Native Advertising Represents A New Search Frontier

With both Google and the Federal Trade Commission (and possibly other groups) warning publishers and advertisers against creating consumer confusion through “native advertising”, “advertorials”, or “guest content”, a lot of big publishers are pushing their native ads into the Dark Web. The Dark Web consists of those uncrawlable regions that search engines cannot or choose not to reach.
Some native advertising is creative and entertaining enough to merit its own audience. Just as TV commercials can become wildly popular with viewing audiences, online advertising can stir discussion and build up loyal followings.
But how are consumers to find all this native advertising? Brand loyalty will help surface some of the content through social media connections but presently there is no general purpose search tool available that allows consumers to look for all the native advertising their favorite brands publish.
You have to rely on site search at the major publisher Websites, and if they are using a Google Custom Search Engine but blocking Google through robots.txt then you won’t find the native advertising.
YouTube and Pinterest have proven beyond question that people search for and share commercial advertising. What’s more, some YouTube channels republish vintage and recent TV and radio promotions emblazoned with their own advertising. YouTube itself also embeds advertising on top of the videos of old ads.
The remonetization of old advertising is well underway and probably is almost unstoppable at this point. It may only be a matter of time before someone figures out how to remonetize new advertising content, especially in the “native advertising” style.
Consumers love this stuff. They create digital collections of their favorite ads and share them on social media and blogs. The creativity that goes into making advertising both interesting and entertaining, in some cases highly informative, does not go unrewarded.
It’s arguable how much some of these creative ads drive sales. In fact, there have been a few case studies over the years that show ads can “jump the shark” just like anything else — taking the creativity so far that consumers become more interested in the advertising than the products being sold.
Nonetheless, we live in an age when information is repackaged a hundred different ways, and we now routinely compile data about data. The advertising-made-as-content content is now fair game for collection and sharing; some advertising campaigns even embrace the sharing. So why should there not be a search service that only indexes native advertising? This would just be a variation on product search, for which several dedicated search engines already exist.
If that day should come the SEO community will no doubt be drawn into the experience as marketers turn to marketers to help market their marketing content through marketing content search tools. And consumers will love them.


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