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Paid to Look Like Truth: The Prevalence and Dark Patterns of Advertorials in News Outlets

Emmanouil Papadogiannakis, Panagiotis Papadopoulos, Nicolas Kourtellis, Evangelos Markatos

Abstract

A reader browsing through an online article is highly likely to encounter an advertorial, often without realizing it. Advertorials represent a relatively new marketing strategy where advertisements are deliberately designed to resemble the style and tone of editorial content. Despite their appearance, they are, in fact, paid content intended to promote a product, brand, or service. Studies indicate that advertorials are significantly more effective (81%) and less intrusive than traditional banner ads or pop-ups. Despite ongoing regulatory efforts to ensure clear disclosure of paid content, concerns persist about the deceptive nature of advertorials. Advertorials can mislead readers into believing that they are consuming unbiased editorial content. In doing so, they gain undeserved legitimacy, by draping themselves in the credibility of the publication's design; not to inform or inspire genuine interest, but to deceive. In this study, we conduct the first large-scale and systematic study of advertorials. We propose a novel automated methodology for detecting advertorials in the wild, and we collect 185K ad URLs over a period of 5 months. We investigate the prevalence of problematic advertorials and explore their structural and linguistic characteristics. We find that advertorials appear in 1 out of 3 news sites, including some of the most popular and credible outlets worldwide (e.g., The Guardian, EuroNews, CNN). We further highlight that legal disclaimers intended to inform users of the promotional nature of the content, are often deliberately obscured or difficult to recognize, raising concerns about user protection.

Paid to Look Like Truth: The Prevalence and Dark Patterns of Advertorials in News Outlets

Abstract

A reader browsing through an online article is highly likely to encounter an advertorial, often without realizing it. Advertorials represent a relatively new marketing strategy where advertisements are deliberately designed to resemble the style and tone of editorial content. Despite their appearance, they are, in fact, paid content intended to promote a product, brand, or service. Studies indicate that advertorials are significantly more effective (81%) and less intrusive than traditional banner ads or pop-ups. Despite ongoing regulatory efforts to ensure clear disclosure of paid content, concerns persist about the deceptive nature of advertorials. Advertorials can mislead readers into believing that they are consuming unbiased editorial content. In doing so, they gain undeserved legitimacy, by draping themselves in the credibility of the publication's design; not to inform or inspire genuine interest, but to deceive. In this study, we conduct the first large-scale and systematic study of advertorials. We propose a novel automated methodology for detecting advertorials in the wild, and we collect 185K ad URLs over a period of 5 months. We investigate the prevalence of problematic advertorials and explore their structural and linguistic characteristics. We find that advertorials appear in 1 out of 3 news sites, including some of the most popular and credible outlets worldwide (e.g., The Guardian, EuroNews, CNN). We further highlight that legal disclaimers intended to inform users of the promotional nature of the content, are often deliberately obscured or difficult to recognize, raising concerns about user protection.
Paper Structure (21 sections, 18 figures, 3 tables)

This paper contains 21 sections, 18 figures, 3 tables.

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Background
  3. Advertorial Definition
  4. Misleading Promotional Tactics
  5. Regulation on Advertising
  6. Methodology & Data Collection
  7. Data Collection
  8. Structure-based Detection
  9. Content-based Detection
  10. Manual Evaluation
  11. Advertorial Prevalence & Reach
  12. Characteristics and Content Analysis
  13. Domain Characteristics & Lifespan
  14. Advertorial Content & Website Structure
  15. Patterns of Malicious Behavior
  16. ...and 6 more sections

Figures (18)

  • Figure 1: Example of advertorials; paid advertisements designed to look like an article, blending informative content with product promotion. Although they appear to present general information, they ultimately serve to promote a specific product (pillows on the left and cameras on the right).
  • Figure 2: Advertorials (highlighted in red) being subtly promoted among the articles of very popular news websites. Ads are seamlessly integrated into the news feed of legitimate news platforms, making them virtually indistinguishable from editorial content. By assimilating into the publication's design, they illegitimately acquire credibility.
  • Figure 3: Overview of methodology for detecting problematic advertorials on news websites.
  • Figure 4: Example of a legal disclaimer in an advertorial site.
  • Figure 5: Network traffic distribution of news websites (monthly visits). The dataset contains both low-traffic (unpopular) and high-traffic (popular) websites, reflecting the diversity of the Web.
  • ...and 13 more figures