Co-founders of InPowered and NetShelter: Peyman Nilforoush and Pirouz Nilforoush.
Yesterday I argued that the New York Times had committed a grave error in judgement by allowing the publication of native ads on its website. Native ads are OK in some specialist publications but certainly not in a newspaper such as important as The New York Times.
Labelling some content that largely looks and feels like your own, independently produced journalism, is an extraordinarily bad idea.
I’m shocked that The New York Times, and its advisors, are so blind to the erosion of trust that will inevitably follow from their readers.
At the very least, native ads do nothing to improve readers trust. At their worst, readers will tune out trusted content just as they tune out other advertising. Why would the management of The New York Times agree to anything that doesn’t help promote reader trust?
This is especially important in today’s widening world of the web where trust in content is vanishing at an astounding rate. Many readers think nearly everything they see is corrupt in some way, by monied interests.
Surely, publishers would want to amplify their trust rating because it is rare. And rarity has value while an abundance of crap has very little.