Native advertising has been proven to be a solid strategy for online companies looking for a new way to distribute their content. It's being adopted by the largest of publishers, and becoming a largely lucrative and successful method of advertising, making it the biggest internet marketing trend this year. We wanted to ask consumers, though, what their experience with native advertising is like. Our findings were very insightful, so we published an eBook with an overview of the results. Watch our Daily Brown Bag to learn about native advertising, why it's so popular in internet marketing, and learn about the results we found from our research.
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Hello and welcome to the Daily Brown Bag. Today, we're going to be talking about native advertising statistics. I'm Chad Hill, and I'm joined by Adam Stetzer.
Hey, good morning, Chad. Welcome to the Brown Bag. Native advertising is a buzzword. We've been hearing it at the conferences. We were at the Borrell Conference in New York City. We were at BIA/Kelsey in San Francisco. Certainly, the big folks are talking about this. I don't think it's penetrated all the way down to the smaller publishers, but I think it will. There is a transformation kind of going on here in terms of advertising. So what is native advertising?
Let's start with the definition, Chad, then let's get into some stats, which I know you have to share today. Native advertising is defined as a form of paid media where the ad experience follows the natural form and function of the user experience in which it is placed. Now, that's a popular definition. I'm sure there are others, and as we will discover as we move through this topic, there's raging debate over exactly what it is, but I think that one's a fairly good one, Chad, and it talks really about the presentation, meaning it's blurring the lines as you flow. As your eye flows down the webpage, you move from "native content" into something that has been sponsored with less distinction.
There's a less abrupt transition, and that's, hence the name, native advertising. So here's a few examples, and I'm sure we've all seen many of these, whether we know it or not. Obviously, the sponsored posts, that's pretty popular. You'll see, "brought to you by," or at the very top, "sponsored by," and you might have a big brand that has actually sponsored the writing of something, so kind of flirting, I guess, with the advertorial line. In-feed units are popular. These are sponsored articles, promoted posts in social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, where you're paid to be in the stream.
Paid search units, and this would be surprising to some. I guess some argue that AdWords is actually native advertising. Interesting debate there, probably. Recommendation widgets and promoted listings, a lot of people have seen those popping up. And I know you're going talk about that, too. Those are content discovery tools sort of under the native advertising umbrella. And there's a few others, but those are the major types we're seeing out there, Chad. So what is this trend all about?
It's definitely an interesting trend. And one of the things we were wondering as we started looking at native advertising and, you know, how to incorporate this into products for our clients, we decided to go out and talk to end customers, and we conducted a survey, and actually wrote an e-book that went through all the results from the survey. So, again, some of the stuff we talked about was really from an end customer, and our question was how are end customers going to interact and react to these native advertising units? Are they going to trust them? Is it going to turn them off on the client? What's going to happen?
So I had three stats I wanted to share here from the results of our survey. The first one we asked, have you read a sponsored or promoted article on the internet. And 67.5% said they had. Another very interesting stat was that 85% of people say that native advertising doesn't hinder their experience on a website, and in some cases, actually improves it.
And then the final one that was very interesting was that, you know, what was really interesting is that 73% of people felt that sponsored content, like promoted blog posts, have just as much, if not more...There just as much, if not more, valuable than non-sponsored content. So really, really interesting results there, Adam, was that we found that really end customers are already engaging and reading this information, these sponsored and native advertising units, and they're actually finding them useful and in many cases helping them make decisions about products to buy or brands to interact with. So big advertisers already get this, right? This is one of those things where the big guys have been doing this for a while. What does this mean for small businesses, though, Adam? Because I think they're, as far as we can see, have barely even dipped their toe into native advertising.
I agree. And this train is coming, and this is a big trend. So, I mean, those stats are compelling, and we'd like to share more with you. That's just a little preview. Download our e-book, find out the rest, see a whole lot more native advertising statistics and the implications for small business. And as always, we all hope you'll subscribe to our YouTube channel and hope to see you back here at our Brown Bag tomorrow.
What is Native Advertising and How Does It Impact Consumers?
In April 2014, Semify conducted a survey of internet users asking about their experience with Native Advertising. As content grows on the internet, so does real-estate for advertisers. Native advertising is unique in the internet advertising world in that it lives within the space where users are already consuming online content--different from display advertising that has become increasingly intrusive.
This eBook provides insight into the consumer experience with a growing form of advertising.
Download the eBook by clicking here.