Yahoo News Posts Advertisements as News

An anonymous reader writes "Yahoo is now putting ad banners as news stories. This is highly misleading and is an awesome way to sell out." I don't really think Yahoo has been sold in in a few years, but this is a new level of yucky. No doubt it is a sign of things to come: the news is the ad. The ad is the news. It's one step worse then the bizarre advertising/news merge that was amazingly evident when Disney/ABC was doing with Monsters Inc while Time/Warner/AOL/CNN was hyping Harry Potter. Oh, in case they change it, basically they have a list of news stories, and one of them links simply to a page advertising (not surprisingly) X-10. The link isn't marked as an ad -- its simply one of the headlines in the news list. It's one thing to have more ads... it's another to simply disguise the ad as actual news. Update The ad was yanked. For those who missed it, there were a dozen news articles, but one was an advertisement. It was indistinguishable from the actual news.

That's not quite true.

[hereticmessiah]

They're putting ads between letting you read articles and the like. It seems to happen randomly as far as I can tell and they're doing it on http://groups.yahoo.com/ too - that's where I first came across it. It's unpleasant to say the least, but not dishonest.

Re:As A Bat

[kilgore_47]

When I saw this on the /. front page, there wern't any comments yet. I immediately clicked the link to yahoo, and I could find no ads presented as news headlines. I'm quite certain yahoo couldn't have pulled it THAT fast.

Half the headline links DO point to non-yahoo sites, though, and I wouldn't be surprised if one of those sites use those newfangled interrupting ads that make you wait 10 seconds or some crap before the actual page appears. I've seen ads like that break on more than one occasion, and I wouldn't be surprised if thats what caused the fuss.

Re:Are you sure?

[yomahz]

It seems to be a random ad on the right column of the screen for a company called TechnoScout. It's a column of links with titles like:

Space program research creates "smart bed" sleep surface

Unique formulation combats oxygen deficiencies without chemicals

But when you click on one of them, it just takes you to a page with product and ordering information. It's pretty obvious to me that it's a advertisement (especially since there's a note on top of it that reads 'Advertisement').

Re:Are you sure?

[Tosta Dojen]

Neither. The offending item in question is the section on the right hand of the page under 'Advertisement'. Sometimes it loads as a box of links that look like news. Sometimes it loads as something else that is obviously an ad. Reload the page a few times and you'll get it. (I posted this down below, but nobody seems to have noticed yet.)

My new favorite option in Mozilla..

[mstyne]

Right click on any image... say ones produced by ads.x10.com -- or maybe us.a1.yimg.com -- or everyone's favorite ads.doubleclick.net... and then you're presented with a nice option to "Block Images From This Server". Thanks Mozilla [mozilla.org]!

Re:You can easily disable ALL X10 Ads.

[Mr. Slippery]

All you have to do is click here and it X-10 ads will never again appear for the next month or so, then just click on it again to reset the cookie.

If all you have to do to get me to stop leaving burn bags of dog crap on your front porch is to ask me, does that make it ok for me to leave those shitbombs until you say otherwise? (With the understanding that I'm free to start up again in a months time unless you keep repeating your request?)

Annoying and rude behavior is not ok even if the offendor agrees to cut it out when asked.

Er, yeah, but...

[Wakko Warner]

It says, in huge letters at the top, "ADVERTISEMENT".

- A.P.

Nothing new here

[Phanatic1a]

This is no different from multipage ad inserts that frequently crop up in Newsweek, Time, and a variety of other "news" publications. You'll see several pages near the center of the magazine, organized in the same columnar layout, the same style of headlines and photo captions, and sometimes even the same fonts as the rest of the magazine, but they'll be stories about the Horrors of an Unclean Bowl or the Heartbreak of Psoriasis or the like, instead of real news like Clinton's new three-breasted intern. And in small type, somewhere on each page, will be the word "ADVERTISEMENT," in order to allow the reader to differentiate it from all the "real" news on the rest of the rag's full-color pages.

So this is nothing really new.

Link

[Washizu]

Here is the "article [technoscout.com]" yahoo linked to, although it plainly says "advertisement" right above the link. For those of you unwilling to support the ad, the article appears to be a normal review of the X-10 Camera and gives you information at the bottom to find out how to buy it.

Screen shot of the Ad

[danec]

Here's a screen shot of the ad. Notice, it does say "advertisement" above the ad.

screen shot [carlsoncarlson.com]

Try news.bbc.co.uk

[mr.e]

this is the reason why the bbc website is good, no adverts ever, so there's certainly no chance of confusing ads with headlines. BBC News [bbc.co.uk]
And no it's not just for the UK, they have plenty news for the rest of the world too, American [bbc.co.uk] for example.

Other publications (like NY Times) do it too

[Bubblehead]

Do any of you synchronize the New York Times with AvantGo? If so, check out the first 1-3 articles. They are usually reviews of shows, product discussions, etc. Call me paranoid, but they always promotes something - even headline stories usually appear only as the second or third article. Coincidence? I don't think so. A fair price for a "free" service? Maybe so, but it's sleezy not to tell the user up front.

Re:Wow, ya know..

[nlh]

Me, i'd rather see 5 banner ads on CNN than have to pay for CNN. Its not 1992 anymore, and websites carry a LOT more data than before. The internet has become a part of our economy

Well, you make a good point here, but I have mixed feelings on this issue. Yes, advertisements are a necessary evil and I too would rather see 5 banner ads (and, perhaps, even pay attention to them on occasion) than pay for CNN, but the trend that Taco points out in the article - that of "sneaky" promotion-as-news - is what I'm more concerned about.

In this case, we saw Yahoo slipping in links to unsuspecting users. In the CNN + ABC cases, we see a concerted effort by news organizations to promote products/movies/services by _artificially_ hyping them up. THAT's what I consider unacceptable: Harry Potter, while it may be a consumer phenom that merrit's some attention, is only given such phenom status when it gets (and keeps) front-page status on CNN for weeks on end.

Just this morning, in fact, I forwarded this article [cnn.com] to a friend during a similar discussion. CNN is actually promoting Survivor's "lack of being cool anymore" as a TOP news story, right on the front page. Of course they included the time and station where people can catch the finale, but that was just as a service to their readers ... right?

The worst example I can remember recently was this one [cnn.com], which was in the "top news" section on the front page when it was published -- basically a meanlingless and contentless article about a lead in the JonBenet case, but one that mentioned AOL and therefore got front-page CNN coverage. No other news organizations covered the story, for obvious reasons...(it wasn't newsworthy).

While I understand that organizations need new and better ways to promote products, the trend for supposedly impartial news organizations to allow corporate promotions to taint story content is worrysome.

Re:Or...

[isli]

that appears to be their logic although, you can just change the timestamp in your cookies.txt file. Changing it like this should take care of it till Tue Jan 19 03:14:07 2038

.x10.com TRUE FALSE 2147483647 PopUnder 0

Foxnews and Subway

[Squeeze Truck]

This was about a year ago. Fox News did a "story" about the Subway Diet, and how Jared lost 200 pounds eating at Subway. This was about a week before the Subway commercials featuring Jared started airing on Fox.

I think that was the day I stopped watching TV news for good.

Re:Er, yeah, but...

[alonsoac]

Informative? That's not the ad they are talking about it was an X10 link that was taken off soon after. It was mixed in with the real news and not clearly marked.