fear that parochial schools won't buy the volumes if they explicitly tell the blunt truth about the Church burning people alive at the stake over the years isn't "Think of the Advertisers!" but "Think of the Subscribers!" (or distributors, or whatever middleman). A publication like Consumer Reports (which subverts the trope by deliberately not accepting advertising) could also be outside this, as would the "Comics Code" or the MPAA ratings (which affect distribution, not advertising). Same with Nintendo and their stranglehold on cartridges. PBS might fit if the threat is from underwriters as indirect advertisers ("production or local acquisition of this programme made possible by X, makers of Y") but threats to funding from other, non-advertising sources (like real-world governments cutting funds for public broadcasting, or student government cutting funding to campus newspapers) is not this trope.

I need to think more about this, but the latest examples added aren't feeling like what I meant to to be.