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

TL;DR

This paper systematically studies advertorials in news outlets, revealing their widespread presence, deceptive design, and the challenges in detecting and disclosing them effectively, raising concerns about reader deception and regulatory enforcement.

Contribution

It introduces a novel automated method for large-scale detection of advertorials and provides the first comprehensive analysis of their prevalence and characteristics in major news sites.

Findings

Advertorials appear in 1 out of 3 news sites, including top outlets.

Legal disclaimers are often obscured or hard to recognize.

Advertorials are more effective and less intrusive than traditional ads.

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.