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Show HN: Detect articles with corporate sponsors

204 points by typpo 12y ago

sbierwagen 12y ago
That's cute. Installed.
sp332 12y ago
John Oliver gets into how bad the practice has become lately in a recent Last Week Tonight episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_F5GxCwizc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_F5GxCwizc
- mast 12y ago
  That's good. It reminds me of a recent blog post by Yoni Freedhoff about nutritionists posting sponsored tweets. Often the disclosure is not at all obvious. http://www.weightymatters.ca/2014/07/7-nutrition-hashtags-you-need-to-be.html http://www.weightymatters.ca/2014/07/7-nutrition-hashtags-yo...
cheepin 12y ago
If there's anything worse than the giant banner ads, it's the ones that trick you into clicking them.
viggity 12y ago
nice, how are you doing the detection. do you have to some logic specific to each of the major "news" sites, or is it more generalized than that?
- sp332 12y ago
  Your other post (the one you edited) is dead because it was a duplicate of this one. You should delete that one and edit this one instead.
  - viggity 12y ago
    I've got an HN chrome extension that might have caused the glitch. oops. I'll leave it alone as slang800 answered it. thanks!
- slang800 12y ago
  It looks like it's just a set of rules for major sites rather than some heuristic applied to all sites. But since it's open source, contributing rules for more obscure sites should be easy. Source here: https://github.com/typpo/ad-detector/blob/master/src/rules.js https://github.com/typpo/ad-detector/blob/master/src/rules.j...
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
corbinpage 12y ago
Great idea! Installed.
veb 12y ago
I'm not sure that I like this. I know it's not really like Adblock or whatever it's called. I never notice advertisements, and I am surprised more people aren't the same. You've been doing the same thing for years -- it's so easy to tell what's content and who's not. I so occasionally get caught by the very clever ones - and so what? If you're big on privacy, I guess you would care more tun I would As I'm growing older I don't mind donating small amounts of monies to good websites and projects. I just wish more people were like me in that regards -- it'd definitely be more profitable IMO. Has anyone got any experience in this (a/b testing maybe?!). I think this behaviour came from the ease of buying from Google Play or the App store... It's almost like, "I just spent $35 on apps last night?" Some corporate advertisements really are stupid. I just imagine someone's crated the perfect advert and the client goes, "make it pop!!!". Those are the ones I would not mind vanishing - but if it's helping the website then I'm all for it -- my continued visits are purely based on their content and ease of use.
- sillysaurus3 12y ago
  Would you mind clarifying what the problem with Ad Detector is? It's not meant to increase privacy or to turn people away from advertisements, but rather call attention to the fact that a given piece of content is actually an ad.
  - veb 12y ago
    My apologies mate, I sort of went off on a tangent. My main point was really that advertisements are (as evolved from my Internet usage) that most are completely invisible to me.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- krisdol 12y ago
  Honesty, journalistic integrity, understanding an author's known biases are some of the reasons I want to identify an ad.
  - 12y ago
dbbolton 12y ago
I don't think I need a browser extension to tell me that the bulk of content on the example sites they show (especially Forbes and Buzzfeed) is sponsored. I'm more interested to see how it performs on less obvious sites that at least maintain an air of journalistic integrity.
- slang800 12y ago
  you can read the logic here: https://github.com/typpo/ad-detector/blob/master/src/rules.js https://github.com/typpo/ad-detector/blob/master/src/rules.j...
  - dbbolton 12y ago
    I was more or less criticizing their presentation of their product rather than the actual product, i.e. I think they could use better examples.
    - calbear81 12y ago
      The examples were done on the most trafficked sources first since a lot of people visit these sites frequently. Anyone can contribute new rules for matching and detecting advertorials.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
andrewljohnson 12y ago
This is cool, but a lot of PR is even more devious! At my first job ever, I was sometimes paid to simultaneously ghost-write stories by executives, then pitch the stories to magazines. So, it was still crap advertorials masquerading as content, but even harder to detect. I wonder if you could do a linguistic analysis to gauge bias and ad-iness, and show a score. Gather a corpus of paid advertorials and compare to ostensibly unpaid material.
- fred_durst 12y ago
  Some of those PR articles are so obvious a bag-of-words classifier would probably be right 80% of the time.
- eli 12y ago
  I'm not sure why an article ghost-written at the direction of an executive is more devious than one actually written by an executive.
- click170 12y ago
  This I don't mind. At my company though, those articles are ghost-written, and then they ask every employee to retweet and share it on Facebook and LinkedIn. It hasn't gotten to the point where we get in trouble for not doing it, but I fear that point is quickly approaching. One line that I won't cross is if they start requiring me to post to social media using my personal accounts, and I will change jobs over it.
cheald 12y ago
I work in media (for Mashable, specifically, though not in an editorial capacity), and I'm puzzled as to how people are getting native advertising so wrong. I'm aware that my paycheck is linked to this sort of thing, so full biases disclosed, but I really do think that there's a misunderstanding of what it actually is. There's this tendency to conflate "someone paid money to have their name attached to this article" with "someone paid to have a good article written about them", and they're wildly different. (I should disclaim that these are my personal opinions as someone in the industry, and I don't claim to speak on behalf of my employer) "Native advertising" like The Atlantic's Scientology advertorial is unequivocally bad. It's sneaky, it's underhanded, it purports to be unbiased reporting when it's anything but. However, that is really the exception rather than the rule. (It's worth noting that this has been the status quo in print magazines for quite some time; brands provide 1- or 2-page ads which are presented to look like an article that belongs in the magazine, with a tiny bit of "This is an advertisement" text stuffed in a corner. I'll scan a few if folks are interested. They're massively worse than the sort of native advertising under discussion here.) "Good" native advertising is the practice of letting brands pay to attach their names to thematically-relevant articles, whose content is not bought, directed by, or advertising the brand who wishes to advertise on it. This pays really well for media outlets, converts well for advertisers, and results in less obtrusive, annoying advertising for readers. For example, from the FTC workshop on native advertising: > [An example] is American Express, who came to us looking to reach female small business owners. So what we created on Mashable was a site called -- sorry, a content series, including videos and articles and info-graphics called "The Female Founders Series" where we profiled female entrepreneurs in technology, profiles and videos and vignettes, that we published on Mashable that were presented by American Express. (http://www.ftc.gov/system/files/documents/public_events/171321/final_transcript_1.pdf http://www.ftc.gov/system/files/documents/public_events/1713... page 43) In this case, profiling female startup founders is directly in Mashable's wheelhouse; it is relevant to our audience (which is socially and technologically savvy, young, and a majority of whom are female), and it's relevant to our advertiser. At no point are Amex's services pushed or touted or even talked about. Amex doesn't get to write the articles or have any editorial control over them. Our KPIs are typically engagement, so in order to deliver on our end of the deal, we have to provide content that people enjoy and want to share. The sponsorship is clearly disclosed in the interest of transparency, but at no point does the sponsor get to inject their brand, agenda, or marketing fluff into the actual content; it is always adjacent to it in the form of "sponsored by" highlights and traditional ad units. The key difference here is that Amex can say "We want our name to be in front of people for every page view of this series of content", rather than "We are going to do a traditional ad buy which will be demographically targeted to US females 19-30 years old, which may or may not end up associated with this series of content". They can't say "Write about this founder, and tell the story of how Amex made her business succeed"; we flat out will not do that. I'm of the opinion that this kind of advertising is actually better for all involved, as long as editorial independence is maintained. All media is sponsored at some level - advertising drives the entire industry - so if the benchmark for "good" content is "content that advertisers don't have any stake in", then...well, good luck. Advertisements that advertisers push through otherwise-respected media outlets in the guise of articles written by the outlet from a journalistic standpoint are bad, but they are the tiny minority of native advertising.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
seanp2k2 12y ago
Nice. I'll check this out. I was also hoping that it did some type of heuristic detection, but I know how hard that can be to get right.
api 12y ago
I would like to see a lot more projects along this line of thinking.
click170 12y ago
Can it perhaps have an option to strip native advertising from my web experience completely? I don't want to see links to native advertising. I don't want to see the short leader blurbs about them showing up when I visit the front page of other news sites. I don't want to even be aware that native advertising exists, I want it completely torn out of any article or website that I go to. Ironically I would likely even pay a small one-time fee for such an extension/program.
suprgeek 12y ago
Great Idea - I think this really should be integrated with http://allaregreen.us/ http://allaregreen.us/ AllareGreen is a "..free browser extension for Chrome, Safari, and Firefox that exposes the role money plays in Congress. Displays on any web page detailed campaign contribution data for every Senator and Representative, including total amount received and breakdown by industry and by size of donation." In fact I am rudimentarily working on a Bias Detector type application that shows, if it is sponsored content, if the main principals mentioned in it are on the payroll of companies etc (does some other things such as Sentiment analysis, chronology ordering etc).
- TeMPOraL 12y ago
  Can you tell more about that application? Is it going to be open source? Is there any way I could contribute?
EyeballKid 12y ago
Cool - will definitely install! I've been working on some projects along similar lines. First one is http://churnalism.com/extension http://churnalism.com/extension Browser extensions which check news articles against a central database of press releases, and can highlight shared text. Disclaimers: It's pretty UK-centric and I think the infrastructure needs a lot more work. I'm somewhat hesitant to expose it to HN at all... but hey :-) There is also http://unsourced.org http://unsourced.org, which lets you attach warning labels onto news articles. There's a browser extension for that too, but the whole project is pretty quiescent right now while I work on other things. But I've got a lot of plans for both these projects... Not one of mine, but for a more US-oriented tool, also check out: http://churnalism.sunlightfoundation.com/ http://churnalism.sunlightfoundation.com/ (again a website + browser extension combo)
sireat 12y ago
I remember that a respected West Coast newspaper contacted my tiny retail store about doing some advertising with them in the mid 90s. The sales person actually said it that if I placed a certain amount of advertising with them, I would have a reporter come out and do a human interest story for the local section of the paper. Talk about native advertising! Since then I've learned to expect that at least 80% of the stories in papers are planted stories. That is they are stories whose ideas and information is provided by PR firms. The best ones are the ones where it is not obvious. A recent crazy but is it? example: national quasi-public radio here in Eastern Europe has been running reports on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transatlantic_Trade_and_Investment_Partnership http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transatlantic_Trade_and_Investm... They sent a reporter to USA to interview what seems to be overwhelming pro TTIP sources. A public radio station struggling for funds sending a reporter on a month long junket? Something does not vibe right here. I am hoping the financing comes from some EU public fund and not something even more nefarious. This reminds of the time that US paid journalists if they run anti-drug stories. Here's a very leftist source but I assume the facts are correct: http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2005/01/will-j13.html http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2005/01/will-j13.html

204 points by typpo 12y ago

That's cute. Installed.

sp332 12y ago

John Oliver gets into how bad the practice has become lately in a recent Last Week Tonight episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_F5GxCwizc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_F5GxCwizc

mast 12y ago
That's good. It reminds me of a recent blog post by Yoni Freedhoff about nutritionists posting sponsored tweets. Often the disclosure is not at all obvious. http://www.weightymatters.ca/2014/07/7-nutrition-hashtags-you-need-to-be.html http://www.weightymatters.ca/2014/07/7-nutrition-hashtags-yo...

cheepin 12y ago

If there's anything worse than the giant banner ads, it's the ones that trick you into clicking them.

viggity 12y ago

nice, how are you doing the detection. do you have to some logic specific to each of the major "news" sites, or is it more generalized than that?

sp332 12y ago
Your other post (the one you edited) is dead because it was a duplicate of this one. You should delete that one and edit this one instead.
- viggity 12y ago
  I've got an HN chrome extension that might have caused the glitch. oops. I'll leave it alone as slang800 answered it. thanks!
slang800 12y ago
It looks like it's just a set of rules for major sites rather than some heuristic applied to all sites. But since it's open source, contributing rules for more obscure sites should be easy. Source here: https://github.com/typpo/ad-detector/blob/master/src/rules.js https://github.com/typpo/ad-detector/blob/master/src/rules.j...

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

corbinpage 12y ago

Great idea! Installed.

veb 12y ago

I'm not sure that I like this. I know it's not really like Adblock or whatever it's called. I never notice advertisements, and I am surprised more people aren't the same. You've been doing the same thing for years -- it's so easy to tell what's content and who's not. I so occasionally get caught by the very clever ones - and so what? If you're big on privacy, I guess you would care more tun I would As I'm growing older I don't mind donating small amounts of monies to good websites and projects. I just wish more people were like me in that regards -- it'd definitely be more profitable IMO. Has anyone got any experience in this (a/b testing maybe?!). I think this behaviour came from the ease of buying from Google Play or the App store... It's almost like, "I just spent $35 on apps last night?" Some corporate advertisements really are stupid. I just imagine someone's crated the perfect advert and the client goes, "make it pop!!!". Those are the ones I would not mind vanishing - but if it's helping the website then I'm all for it -- my continued visits are purely based on their content and ease of use.

sillysaurus3 12y ago
Would you mind clarifying what the problem with Ad Detector is? It's not meant to increase privacy or to turn people away from advertisements, but rather call attention to the fact that a given piece of content is actually an ad.
- veb 12y ago
  My apologies mate, I sort of went off on a tangent. My main point was really that advertisements are (as evolved from my Internet usage) that most are completely invisible to me.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
krisdol 12y ago
Honesty, journalistic integrity, understanding an author's known biases are some of the reasons I want to identify an ad.
- 12y ago

dbbolton 12y ago

I don't think I need a browser extension to tell me that the bulk of content on the example sites they show (especially Forbes and Buzzfeed) is sponsored. I'm more interested to see how it performs on less obvious sites that at least maintain an air of journalistic integrity.

slang800 12y ago
you can read the logic here: https://github.com/typpo/ad-detector/blob/master/src/rules.js https://github.com/typpo/ad-detector/blob/master/src/rules.j...
- dbbolton 12y ago
  I was more or less criticizing their presentation of their product rather than the actual product, i.e. I think they could use better examples.
  - calbear81 12y ago
    The examples were done on the most trafficked sources first since a lot of people visit these sites frequently. Anyone can contribute new rules for matching and detecting advertorials.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

andrewljohnson 12y ago

This is cool, but a lot of PR is even more devious! At my first job ever, I was sometimes paid to simultaneously ghost-write stories by executives, then pitch the stories to magazines. So, it was still crap advertorials masquerading as content, but even harder to detect. I wonder if you could do a linguistic analysis to gauge bias and ad-iness, and show a score. Gather a corpus of paid advertorials and compare to ostensibly unpaid material.

fred_durst 12y ago
Some of those PR articles are so obvious a bag-of-words classifier would probably be right 80% of the time.
eli 12y ago
I'm not sure why an article ghost-written at the direction of an executive is more devious than one actually written by an executive.
click170 12y ago
This I don't mind. At my company though, those articles are ghost-written, and then they ask every employee to retweet and share it on Facebook and LinkedIn. It hasn't gotten to the point where we get in trouble for not doing it, but I fear that point is quickly approaching. One line that I won't cross is if they start requiring me to post to social media using my personal accounts, and I will change jobs over it.

cheald 12y ago

I work in media (for Mashable, specifically, though not in an editorial capacity), and I'm puzzled as to how people are getting native advertising so wrong. I'm aware that my paycheck is linked to this sort of thing, so full biases disclosed, but I really do think that there's a misunderstanding of what it actually is. There's this tendency to conflate "someone paid money to have their name attached to this article" with "someone paid to have a good article written about them", and they're wildly different. (I should disclaim that these are my personal opinions as someone in the industry, and I don't claim to speak on behalf of my employer) "Native advertising" like The Atlantic's Scientology advertorial is unequivocally bad. It's sneaky, it's underhanded, it purports to be unbiased reporting when it's anything but. However, that is really the exception rather than the rule. (It's worth noting that this has been the status quo in print magazines for quite some time; brands provide 1- or 2-page ads which are presented to look like an article that belongs in the magazine, with a tiny bit of "This is an advertisement" text stuffed in a corner. I'll scan a few if folks are interested. They're massively worse than the sort of native advertising under discussion here.) "Good" native advertising is the practice of letting brands pay to attach their names to thematically-relevant articles, whose content is not bought, directed by, or advertising the brand who wishes to advertise on it. This pays really well for media outlets, converts well for advertisers, and results in less obtrusive, annoying advertising for readers. For example, from the FTC workshop on native advertising: > [An example] is American Express, who came to us looking to reach female small business owners. So what we created on Mashable was a site called -- sorry, a content series, including videos and articles and info-graphics called "The Female Founders Series" where we profiled female entrepreneurs in technology, profiles and videos and vignettes, that we published on Mashable that were presented by American Express. (http://www.ftc.gov/system/files/documents/public_events/171321/final_transcript_1.pdf http://www.ftc.gov/system/files/documents/public_events/1713... page 43) In this case, profiling female startup founders is directly in Mashable's wheelhouse; it is relevant to our audience (which is socially and technologically savvy, young, and a majority of whom are female), and it's relevant to our advertiser. At no point are Amex's services pushed or touted or even talked about. Amex doesn't get to write the articles or have any editorial control over them. Our KPIs are typically engagement, so in order to deliver on our end of the deal, we have to provide content that people enjoy and want to share. The sponsorship is clearly disclosed in the interest of transparency, but at no point does the sponsor get to inject their brand, agenda, or marketing fluff into the actual content; it is always adjacent to it in the form of "sponsored by" highlights and traditional ad units. The key difference here is that Amex can say "We want our name to be in front of people for every page view of this series of content", rather than "We are going to do a traditional ad buy which will be demographically targeted to US females 19-30 years old, which may or may not end up associated with this series of content". They can't say "Write about this founder, and tell the story of how Amex made her business succeed"; we flat out will not do that. I'm of the opinion that this kind of advertising is actually better for all involved, as long as editorial independence is maintained. All media is sponsored at some level - advertising drives the entire industry - so if the benchmark for "good" content is "content that advertisers don't have any stake in", then...well, good luck. Advertisements that advertisers push through otherwise-respected media outlets in the guise of articles written by the outlet from a journalistic standpoint are bad, but they are the tiny minority of native advertising.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

seanp2k2 12y ago

Nice. I'll check this out. I was also hoping that it did some type of heuristic detection, but I know how hard that can be to get right.

api 12y ago

I would like to see a lot more projects along this line of thinking.

click170 12y ago

Can it perhaps have an option to strip native advertising from my web experience completely? I don't want to see links to native advertising. I don't want to see the short leader blurbs about them showing up when I visit the front page of other news sites. I don't want to even be aware that native advertising exists, I want it completely torn out of any article or website that I go to. Ironically I would likely even pay a small one-time fee for such an extension/program.

suprgeek 12y ago

Great Idea - I think this really should be integrated with http://allaregreen.us/ http://allaregreen.us/ AllareGreen is a "..free browser extension for Chrome, Safari, and Firefox that exposes the role money plays in Congress. Displays on any web page detailed campaign contribution data for every Senator and Representative, including total amount received and breakdown by industry and by size of donation." In fact I am rudimentarily working on a Bias Detector type application that shows, if it is sponsored content, if the main principals mentioned in it are on the payroll of companies etc (does some other things such as Sentiment analysis, chronology ordering etc).

TeMPOraL 12y ago
Can you tell more about that application? Is it going to be open source? Is there any way I could contribute?

EyeballKid 12y ago

Cool - will definitely install! I've been working on some projects along similar lines. First one is http://churnalism.com/extension http://churnalism.com/extension Browser extensions which check news articles against a central database of press releases, and can highlight shared text. Disclaimers: It's pretty UK-centric and I think the infrastructure needs a lot more work. I'm somewhat hesitant to expose it to HN at all... but hey :-) There is also http://unsourced.org http://unsourced.org, which lets you attach warning labels onto news articles. There's a browser extension for that too, but the whole project is pretty quiescent right now while I work on other things. But I've got a lot of plans for both these projects... Not one of mine, but for a more US-oriented tool, also check out: http://churnalism.sunlightfoundation.com/ http://churnalism.sunlightfoundation.com/ (again a website + browser extension combo)

sireat 12y ago

I remember that a respected West Coast newspaper contacted my tiny retail store about doing some advertising with them in the mid 90s. The sales person actually said it that if I placed a certain amount of advertising with them, I would have a reporter come out and do a human interest story for the local section of the paper. Talk about native advertising! Since then I've learned to expect that at least 80% of the stories in papers are planted stories. That is they are stories whose ideas and information is provided by PR firms. The best ones are the ones where it is not obvious. A recent crazy but is it? example: national quasi-public radio here in Eastern Europe has been running reports on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transatlantic_Trade_and_Investment_Partnership http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transatlantic_Trade_and_Investm... They sent a reporter to USA to interview what seems to be overwhelming pro TTIP sources. A public radio station struggling for funds sending a reporter on a month long junket? Something does not vibe right here. I am hoping the financing comes from some EU public fund and not something even more nefarious. This reminds of the time that US paid journalists if they run anti-drug stories. Here's a very leftist source but I assume the facts are correct: http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2005/01/will-j13.html http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2005/01/will-j13.html