Google’s war against fake news (i.e., sponsored content)
Interesting piece on pay to play news, which is also known as sponsored content.
http://www.salon.com/2013/04/10/googles_war_against_fake_news/
An outfit called NewsCred sent me an email this morning with the subject: How Googles stance on branded content could impact marketers. It provided a link to an unbylined piece titled Why Google Should Rethink Its Approach to Sponsored Content.
Haha, I thought. This should be fun. On March 27, Richard Gingras, Googles senior director for news and social products (and formerly, Salons CEO), warned in a blog post that Google News strongly disapproved of news outlets that were passing off sponsored content as the real thing.
If a site mixes news content with affiliate, promotional, advertorial, or marketing materials (for your company or another party), we strongly recommend that you separate non-news content on a different host or directory, block it from being crawled with robots.txt, or create a Google News Sitemap for your news articles only. Otherwise, if we learn of promotional content mixed with news content, we may exclude your entire publication from Google News.
Most journalists who take their job seriously might be expected to applaud Googles critical stance on sponsored content. Sponsored content, also known as native advertising, is a calculated attempt to trick readers, to fool them into believing that they are reading something whose integrity is backed by the publication in which it appears. But it is pure commercial propaganda, not news, and as such, it shouldnt be indexed as news. Its also growing very fast, and cant be ignored.
dlwickham
(3,316 posts)I'm sure people click on the links without knowing that the site is Faux on steroids
Blanks
(4,835 posts)It shows up on my Facebook news feed. I'm just guessing that it's sponsored content, but one particular thorn in my side posts every negative piece that he stumbles across.
ThoughtCriminal
(14,011 posts)Yahoo!
davidpdx
(22,000 posts)Google is going to lose it's reputation if it doesn't find a way to combat this.
DrDebug
(3,847 posts)I remember when their ads started. It was just text because G consider graphics not a good choice. The site wasn't allowed to contain _ANY_ pop-ups or pop-unders or it would be refused, etc. etc. And look at the mess now (not that I see it anymore... because sometimes you see it on other people's computers)
Okay, I'm pessimistic...