Advertising And Editorial Blur At The Times
Quick: Which one of these two boxes is an ad, and which is official Times Web content? Both ran in a column down the right side of an nytimes.com business news article, both have headlines in sans-serif font, both use the exact same link colors. It turns out the one with the big corporate logo (on the right) is actually the editorial content, while the one designed to look like a trustworthy Times table of contents is actually an ad, taking the reader to awful, faux-objective content like this. Congratulations, Times. I read a lot of fairly scuzzy media websites in the course of a day, and I've never been tricked quite this completely. Or as Ashton Kutcher likes to call it, "Link'd."