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Comment by sp332 | Hacker News Reader

It says "sponsored placement", which is true because the website put the ad right in the middle of the organic results.

It doesn't matter what it says, it matters what users perceive it to be. It's obviously meant to deceive the users while providing the author (not very) plausible deniability of the deception.

Agreed. The sooner a site I can live without starts using scummy tactics to drop ads the sooner I drop them. Nothing like losing viewers because you're too hard pressed to run legit content.

(Obviously this is my opinion. I understand the whole "if you're not paying for it then you're the product" stuff, I just think its dishonest to lead people on one way or another)

How do you think this compares to google's ads at the top of search requests? That is the comparison this article is making.

Those are deceptive as well

Yeah, thanks to this article I took a critical look at those Google sponsored top result ads and realized how deceptive they were.

Probably not the point the author was trying to make, but I still got a lot of interesting out of it :)

What about things like outbrain? http://www.outbrain.com/getwidget

They have more deceptive ad units at publishers: http://www.cnn.com/2011/11/23/world/africa/egypt-protests/ (Scroll to pre-comment-box or search for "From around the web")

For the lazy, the "From around the web" section looks like relevant articles on other sites and is styled exactly like the links that CNN recommends, but it's actually paid content.

A popup under "What's this" gives the following info:

"Paid Distribution

An Outbrain customer paid to distribute this content. We do our best to ensure that all of the links recommended to you lead to interesting content. To find out more information about driving traffic to your content or to place this widget on your site, visit outbrain.com. We welcome your feedback at feedback@outbrain.com.View our privacy policy here."

As a large publisher who uses Outbrain, I can say that I'd much rather have the Outbrain paid links on my sites than running PPC AdSense with belly fat ads, and Work From Home stuff.

Outbrain actually links to content - often, decent to good content - where then publishers can monetize the click as they choose, but from a publishers standpoint, the Outbrain widget is one of the least objectionable drivers of revenue I've found.

Outbrain ads specifically put the nail in the coffin on seattlepi.com's long slide from legitimacy. It is sad, because seattle PI used to be he leading real newspaper for Seattle.

I would say the same for CNN, but CNN became a worthless organizationon before Outbrain showed up.

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