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Adds featured alongside links to content, Women's Health Magazine
http://www.womenshealthmag.com/food/soup-salad-ingredients |
When I read over the blog question for this week, it made me think of the increasingly blurred line that exists between online magazine articles, and the advertisements that are part of the container (website) they are presented within. If you take a magazine and look at its print version, it's usually fairly clear what is an advertisement, and what is not. In fact, in many countries, groups like the American Society of Magazine Editors actually mandate that content and advertising be kept separate, and not be featured on certain key pages (ie. the cover). However, go to the online version of that same magazine, and these same rules no longer exist - suddenly, it becomes difficult to tell what is part of the actual content of the magazine, and what is part of the advertising that the publisher relies on to fund that content.
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| Coca-cola advertisement in the 2003 Film, Elf |
In some cases, this advertising comes in the form of links to outside content, that are displayed alongside links to actual magazine content. In others, the advertisements are placed directly into the middle of articles themselves. In both cases, the line between content (the magazine articles) and container (the website and/or the overarching structure of the magazine) is blurred. You could argue that the same thing happens in movies as well, for example when coca-cola is featured in every scene with the main actor despite having nothing to do with the content of the movie. Maybe this blurring of the lines between content and container is just the way of the future, something as non-threatening as the increasing preference for open source data formats that can be read on multiple devices. However I, for now, find advertisements that blur the content-ad (or the content-container) distinction somewhat disturbing.
Sources:
American Society of Magazine Editors:
http://www.magazine.org/asme
Kara, this is a really interesting way to show the blurring of content and container because it is such a uniquely digital problem, to be not only advertised to but potentially transported away from your original content. I think one of the more insidious things about lots of blogs and online magazines is not just the integration of ads, but the blending of different article types and sources (like the clickbait that tries to pull you away from the website you're on to make you look at fake celebrity gossip or weird photoshopped pictures).
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