Blurred Lines: Can Readers Distinguish Ads from Content?

Some websites, even very reputable ones, sometimes blur the distinction between editorial content and advertising. Of course, consumers have a right to know what they are reading is an advertisement when that is the case. To that end, the Federal Trade Commission has created advertising guidelines for websites that use ads that look like the surrounding non-advertising content (“native advertising”). It encourages them to make clear disclosure to distinguish advertising content from regular new stories or natural search results. But are those disclosures really working? To find out, the FTC just published a study where Internet surfers were exposed to various webpages and asked to identify the advertising, if any, on those pages. The FTC also modified those real pages with simple changes it thought might better identify sections that really were advertisements. Here is a sample Google Shopping results webpage when searching for computer tablets, and an FTC-modified…

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