Tech news publisher CNET is turning its own product reviews into native ads by letting companies like Samsung and Lenovo pay to have positive reviews bumped up on the site.
Though native advertising is redefining what it means to separate editorial and marketing content, selling reviews has historically been a no-go. So has CNET figured out how to monetize reviews without jeopardizing its all-important editorial neutrality?
The program, called CNET Replay and first reported on by Brian Morrissey at Digiday, launched quietly last week. Sponsors can pay to have favorable reviews bumped up on the site months after they’ve been written, like the Galaxy S4 Replay review below that originally ran in April but appeared among CNET’s more recent phone review listings. They’re real reviews written by CNET tech writers weeks before any deal with an advertiser takes place.
Replay is expected to be highly lucrative for CNET and effective for advertisers. According to Digiday:
The publisher’s internal metrics estimate Replay ads drive purchase intent by 500 percent. Lenovo and Sony are in line to use the unit in the near future. CNET is extending Replay to Gamespot in the fall to allow video game manufacturers to promote positive reviews. It is also rolling out a new large format ad unit that will pull in Replay reviews, other CNET content as well as advertiser content in a graphical unit.
It’s already common for marketers to use positive reviews of their products on their own sites and in other communications material. There’s even an ad tech vendor called InPowered that helps brands find positive reviews, or “earned advertising,” and promote them on blogs and recommendation engines. But this is the first time sponsors have paid for reviews to be published on the original publisher’s site, not as ads or promoted content but in the editorial stream.
Contrary to one of the tenets of successful native advertising, Replay articles are not immediately identified as ads, and the sponsors are not named (though the review makes it fairly obvious who the sponsor is). Instead, a small-print disclaimer, only visible once the user has clicked on the ad, runs above each Replay review:
This content was previously written independently and objectively by the CNET staff as part of our regular coverage. The author holds no interest in the sponsor company, which has chosen to re-share the content in paid promotional units.
That’s where Replay hits a snag. Although CNET wants to draw a hard line between its editorial and ad content, failing to overtly identify the post as an ad does just the opposite. Is Samsung paying for a promotion on CNET’s site, or is it paying to modify CNET’s editorial calendar?
Advertisers coming into the sponsored content space may not realize just how fragile editorial credibility can be — especially when it comes to product reviews, which are notoriously sensitive to outside influence. The stigma of the “paid review” hangs heavy over tech publishers, and CNET’s reputation already took a big hit back in January, when parent company CBS blocked it from giving a major award to Dish because of ongoing litigation between the two companies.
“CNET’s reviews are its bread and butter. That’s what its brand is built on,” said Matt Ingram, GigaOm media reporter and former Globe and Mail communities editor. “Any site that does reviews, you’ve got to have a hard line between the editorial and anything that comes from that manufacturer, because you start to raise questions about the validity or the independence of the review.”
Ingram said even if CNET has mechanisms in place to make sure advertisers aren’t influencing its content, the more advertisers get involved with core editorial content, the more credibility will become an issue for the brand. If CNET readers think its been editorially compromised, it may not matter what the reality is.
Already Morrissey at Digiday has speculated that sponsors might start paying to promote negative reviews of their competitors; Business Insider’s Aaron Taube suggested that CNET’s reviews might start to skew positive in anticipation of sponsors paying to repackage them.
“That fear, or awareness of potential conflict, has always been there,” said Ingram. “The further you go into doing the advertiser’s bidding with your editorial, the more you raise those question marks.”
On the other hand, consumers are growing used to the idea of sponsored content, and as publishers struggle to find new revenue sources, fewer readers are objecting on grounds of compromised editorial autonomy. CNET appears to have done its due diligence – it tested Replay on 2,800 users over six months and found the program would not “significantly affect” perceptions of the brand credibility.
But even Al DiGuido, an interactive marketing veteran and former PC Magazine associate publisher who praised CNET’s innovative new approach to content monetization in Taube’s article, said that CNET should to do a better job of delineating sponsored content.
“It’s like the surgeon general’s warning here,” DiGuido said of the disclaimer readers see at the top of the reviews when they click the Replay link. “I think they’ve done a disservice from that first click where you have to read the small type.”
