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I noticed a recent increase in the amount of native advertising, especially poorly labeled "sponsored content," and built a chrome/firefox extension to flag the

by typpo 12y ago

I noticed a recent increase in the amount of native advertising, especially poorly labeled "sponsored content," and built a chrome/firefox extension to flag these articles [1]. It includes rules for the sites mentioned - Buzzfeed, Mashable, Quartz, and Vice - as well as about 100 others. Reactions from publishers and native ad companies were surprisingly positive - some even reached out asking to me add their sites. In general I think a lot of people in publishing are very conflicted about the problem because it gets into journalistic ethics, which are deeply ingrained. Currently an organization called the IAB provides the standard for the industry, but it's vague and lags behind innovation in native ads [2]. Native ads aren't necessarily bad, but their inconsistency that makes them very deceptive to users. I think publishers would benefit from an updated set of standards that enforce consistent messaging. [1] http://ianww.com/ad-detector http://ianww.com/ad-detector [2] http://www.iab.net/nativeadvertising http://www.iab.net/nativeadvertising

hackuser 12y ago
A great idea, thanks. A suggestion: If you could post it someplace that allows user reviews, I'd be much more likely to download it. It's hard to tell if it will cause performance problems, installs/uninstalls well, false-positive/negative rates, identifies advertorials that I wouldn't find on my own, etc. I could try it, but there are many, many add-ons to try! That said, I hope it works well and becomes widely used. The publishers should be putting that alert on their pages themselves.
- typpo 12y ago
  Thanks for the feedback. The chrome/firefox pages have user reviews but there aren't many of them. I was sensitive to performance when I wrote it - in most cases detection rules are single selectors. It won't run anything on sites not in the db. No library dependencies. There's a phantomjs test suite that flags false positives and negatives. Of course, I can't personally compile a list of every site with sponsored content, so if it's not on the list the addon won't display anything. If you're interested, the code is open source at http://github.com/typpo/ad-detector http://github.com/typpo/ad-detector. Hard for me to say whether it can spot ads that you can't. Many people think they aren't susceptible to ads like these, and I'm one of them, but I built this for peace of mind. Sponsored content can be easy to miss. My favorite examples are this Yahoo news article on climate change (written by an oil company), and a Newsweek article on personal injury lawyers: [1] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/global-cooling-real-inconvenient-truth-140500879.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/global-cooling-real-inconveni... [2] http://www.newsweek.com/10-best-personal-injury-attorneys http://www.newsweek.com/10-best-personal-injury-attorneys
sogen 12y ago
This is really good. I'd gladly form an open IAB

by typpo 12y ago

hackuser 12y ago

A great idea, thanks. A suggestion: If you could post it someplace that allows user reviews, I'd be much more likely to download it. It's hard to tell if it will cause performance problems, installs/uninstalls well, false-positive/negative rates, identifies advertorials that I wouldn't find on my own, etc. I could try it, but there are many, many add-ons to try! That said, I hope it works well and becomes widely used. The publishers should be putting that alert on their pages themselves.

typpo 12y ago
Thanks for the feedback. The chrome/firefox pages have user reviews but there aren't many of them. I was sensitive to performance when I wrote it - in most cases detection rules are single selectors. It won't run anything on sites not in the db. No library dependencies. There's a phantomjs test suite that flags false positives and negatives. Of course, I can't personally compile a list of every site with sponsored content, so if it's not on the list the addon won't display anything. If you're interested, the code is open source at http://github.com/typpo/ad-detector http://github.com/typpo/ad-detector. Hard for me to say whether it can spot ads that you can't. Many people think they aren't susceptible to ads like these, and I'm one of them, but I built this for peace of mind. Sponsored content can be easy to miss. My favorite examples are this Yahoo news article on climate change (written by an oil company), and a Newsweek article on personal injury lawyers: [1] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/global-cooling-real-inconvenient-truth-140500879.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/global-cooling-real-inconveni... [2] http://www.newsweek.com/10-best-personal-injury-attorneys http://www.newsweek.com/10-best-personal-injury-attorneys

sogen 12y ago

This is really good. I'd gladly form an open IAB