Even while some media organizations roll out new online subscription plans, the Internet continues its steady drift toward a business model built overwhelmingly on money not from readers, but from advertisers. It’s advertising that’s emerging as the revenue source that everybody, from Facebook and Google to newspaper websites and gadfly bloggers, wants a piece of.
That raises perennial questions of media economics and ethics: What limits should publishers put on advertiser influence? How far should they go in shaping their content to enhance its value as a delivery van for paid persuasion?
And how plainly should they cordon off the messages they’re paid to carry to distinguish them from content that’s shaped independently by their own staffs, whether reporters, aggregators or curators?
The latest mini-scandal involving advertising over-reach doesn’t come from an online startup. It’s from a venerable and highly respected publication, the Atlantic, founded in 1857 by Longfellow and Emerson.
In mid-January, the Atlantic posted a lengthy, self-congratulatory epistle from the organization called the Church of Scientology, which is variously assailed as a tax dodge and a loopy cult, praised as a source of spiritual rebirth, and chronicled as a refuge for disaffected Hollywood luminaries.
Now, running ads from controversial sponsors has long been routine among commercial media. But here, controversy erupted over the way the Scientology content—which was soon taken down—drew online comment that was suspiciously glowing, and over the way the item looked.
Although it ran under a small sig, “Sponsor Content,” the article otherwise seemed—in its typeface, composition, placement of photos, and overall look and feel—just like any other Atlantic article.
That had to be intentional, which takes us to the point of this column. The ad was an example of what’s now called “native advertising.” Native advertising refers to paid messaging that is Continue reading “Advertising goes native, and deception runs free”
