Native Advertising: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)

Me too. Native advertising is plain evil, in a way even the worst drive-by malware flash popups aren't. They're ads designed with the sole purpose of tricking readers into thinking they're viewing a real article, and they abuse the trust readers have towards the news source. I think John Olliver covered the topic well enough[0], so let me just say that I only hope that Upvoted will label the ads clearly so that it's obvious for everyone they're reading paid content (imagine advertisers letting them do that, though...). > It could be a piece on Tesla Wait, since when Tesla does native ads? Do they do ads at all ? [0] - [this video]

I remember when Netflix took out a whole page ad for their Orange is the new Black show. John Oliver had a piece on it [this video] This is a natural extension of it. But what is revolutionary is the scale that this is now possible. We have so many people out there who now blindly trust the output of an LLM (how many colleagues have you had proudly telling you: I asked Claude and this is what it says <paste>). This is as advertiser's wet dream. Now it's ads at the bottom, but slowly they'll become more part of the text. And worst part: you don't know, bar the fact that the link has a refer(r)er attached to it. The internet before and after LLMs is like steel before and after the atomic bombs. Anything after is contaminated.