News Corp CEO Robert Thomson lays into “trash traffic”…

“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… 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.”