You are reading a news item, article or report in your favorite newspaper or magazine, and without realizing it, you have just contributed to a certain company getting a better position in Google’s results. Maybe, entertained as you were with the content of the text, or simply because it was not of interest to you, you missed a link to the website of a product or service. One that matched the text and seemed casual. It doesn’t matter if you clicked there or not, if you saw it, or if you skipped it. Because whether you know it or not, you have just become a soldier in the war for SEO, search engine optimization. This is linkbuilding, millions of contents are published every day around the world to do it, and the media have in it an important source of income.
An investigation by Neeo and the podcast Los Mediatizados has put figures: 7.012€ charged by El Mundo, 7.161€ El Español, 4.492€ ABC, 4.719€ ElDiario.es, 2.800€ El Confidencial, 2.532€ La Razón or 2.178€ Público, to give some examples of newspapers with very different editorial line. It also occurs in the websites of large radio stations, €2,662 is the rate of COPE, €2,662 that of Onda Cero, €1,168 that of Los 40 or €1,154 that of Rock FM. We also find it in economic newspapers, at 4.398€ in Cinco Días, 2.312€ Bolsamanía; in reference magazines, 5.000€ in Muy Interesante or Marie Claire; in famous blogs: 5.569€ Neomotor, 2.360€ AutoBild; in the television website Vertele 4.396€; and even in Forocoches, with a rate of 800€. All internet publications, regardless of ideology or subject matter, do linkbuilding, charging according to the number of visits and unique users, and can be hired through Marketplaces, intermediaries among which are names such as Growwer, Coobis, Prensalink or Leotycs, among others.
What is bought there is, above all, the work of editors who elaborate specific news to respond to the interest of a product, a service, or to help influence strategies specifically created by lobbies. If it is badly done, it can be very obvious, somewhat sloppy, and even the least critical reader will realize: this is advertising. But if it is professionally handled by journalists from the media itself, as is often the case, or by collaborators with sufficient experience, you will read it without understanding that it really has a commercial intention. And here we are talking only and exclusively about linkbuilding, which is only a part of paid content.
Professional journalism has always categorically refused this kind of practices. Defending that its capacity to be the Fourth Estate and tell the truth is only possible from economic independence, thanks to the readers who pay for it. Formerly for the physical copy, and today through subscriptions. Thus were born before the pandemic new media such as CTXT or InfoLibre, which assured in 2018 that they would not lend themselves to these practices, today perfectly integrated into their business model. It is not that they have sold out, there is simply not a single media in our country that can live exclusively from subscriptions, or from the sum of these and direct advertising, ads and campaigns. That is why today everyone does linkbuilding and paid content. What’s more. The most read media in Spain, and the ones that have grown the most, are the ones that have bet more decidedly on this type of practices, adding clickbait headlines and sensationalism: 20Minutos, OKDiario and El Huffinton Post.
And this is not a local phenomenon. Classic and prestigious international newspapers also do it, such as the French Le Monde, with its €19,360 rate, or the Italian La Repubblica, €16,426. But this has already gone much further. Just this September, Vulture magazine, cultural magazine of the New York Times, discovered that the Rotten Tomatoes website, Rotten Tomatoes, has taken this practice to such an extreme that it has Hollywood absolutely overwhelmed. For those who are not familiar with it, it is a benchmark in cultural journalism on film, which eliminated film critics, ensuring that the critical opinions on titles, created by a community of experts, truly reflected the taste of the public, and not of some expert intellectuals. It has just been discovered that if a production company pays enough money, its film will be rated as the public’s favorite, and while critics scratch their heads and say otherwise in their sections, thanks to this paid content, Google’s results are saying a resounding “this film is extraordinary, go see it”.
An example that helps us to understand where the influence of linkbuilding is taking us and how it has become, today, the real Fourth Power. With sufficient investment, the first Google results will be only the paid ones, and critical or contrary opinions will simply disappear. Too far down to reach anyone. You can maybe find them on social networks, but they reach less influence, and let’s not forget that paid content became popular precisely to allow media to compete with networks for public attention on news. And to bypass the ability of your ad blockers. This is how film criticism has ended up being almost irrelevant, and the documentary with which Carlos Boyero bid farewell to his long career is a good example of the changing times in information. The fact that Barbie or Oppenheimer have dominated the summer billboard paying may or may not be important, but for the same reason that the companies that do the most linkbuilding here, we will rarely read news that talk about their defects or bad practices. Too far down in the results.
