Robert Thomson says advertisers ‘don’t want guilt by association, they want gilt by association’

News Corp chief executive Robert Thomson has criticised “trash traffic” on “so-called contemporary content sites” such as BuzzFeed, saying advertisers preferred “gilt by association, not guilt”.



Thomson, who oversees Rupert Murdoch’s publishing empire including the Sun, the Times and the Wall Street Journal, said the “cybersands were shifting” with advertisers beginning to move away from the “trendy” to the “enduring”.

The News Corp chief said the mood among advertisers had “picked up” in the UK following uncertainty around the general election, but said it remained to be seen how that would transfer into revenues.

News Corp recently saw a 52% year-on-year fall in its third-quarter profits as its newspaper advertising revenue continued to decline.

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Thomson said: “A lot of advertisers are a little confused about where they should be advertising. It’s almost an argument between the fashionable and the functionable.

“If you look at a lot of so-called contemporary content sites, you know who they are, I don’t have to name and shame them – like BuzzFeed for instance – the amount of trash traffic on those sites is significant.

“There’s no doubt advertisers are starting to realise they don’t want guilt by association, they want gilt by association. It is up to us to make the case for our mastheads,” he told a media conference in London on Tuesday.

Thomson, who has previously criticised BuzzFeed, said News Corp would continue to invest in “quality content. We believe in journalism, the power of journalism, and the profitability of great journalism.

“Unlike certain newspapers in other companies, we are not going to cut down to the bone and beyond.”

Thomson said it was “easy to come up with a website that I guarantee you would hit a million hits within four weeks. We could have photos of cats, we could complement that with some photos of dogs, and silly little headlines which we’ve scraped from other sites, we could do that. It’s not difficult, even I could do it.

“There is something more important than that, and advertisers … will come to realise that.”

He added: “I think the cybersands are shifting. People will be less seduced by the trendy and have more affinity with the enduring. Advertisers are much more focussed on engagement and when you come to engagement it means the quality of the journalism.”

Of the future prospects for News Corp’s UK business, Thomson said: “You have had an election here, there has been a certain amount of uncertainty around the outcome.

“From my conversations the last couple of days with a lot of my clients, the mood here has clearly picked up. Whether we see that in advertising, you would like to think it would be articulated, but that remains to be seen.”

Thomson said there was a “distinction between what is happening at the Times and Sunday Times and what is happening at the Sun, both in terms of subscription models and growth in circulation”.

He said the Times was seeing “very strong circulation in particular, which we have publicly said is now profitable. I can honestly say when I was editor of the Times, profitable is not a word that was associated with it”.