Consumers are easily duped by ads masquerading as editorials, according to a new paper by Chris Jay Hoofnagle and Eduard Meleshinsky. Their research shows that these “native ads,” better known as advertorials or clickbait, are becoming harder to differentiate from actual news content. Yet they’re proliferating online at a rapid rate.
Hoofnagle and Meleshinsky surveyed nearly 600 consumers with a typical advertorial embedded in a blog. They found that one in four respondents thought it was written by a reporter or an editor. Although the ad was marked “sponsored content,” it failed to raise a red flag.
Read a longer version of this article on the UC Berkeley School of Law website.