Over the last few months, we’ve been working on a major update to our Trends political advertising tracker. From today, those changes are live. Here’s an explanation of what we’ve done:
1. Expanded data access now requires a free login
Trends tracks activity by over 125,000 political advertisers, across more than 1,000 political parties and 60 countries.
It’s a lot of data, but until now, we’ve not known much about who is regularly using it for analysis and understanding of campaigns. Going forward, to access more than a basic level of data, you’ll need to create a free account. Once you’ve done this, you can access the same data as on the previous version of Trends.
2. Get more access with a supporter account
Once you’ve created an account, you’ll be presented with some options for different types of account. If you choose an individual supporter account, you’ll help us make political advertising more universally transparent by covering some of the (significant) cost of running the Trends platform each month.
The £10/month supporter account gives you:
- “Top 50” advertiser leaderboards (as opposed to Top 20 with a free account)
- Access to automated content, tone and topic summaries for Meta ads for any political party we cover
- We’ll sign you up to free access to all issues of our Full Disclosure newsletter
- We’ll surprise you with some new features (as we release them)
If you think our work is valuable, please support it.
3. Get even more access with a journalist account
If you’re a journalist, a paid account gets you:
- Access to all active advertisers and dashboards
- More automated content analysis
- Help with the story or stories you’re working on
Initially, we’ve set this at £250/year. It’s designed to be an amount that most professional news organisations can afford, ideally expense-able by a single journalist. However, we want to work with journalists to tell stories about how political ads are being used all over the world, so if your organisation can’t afford it, or there’s a policy issue stopping you from signing up for an account, get in touch and we’ll work it out.
4. Partners
Since 2017, we’ve worked with publications, watchdogs, civil society groups, regulators, election observers, academics and more, all over the world. We’ve found that each partner has a slightly different set of needs, so the best thing to do is to get in touch with us to discuss how we can help. Broadly, our partners get:
- Data for all advertisers
- More automated analysis
- Multiple user accounts
- Private and custom dashboards tailored to your needs
- Support for your research
- Training and ongoing support
- New Trends features as they’re released
If that sounds like you or your organisation, please get in touch.
5. A new, improved design
We’ve cleaned up a lot of the design versus the previous version, with new colours, cleaner typography and more overall consistency.
6. The future
Our feature roadmap for Trends includes lots of exciting new things which will help people dive deeper into the ways online political ads are used, making it easier to understand the strategies of campaigns and the enormous role platforms play in contemporary democracy. These new features will start to roll out in the coming weeks. If you want to know about them as they’re released, please sign up for one of our free or supporter accounts.
If you have questions, thoughts or feedback on our approach to the new version of Trends, please get in touch. We’d love to hear from you.