This editorial was contributed by Noel Abbott, CEO and cofounder of Ganjapreneur.
In 2026, the options for niche digital marketers are plentiful. If you can put together an ideal customer profile and a few thousand dollars, you can find a marketing consultant to pitch you any combination of programmatic ad networks covering the world’s top news and entertainment outlets, social media platforms, streaming services, podcasts—even real-world screens at airports, gas stations, and grocery stores—so you can follow your ideal prospects around as they go about their lives, hitting them with strategically-timed messaging sequences to manufacture the Almighty Conversion.
And depending on what you’re selling (and how much you’re spending), you can fine-tune your targeting parameters over time to ensure that you’re reaching only the most relevant individuals with the highest statistical probability of recognizing the value of your product or service. Or so the story goes.
However, when it comes to advertising anything related to a federally-prohibited substance like cannabis, these programmatic networks offer a simple “thanks but no thanks” if you’re lucky, or more often a lifetime account ban. It’s not that they don’t want the revenue, and it’s not due to some moral objection to Sweet Mary Jane: it’s because the financial institutions they rely on simply won’t allow it.
Having operated a grassroots cannabis industry publication for over 12 years, I’ve watched as startups of all kinds have been forced to adapt to this reality. But just because mainstream ad networks won’t let you target a specific audience, doesn’t mean that audience doesn’t exist. Ganjapreneur built one over time, and we were forced to build our own monetization infrastructure for that audience, too.
While not having access to the primary revenue streams available to most digital publishers seemed like an obstacle at first, it wound up leading me to the realization that we’re actually better able to help marketers without the middle-man. As it turns out, grassroots media outlets have unique advantages to offer in the modern digital marketing landscape.
How the Mainstream Digital Marketing Landscape Got “Enshittified”
Coming off the excesses of the newspaper/magazine advertising era and the focus-grouped TV ads of the 80’s and 90’s, the internet presented new opportunities to buy and sell advertising without the inflated budgets. Readership and airtime evolved into impressions and clicks, and the invention of cookies and link-tracking enabled the possibility of direct campaign sales attribution, theoretically empowering advertisers to eliminate wasteful spending and shift their priorities and budgets based on what was working in real-time.
The promise of programmatic advertising was certainly enticing. And to be fair, it has been and continues to be a tool embraced by the vast majority of modern marketers, which wouldn’t be the case if it didn’t have any utility. But somewhere along the line, as the digital ad landscape got more densely populated via social media and the world of traditional media became more consolidated and profit-starved, the effectiveness of programmatic advertising started to decline.
I don’t know if there’s a better word for what happened than “enshittification,” a term coined by Cory Doctorow to describe the systematic decline in quality of online platforms as they prioritize short-term profits for shareholders over users and business customers. Anyone who has been active on the internet for the past decade should recognize this in the way that half-baked social media features are rushed into operation before they’re fully functional, listicles have replaced actual analysis, ragebait is prioritized by algorithms to keep people engaged, app layouts use awkward ad placements to encourage accidental clicks, et cetera.
I should mention: while I’m obviously invested here as a grassroots media person, my opinions on and familiarity with the digital marketing landscape go a lot deeper than that. Before Ganjapreneur, I ran marketing for a mid-sized B2B SaaS company for several years, and I also cofounded a creative agency that still runs advertising for clients in a variety of industries. I’ve personally watched programmatic ad giants like Google/Meta/LinkedIn add countless layers of “customization” to their advertising platforms while seemingly obfuscating or completely removing the most useful targeting capabilities altogether.
The Problem of Verifiable Intent
Personal opinions aside, it’s worth noting that programmatic advertising relies on tracking people through their browsers and devices. In 2026, an estimated 20-30% of people on the internet use a VPN (virtual private network) to mask their IP address / physical location. It’s estimated that another 30-50% use ad blockers, and on top of that, bots apparently outnumber humans on the internet as of earlier this year, with a recent NBC article revealing that 57% of web traffic is now automated or agentic.
Ad networks claim to filter out most bot traffic, but they’re not perfect. Let’s say you do get your ad through to a real person on a programmatic network: where does that person see that ad, and in what context? Are they watching a YouTube video in the background while they fold laundry? Are they being served your ad while they scroll celebrity gossip to pass time at the gas pump? Are they “relevant” because they searched for an adjacent keyword combination two weeks ago?
Scale plus targeting sounds great at face value, but when it’s tied to a bunch of enshittified platforms all trading bids anonymously behind the scenes, it seems like the window for a qualified impression gets narrower and narrower the deeper you dig.
Grassroots Niche Audiences Are Inherently Intentional
In contrast to a programmatic network, what grassroots media outlets lack in scale they make up for in verifiable intent. Of course, outlets vary wildly in terms of size, format, subject matter, who they cater to, ad formats and pricing, and so on. But one thing that unites them is that the only reason someone winds up becoming a follower or reader of a grassroots outlet is because they have an interest (usually a substantial interest) in its subject matter.
For marketers targeting a specific industry, the difference between a centralized enthusiastic audience and an audience defined by random signals is palpable. With grassroots media, you can actually see who your audience is and what they’re interested in, not just what they might be interested in based on their browser history.
Considerations for a Successful Campaign
The rationale behind advertising with a grassroots outlet is more like attending an industry event than putting up a billboard: you’re basically handing out business cards in a place where your target audience has gathered. Since every self-monetized grassroots outlet is different, though, you’ll need to do a bit more legwork to identify the best campaign format(s) for whatever it is you want to promote.
The good news is, with grassroots outlets you can actually talk to real people about how best to engage with their audience, to review examples of past and current campaigns, and to get clarity on the details of your campaign’s delivery and performance after it has concluded.
And you don’t have to give up on programmatic targeting entirely: depending on the partnership format and publication, sometimes you can use a grassroots outlet as the top of your funnel with a dedicated landing page and tracking pixel that you can then retarget directly with your programmatic budget, ensuring you control the signal that these platforms use to decide whether or not someone is a valid prospect.
If search optimization and generative engine optimization are a part of your strategy, running a grassroots media campaign to distribute your official announcements (such as via the Green Press Collective) can be a way to enhance the discoverability of your brand. This way, you’re reaching the relevant audience directly when you make your announcement, and then you’re getting the follow-up benefit of being indexed by the robots. But for your own sake I recommend not getting too attached to any “optimization” frameworks: more enshittification is absolutely coming down the pipe. As long as humans are still the ones doing the buying, the most effective long-term strategies will focus on people, not bots.
When you put together a campaign with a grassroots outlet (or multiple outlets), you should also take a few steps to ensure you’ll be able to properly analyze your results after the fact. Setting up your own click-through tracking via Google Analytics or a third-party attribution platform will give you insight into the total yield of the campaign and the behavior of visitors who click on your link. Having your campaign assets and concept fully defined in advance will ensure that you won’t ship any rushed ideas (since most grassroots outlets run promotions according to a schedule), and you can also get feedback on your campaign creative directly from a grassroots publication before it runs, which is something programmatic networks won’t (can’t) do.
Supporting Grassroots Media Just Feels Good
On top of the numerous rational arguments that make grassroots media a compelling option for digital marketers in 2026, there’s also the simple fact that grassroots media is cool, and supporting grassroots media is cool, too.
After 12 years, I can tell you: it ain’t easy running an independent publication excluded from the revenue sources that mainstream publishers rely on. When you’re one of the key partners keeping a grassroots outlet like ours operational, your partnership is truly appreciated by a group of people who have extensive reach and contact with your target audience. That appreciation comes with familiarity and being top-of-mind when we’re at industry events, on social media, or meeting up with a contact or client who might need what you’re offering.
The bottom line is, a programmatic ad platform executive isn’t going to give you personalized insights into your target audience and campaign messaging over a joint. The grassroots media variety, on the other hand, might just come equipped with comparable campaign performance metrics from the last six months and a hand-rolled spliff from their personal stash. Just saying.
Author: Noel Abbott
Noel Abbott is the CEO and cofounder of Ganjapreneur, a cannabis industry publication that officially launched in 2014. He is also the cofounder of HappyChap Creative, a design/create/help/strategize agency based in Bellingham, WA.