Native Advertising and the Future of Mass Communication

Native advertising, defined as the practice by which a marketer borrows from the credibility of a content publisher by presenting paid content with a format and location that matches the publisher's original content, has been the primary driving engine of the Internet marketing economy for several years. Spending on native advertising is projected to grow from $4.7 billion in 2013 to $21 billion by 2018 (Hoelzel, 2015), and advertising agencies are not only using native broadly but also hoping to increase their usage (Aldrige, 2016). While a majority of online marketing seeks to narrowly target users based on topic, through the use publication audience data, user tracking, collaborative filtering, and other techniques, native advertising not only gives users content that matches the topic of the publishers' original content but also does so by copying the format of nonpaid content. Native advertising can take a wide variety of forms, ranging from sponsored posts on social media platforms, sponsored articles and videos on sites that publish original content, and sponsored links and recommendation blocks on content providers and Web search engines.