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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.
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.
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* 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.
===
* The [[PBS|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]] ([[Thanking the Viewer|Thank You]]), PBS remains just as vulnerable as any other mass medium.▼
** Home Depot and Weyerhaeuser withdrew their support for WGBH-TV's ''This Old House'' because then-host Bob Vila had appeared in an ad for a competing regional firm in New Jersey. Vila was sacked, and ultimately went on to [[Start My Own|start his own show]] on another network. ▼
** Gulf+Western withdrew its corporate underwriting of Newark, NJ-licenced member station WNET to protest a documentary, [http://www.richtervideos.com/HungryforProfit/ ''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." <ref>The London Economist, cited in Noam Chomsky's [https://keimena11.files.wordpress.com/2012/02/noam_chomsky_necessary_illusions_thought_control_in_democratic_societies.pdf Necessary Illusions: Thought Control in Democratic Societies], ISBN 978-0887845741</ref>▼
** On 12 November 2012, WNET broadcast Alex Gibney's documentary ''[https://www.pbs.org/video/why-poverty-park-avenue-money-power-american-dream/ 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.<ref>[https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/05/27/a-word-from-our-sponsor Public television’s attempts to placate David Koch], Jane Mayer, New Yorker, 27 May 2013.</ref>▼
* 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.
* And no, [https://www.apnews.com/b7270beac210426282e27a530dc8c43e 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.
* A rare few periodicals managed to [[Averted Trope|avert]] the trope by not accepting advertisements. This is a costly decision, and rarely done, with ''Consumer Reports'' (Published by Consumers Union · No advertising) being the most prominent example. It reviews products, so it must remain neutral. Parody magazines like ''[[Mad]]'' and ''[[Cracked]]'' historically did monochrome print runs with no ads (so Mad's parody of Consumer Reports was "Condemner Reports · Manufacturers hate us so we get · No Advertising"), although this stance was abandoned once they began losing ground in a big way to Internet and new media.
== [[Live-Action TV]] ==
▲* The [[PBS|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]] ([[Thanking the Viewer|Thank You]]), PBS remains just as vulnerable as any other mass medium.
▲** Home Depot and Weyerhaeuser withdrew their support for WGBH-TV's ''This Old House'' because then-host Bob Vila had appeared in an ad for a competing regional firm in New Jersey. Vila was sacked, and ultimately went on to [[Start My Own|start his own show]] on another network.
▲** Gulf+Western withdrew its corporate underwriting of Newark, NJ-licenced member station WNET to protest a documentary, [http://www.richtervideos.com/HungryforProfit/ ''Hunger for Profit''], about multinationals buying up huge tracts of land in the third world. [https://keimena11.files.wordpress.com/2012/02/noam_chomsky_necessary_illusions_thought_control_in_democratic_societies.pdf Its CEO denounced the content as "virulently anti-business, if not anti-American."
▲** On 12 November 2012, WNET broadcast Alex Gibney's documentary ''[https://www.pbs.org/video/why-poverty-park-avenue-money-power-american-dream/ 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.
== [[Web Original]] ==
* [[TV Tropes]], of course. See [[TV Tropes/The Situation]] and [[TV Tropes/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 it now considered "unacceptable" content -- including any and all LGBTQ communities but not Neo-Nazi or White Supremacist groups. (And on top of ''that'', Tumblr staff made [[Orwellian Editor|a deliberate, concerted effort to ''block'' 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. ''Immediately'' following the announcement, users of ''every'' stripe began leaving Tumblr. 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. It was sold to WordPress owner Automattic Inc. in August 2019 for pennies on the dollar. See our [[Tumblr]] page for a bit more detail. Also, the move only removed the most outward NSFW content and the appropiately tagged stuff: pornbots (automated blogs that post naked pictures and links to camgirls and call girls services) still run rampant but go under the radar because they are untagged or use extremely generic content tags (like the tags for foodstuffs or popular fandoms that many people in the site follow) that cannot be banned because of the actual legitimate content there, meaning that they cannot be as easily expelled as other NSFW sex-related content.
* [[Wikia]]'s crusade against [[Uncyclopedia]], from the intrusive [[Content Warnings]] in 2012 (which caused a permanent split in the English-language community, now [https://uncyclopedia.ca here] and [https://en.uncyclopedia.co 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 [http://awa.shoutwiki.com/wiki/Closed_wikis 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 [[Paedo Hunt|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 -- 6A may not have orchestrated the purges, but they did get all the advantage they could get from the subsequent "clean up".
* ''Tripadvisor'' had been "quietly deleting reviews that mention rape for years" – supposedly because it violates family-friendly policies. After widespread media coverage ([https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/16/travel/tripadvisor-safety-sexual-assault-reviews.html NYT], [https://jezebel.com/tripadvisor-told-woman-to-leave-a-first-person-review-o-1833064531 Jezebel], [https://www.theguardian.com/travel/2019/may/14/tripadvisor-safety-filters-sexual-assault-concerns Guardian UK], [https://www.businessinsider.com/tripadvisor-backlash-sexual-assault-response-2019-3 Business Insider], [https://mashable.com/article/tripadvisor-sexual-assault-complaints/ Mashable]) the site moderated its stance slightly... but the fundamental flaw (that TA is a review site funded by ads from the very vendors being reviewed) remains.
** Their excuse? "In the past, reviews mentioning assault did tend to get removed, for a number of likely reasons: being too graphic, making
** Sadly, TA isn't the only "review" board sponsored by the very vendors being reviewed. ''Yelp'' sells ads to restaurateurs, then makes some less-than-transparent decisions to selectively remove reviews as allegedly being from [[The Shill|shills]] or [[Sock Puppet
** There are even a few sites on the web which "review" call girls – guess who buys the intrusive ads which pay the bills there.
* [[OnlyFans]], a online subscription
=== YouTube ===
* [[YouTube]] had
* YouTube's strict compliance to COPPA guidelines in 2020 caused a lot of backlash both from content creators of family-friendly children's videos, who contended that the demonetization would affect their livelihood and stifle interaction, and those who while do not necessarily make videos aimed at children, are still in some ways affected due to the automated flagging of content remotely resembling children's media. Heck, even adult cartoons such as ''[[Happy Tree Friends]]'' and legitimate parodies of children's content e.g. [[YouTube Poop]]s are unjustly flagged as for kids despite their content being oriented more towards mature audiences. Similar to other videos pertaining to sensitive topics, restrictions are applied to videos marked as "for kids", albeit a tad stricter as not only you couldn't leave any comments to them, you are also unable to save them to a playlist, perhaps likely due to reports of
* Anthony Fantano, host of [[The Needle Drop]], stated on a [https://twitter.com/theneedledrop/status/915285823955853314 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 Play]]s of [[Ecchi]] [[Visual Novel]]s, starting in early 2016. Old videos were targeted years after their release, and he received Community Guideline strikes, as [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=spOTMAxuusk 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.
** [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=otPrnNoZ_fE "I got destroyed by
* A number of channels had to self-censor their videos especially those pertaining to sensitive subjects such as [[True Crime]] documentaries. One such channel is [https://www.youtube.com/c/annasolves Anna Solves], who had to mince their videos' titles e.g. "The 18YO Model Who Was Viciously [[Symbol Swearing|K*LLED]].. Then Violated" likely due to fears of demonetization, even if the use of terms related to heinous crimes such as "rape", "murder", "stab" or "kill" aren't as taboo as those widely viewed as explicit or risqué unless used in a threatening or malicious context. Ditto with popular Filipino public service YouTuber [[Raffy Tulfo]] who also took a similar approach despite him and his brothers having gained notoriety in their native Philippines for their penchant for expletives.
{{reflist}}
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[[Category:New Media Tropes]]
[[Category:Advertising Tropes]]
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