For all those folks who believe people have a right to know when they’re being advertised to (and by all those folks, of course, we mean the hardtracking staff), this will come as unwelcome news.

From Caroline O’Donovan’s piece at Nieman Journalism Lab:

Does having native advertising make a news site less credible? This study, at least, suggests no

Two researchers at Cal Poly published a study that looks at how older people consume and perceive native advertising compared to younger readers.

Native advertising is providing an ever-larger chunk of digital revenue for publishers these days. But despite (or perhaps because of) the money, lots of journalists are still squeamish about the topic. They worry that, at its core, native advertising is about tricking your reader into reading an ad and thinking its editorial content. Why would a reader who feels duped by a news brand ever want to return to it?

That’s the question that led Patrick Howe and Brady Teufel of Cal Poly to publish a research paper titled “Native Advertising and Digital Natives: The Effects of Age and Advertisement Format on News Website Credibility Judgments.”

And what does the study show?

Not what the researchers thought it would . . .

Read the rest at Sneak Adtack.