ONLINE JOURNALISM
INTERVIEWS
Howard Rheingold
The fuzzy world of
Other sites, like Women.com and BabyCenter, publish special features
pages hosted on their own servers.
Not all sponsored content is created equal. Some of it is pure promotional
puffery, while some offers useful editorial material.
More than any other revenue source, however, online sponsorships seem to
come with their own special set of ethical headaches. Should a company that
manufactures children's acetaminophen be allowed to sponsor a baby site's
medical section on child fevers? Should a children's clothing manufacturer
be allowed to sponsor the articles on how to dress your child?
"We still wrestle with those kinds of questions every day," says BabyCenter
spokesperson Lara Hoyem. She points out that all sponsored content deals go
through the site's editor in chief, Jim Scott.
At BabyCenter, sponsorships come in two main forms: featured sponsor
sections and editorial sponsorships. Here's a quick look at how sponsorships
play out at one content and commerce site:
Featured sponsor sections
Unlike most sites, the sponsored content on BabyCenter isn't crafted by the
marketing or promotions folks. From the beginning — predating my
arrival and continuing to this day — the task of researching and
writing these special packages has fallen to the editorial department.
BabyCenter has set the bar for these sponsorships at a proper height, in my
judgment, by asking a single question: Does the sponsored content serve the
users' needs?
So, yes, BeechNut gets prominent play in the sponsored area on introducing solid foods,
but all the facts in the baby nutrition chart, checklist for introducing
solids, first food tracking guide and other editorial material was
researched by an editor and vetted by the company's medical advisors.
The same applies to the other minisites grouped under the "Good Stuff" banner at
the bottom of BabyCenter's home
page. (If you're wondering: These sponsored areas make up less than 1
percent of BabyCenter, and the site offers extensive non-sponsored articles
that cover much the same ground. Sponsored content does not appear in the
BabyCenter Store.)
The site has turned down tens of thousands of dollars from advertisers who
merely wanted to put up a page touting the glories of their product. But
many advertisers saw the value in having credible editorial material as the
main component of these minisites, with a "brought to you by" brand page as
the denouement of the package. Links to these packages throughout BabyCenter
clearly identify the minisite's advertising sponsor, and the packages are
designed in a way to differentiate them from the rest of BabyCenter's
editorial content.
Jonathan Tuttle, the art director who designed many of these
pages, recalls sitting at meetings with company executives and business
staff, trying to educate them about some of the ethical conflicts of
interest in having an advertiser sponsor a minisite that refers directly to
their product in the context of an article.
"We didn't get outrageous requests," says Tuttle, who left BabyCenter in
late 1999 and is now co-founder of Gocitykids.com. "We tended to react pretty
strongly to the minor incursions, and it was an ongoing process of educating
folks why certain proposals didn't fly."
At one meeting, Tropicana wanted to sponsor a minisite on folic acid. The
only problem was that our existing articles listed a dozen other foods that
doctors recommended before orange juice as good sources of folic
acid. Without editorial's buy-in, the minisite never happened.
Tuttle points out that sponsored minisites can pose an ethical slippery
slope if the company doesn't establish rules to ensure editorial integrity.
"As many times as a client says it doesn't matter if we mention competitors'
products, boy, come renewal time you can bet they'll want that out of
there," he says. "There are lots of shades of gray and you've got to be
careful or the client will try to wedge in their own slant on the subject,
and once you've got their money in your pocket that's hard to stop."
Editorial sponsorships
More problematic than sponsored minisites, in my view, are editorial
sponsorships. Under this revenue model, companies sponsor existing sections
or pages on the site, a technique pioneered by portals like Excite and
Lycos.
When I left the company 13 months ago, the business department hoped to sell
dozens of these sponsorships, while the editorial folks argued for a go-slow
approach.
While some arrangements seemed innocuous enough — say, a
sponsor for a child's height predictor calculator — other sponsorships
seemed troublesome: Did we really want to compromise the site's credibility
by having a sponsor for pages related to a mother's or newborn's health?
Ultimately, the executive team signed on to only a couple of editorial
sponsorships, Hoyem says. Baby Gap sponsors BabyCenter's popular Baby Namer tool, and
ReliefBand sponsors the site's morning sickness page.
The original mockups, which troubled me, had the sponsor's name across the
top of the page. These examples, with a vertical treatment in the right-hand
column, look fine to me.
Are sponsorships a legitimate form of advertising? Purists might say no,
because it inserts a promotional message into the center of editorial
content. But to my mind, it's hard to see how this is ethically any
different than a radio show sponsored by an advertiser or a paid-advertising
section on health in Newsweek.
There will always be readers who don't trust anything on a site if you sell
things (dooming all content sites), just as there are some people who don't
trust newspapers or broadcast news because they sell advertising (dooming
all media except Ms. magazine and Consumer Reports). Like it or not,
sponsored content helps keep content sites afloat.
sponsored content
This column appeared March 8, 2001, in the Online Journalism Review. Here's the version on the OJR site.
By J.D. Lasica
"Sponsored content" on the Web comes in different shapes and flavors. At
some online publications, like Slate, Salon, iVillage and ESPN.com, clicking
on a "sponsor" link transports the user to another site or to a co-branded
page paid for by an advertiser
or hosted by a strategic
partner.
More problematic than sponsored minisites are editorial sponsorships.
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