A reader browsing through an online article is highly likely to encounter an advertorial, often without realizing it. Advertorials represent a relatively new marketing strategy where advertisements are deliberately designed to resemble the style and tone of editorial content. Despite their appearance, they are, in fact, paid content intended to promote a product, brand, or service. Studies indicate that advertorials are significantly more effective (81%) and less intrusive than traditional banner ads or pop-ups. Despite ongoing regulatory efforts to ensure clear disclosure of paid content, concerns persist about the deceptive nature of advertorials. Advertorials can mislead readers into believing that they are consuming unbiased editorial content. In doing so, they gain undeserved legitimacy, by draping themselves in the credibility of the publication's design; not to inform or inspire genuine interest, but to deceive. In this study, we conduct the first large-scale and systematic study of advertorials. We propose a novel automated methodology for detecting advertorials in the wild, and we collect 185K ad URLs over a period of 5 months. We investigate the prevalence of problematic advertorials and explore their structural and linguistic characteristics. We find that advertorials appear in 1 out of 3 news sites, including some of the most popular and credible outlets worldwide (e.g., The Guardian, EuroNews, CNN). We further highlight that legal disclaimers intended to inform users of the promotional nature of the content, are often deliberately obscured or difficult to recognize, raising concerns about user protection.

翻译：读者浏览在线文章时，极有可能在不自知的情况下接触到软广告。软广告是一种相对新颖的营销策略，其广告内容被刻意设计成与新闻报道的风格和语气相似。尽管外观如此，它们实质上是旨在推广产品、品牌或服务的付费内容。研究表明，软广告比传统的横幅广告或弹窗广告效果显著更佳（81%）且侵入性更低。尽管监管机构持续努力确保付费内容得到清晰披露，但关于软广告欺骗性的担忧依然存在。软广告可能误导读者，使其误以为正在阅读的是无偏见的新闻报道。通过披上出版物设计可信度的外衣，它们获得了不应有的合法性；其目的并非提供信息或激发真正兴趣，而是欺骗。在本研究中，我们首次对软广告进行了大规模系统性研究。我们提出了一种新颖的自动化方法，用于在实际环境中检测软广告，并在5个月内收集了18.5万条广告URL。我们调查了问题软广告的普遍性，并探讨了其结构和语言特征。我们发现，每3个新闻网站中就有1个出现软广告，其中包括全球一些最受欢迎和可信的媒体（例如《卫报》、欧洲新闻台、CNN）。我们进一步指出，旨在告知用户内容推广性质的法定免责声明，常常被故意模糊化或难以识别，这引发了关于用户保护的担忧。