17516: On Trials & Tribulations Troubling Black Publishers.

 

Adweek published content spotlighting Black publishers who stayed in the black when White brands pulled back performative DEIBA+ commitments.

 

The authors even connected matters to Juneteenth, noting “how the Black-owned media community has continued to be conditioned by a long-standing lack of support from advertisers.”

 

Call it being conditioned for crumbs—and systemic racism.

 

Black Publishers Knew the Ad Commitments Wouldn’t Hold. So What?

 

The ones who stopped waiting on promised ad dollars and built revenue they could control are the ones still standing

 

By Rhonesha Byng & DéVon Johnson

 

Since brands began to pull back their commitment to diversity ads in 2023, publishers throughout the BOMESI network have not been surprised. Many have rebuilt their business models with the knowledge that these ad dollars allocated post-2020 were not going to be there.

 

The lessons we learned over the last six years while operating BOMESI, which launched around Juneteenth in 2020, are very real. 

 

The date commemorates when an enslaved population in Texas learned that they were free, two and a half years after the Emancipation Proclamation was issued. 

 

This delayed revelation indicates how the Black-owned media community has continued to be conditioned by a long-standing lack of support from advertisers.

 

Today, BOMESI has connected more than 300 Black-owned publishers with over 2,500 diverse-owned publishers to create a larger network of publishers reaching over 90 million households on a monthly basis. Currently, Black-owned media receives less than 2% of the total U.S. advertising spend, according to Nielsen; yet Black Americans represent approximately 15% of the population and consume more than 81 hours of media per week, 31.8% more than the general population.

 

Publishers made an expensive choice: trade advertising as the backbone of the business for subscriptions, events, licensing, and branded work on their own terms. Audience trust became the asset that mattered. Some turned down ad revenue outright because the strings attached would have meant covering their communities differently than they wanted to.

 

Here’s how two Black-owned publishers successfully adjusted, when advertisers stopped their commitments.

 

Black Girl Nerds expanded its product portfolio and partnerships

 

Black Girl Nerds sits at the intersection of geek culture and Black feminism, built for an audience that wanted both taken seriously. Broadnax didn’t wait for ad budgets to come back. Founder and CEO Jamie Broadnax built a Substack newsletter, launched a subscription book club through Bindery, and joined the Yahoo Creators program. The shift cost time, nothing more. It grew her Substack readership, brought brands back into her inbox, and gave the business steadier income through Yahoo Creators.

 

Snackable Media made an acquisition to better monetize its audience

 

Snackable Media started as a multicultural ad network, helping smaller, minority-owned publishers compete for big RFPs through bigger players’ programmatic reach. In April 2025, it acquired adtech company AdGrid, picking up its own wrapper, an SSP, rich media tools, and a new unit, Content Zebra, that helps publishers grow traffic and monetize it at once. Founder Justin Barton’s bet: brand attention has faded since 2020, so revenue now has to come from the audience itself—one he calls culturally relevant, high-spending, and worth unlocking through partnership, not a single ad deal.

 

The case for building audiences with brands can be tracked. According to a 2023 Pew Research Center study of 5,000 Black adults, 24% of respondents say they rely on Black-Owned media on a daily basis and 40% do so on a regular basis. Meanwhile, 63% of Black adults in this survey believe media coverage of Black people tends to be negative when compared to other minority groups. Additionally, 57% of respondents say they don’t get the full spectrum of news about Black communities.

 

Because brands are using the “general market” to reach their audience, they are essentially paying for something the audience has already decided is not relevant to them; therefore, brands are at a disadvantage when it comes to advertising to this group through general market channels. 

 

The DEI retreat makes the argument all even more clear. Since 2020, equitable advertising expenditures have served as a means of expressing values through inclusion as a separate line item for brands that include or exclude depending on optics. A Government Accountability Office report revealed that over the last 10 years, federal acquisitions of advertising accounted for $14.9 billion in total spent, but just 14% of that amount (which includes all businesses owned by minorities, women, and disadvantaged individuals) actually reached those businesses that the categorization was intended to serve.

 

Media owned by people of color was included in the 14% total, but not at the top. Publishers who were aware of that math before it was a “talking point” are the type of businesses to work with regardless of where the DEI falls on the public policy agenda.