What is Native Advertising?

You may have seen the term, native advertising, in blog posts and research reports.  I came across it again this morning reading the Research Brief published by the Center for Media Research asking the question, Where's The State of Native Advertising?  It noted in a recent survey to answer this question many folks were unclear on the concept so the article authors provided a definition:

"Native advertising is a web advertising method in which the advertiser attempts to gain attention by providing content in the context of the user’s experience; for example, ads appearing alongside search results are ‘native’ to the search experience."

There you go.  Text ads on Google, sponsored links, sponsorship with the most popular being "blog posts (65%), articles (63%), and Facebook (56%).

Thought you'd never ask.

Here's the first reference to the term I noticed. The November 14th article by Gord Hotchkiss entitled, Google's Etymological Dream Come True, as he was uncomfortable initially with the word, native, but then discovered "the root of “native” is the Latin “nasci," meaning born and that indeed this form of advertising was "born" on the search page."

On a side note, his article also pointed me to Google's nGram. "With it, you can plot the popularity of words over 500 years in a body of over five million books."  So, I plotted the popularity of a term I have been working to increase awareness of through my Website, EarthSayers.tv, voices of sustainability.

Link to chart here on sustainable development and sustainability, 1980 - 2008.

Very interesting tool to use in creating titles and excerpts of your white papers and blog posts or, if you are a technologists, names you choose to popularize for concepts and products. Here's link to the chart comparing Excel, Google, Spreadsheet ( 1980-2008)

Ruth Ann Barrett, November 19, 2013, Portland, Oregon.