Organic vs. Sponsored Content: From Ads to Native Ads

Online advertising is dominated by traditional techniques such as pop ups, banners, emails etc. Users are more likely to engage with content they find relevant and interesting, and ads generally disrupt their browsing experience. Hence an effective advertisement is one that simultaneously satisfies the marketing goals of the advertiser and also seamlessly embeds into the user experience. Such advertisements should be engaging, and presumably share features with organic (i.e. non-advertisement content). In this preliminary work, we aim at discovering features which best discriminate organic content from advertisements. For the advertiser it provides the utility of user targeting and revenue, but it also provides utility to the user, by making ads less of a nuisance and be interesting within a specific context.