Last week I was being a jerk on Gizmodo.com.au. In the comments of one of the articles I accused an author of shilling for Foxtel’s new local Netflix compitor “Presto” I think I was over the top in calling them a bunch of hacks. But Gizmodo is lathered in Telstra/Foxtel ads and the review of the Presto service was kind of gushing, and obsequious.

If I overreacted, it’s because I’m seeing a lot more native advertising slipping into otherwise respectable online publications and it creeps me out. Take today’s front page of Fairfax’s Canberra Times (BTW Fairfax also owns Gizmodo.com.au, but you knew that right?)

Check out that nice article on Eftpos. this is something that I’m generally interested in and wanted to read. But when I read the article I see that’s really more of an ‘advertorial’ - with a nice big banner ad for the company that the 'author’ works for. I put red boxes around those to make it easy for you.

There were a lot of comments from readers engaging with the article - no one called it out for being an advertisement so I have to assume that either:

A. People don’t know that it’s native advertising or;

B. People don’t care that it’s native advertising

I actually hope that the answer is A. Because if it’s B, then it means that we’ve crossed a threshold where objective journalism doesn’t matter to people. Maybe we crossed it a long time ago …