ASBPE on hypertext ads

For an update on the debate about sponsored links in editorial content on the web, check out this article on the national ASBPE website: "What ASBPE, B2B bloggers said about paid links in articles."

Ethics controversy continues at Ziff Davis; ASBPE clarifies ethics guidelines

Note: This post comes from the ASBPE Boston Blog and was made by Martha Spizziri. Link:
ASBPE Boston Blog: Ziff Davis, eWeek, Again Subject of Ethics Controversy.

The same day I posted about a recent Folio: profile of Ziff Davis Media, B2B publishing consultant Paul Conley published a blog post titled "Ziff Davis crosses the ethics line again."

Conley's post centers around Ziff Davis' decision to once again use Vibrant Media's IntelliTXT in-context ads on some of its sites, after pulling them from eWeek earlier this year. (See earlier post on this blog, "eWeek/IntelliTXT Flap," and two earlier posts on Paul Conley's blog, "eWeek crosses an ethical line" and " eWeek retreats in ads-within-edit scandal" for background.) The ads are back in eWeek and also appear on the company's CIO Insights web site.

Folio: published a story about the controversy on May 3. The article quotes Ziff Davis editorial director and senior VP Michael Vizard as saying "The IntelliTXT ads are clearly labeled as advertisements in compliance with existing ASME and ASBPE guidelines as we understand them. Should these officially recognized bodies adopt specific policies related to IntelliTXT ads, we would welcome that clarification and would also be inclined to comply with those guidelines."

ASBPE's ethics guidelines do, in fact, state that links within editorial content should be under editorial control. But in response to Vizard's statement, the ASBPE ethics committee has attempted to clarify the issue. The last sentence of the relevant portion of our Code of Preferred Editorial Practices, Section VII, Paragraph D, previously read:

Contextual links within editorial content should not be sold, and generally should not link to a vendor’s Web site, unless it is pertinent to the editorial content or helpful to the reader.

It now reads:

Contextual links within editorial content should not be sold. If an editor allows a link, it generally should not link to a vendor’s Web site, unless it is pertinent to the editorial content or helpful to the reader.

ASBPE national president Roy Harris relayed this change to Folio: and it was posted as an addendum to the May 3 article. As Roy says in an accompanying statement to Folio:, "We feel the code offers a clear guideline: Editors, not publishers or ad-sales folks, should make the final decisions on ALL uses of links within edit copy. Also, ad links within editorial text should NOT be sold under any condition."

A short news item about the whole matter will soon be issued by ASBPE national and posted on the ASBPE web site. I'll post an update when it appears. In the meantime, here are other posts on the topic:

From ASBPE ethics committee member Jeff Seglin:

• "Hypertext Ads Within Online Edit Cause Confusion"

From Paul Conley's blog:

• "ASBPE takes stand in Ziff Davis ad-link scandal"
• "More on the Ziff Davis ads-in-edit scandal"

From custom publisher Rex Hammock's blog:

• "Paul Conley is mad as hell at Ziff Davis for embedding text ads in news articles"

For a contrarian view, see this post on Eric Shanfelt's personal blog:

• "Give Ziff Davis a Break"

(Shanfelt is a former senior VP of emedia at Penton Media Inc.)

IntelliTXT trouble at Ziff Davis

Ziff Davis' eWeek is getting blasted by the B2B blogs for its use of contextual ads. Below are thoughts posted by Martha Spizziri, the vice president of the ASBPE Boston chapter. (See her original post: ASBPE Boston Blog: eWeek/IntelliTXT Flap.)

In case you missed it: Woburn-based Ziff Davis publication eWeek has been the subject of some Internet controversy for its use of IntelliTXT contextual ads, which are hotlinked from within the text of editorial content. The IntelliTXT service was developed by the company Vibrant Media.

Rather than repeat what's already been said, I'll direct you to some of what's been written about it:

• "eWeek crosses an ethical line" from Paul Conley's blog
• "eWeek doesn’t want me to visit eweek.com" from Matt McAlister's Inside Online Media blog

One thing I will repeat that's mentioned in Paul Conley's post: ASBPE's ethics guidelines state

The editorial department should control all editorial content on a publication’s digital publication, including Web site, blogs, e-newsletters, digital magazines, and others. Standards such as accuracy, attribution, fairness, and balance applying to a publication’s printed editorial material also apply to a publication’s Internet or digital presence.

Care should be used online, as with printed material, to avoid placement of advertisements in or near editorial content in a way that could compromise editorial integrity or confuse the reader.

And I do have a few comments about this 2004 post from John Battelle's Searchblog, which Matt McAlister's post above also links to: "IntelliTXT: Your Advertising Peanut Butter Is In My Editorial Chocolate..." Although the piece is almost three years old, Battelle makes an interesting devil's-advocate argument that contextual ads within articles might not be so bad after all. Battelle's reasoning, in brief:

... [M]agazines that are essentially catalog magazines ('magalogs'), or most of the Seven Sisters (Glamour, Vogue, etc) ... pretty much exist to move product, and they don't pretend otherwise. A system like this would work quite well for the online kin to these kind of publications. ...

Second, there are an entire classes of content-driven sites which claim absolutely no pretense of editorial objectivity. Whether they are fan sites, directories, blogs, corporate advertorials, for-profit domain-specific portals, you name it, the tradition of sites which carry their biases proudly or are baldly commercial in nature is rich and growing, and IntelliTXT may well give these kind of sites a new monetization model.

Leaving aside whether directories, blogs, and fan sites are, or ought to be, commercial in nature, I'd say that at best the IntelliTXT model is annoying--in the same way that even editorial links can be annoying when the text is vague. In both cases, you aren't really sure what kind of information you'll get if you click.

IntelliTXT links are distinguished from editorial links by a green double-underline format, and Stevenson tells Battelle that the links are a service, and that the reader won't see the ad unless she makes a conscious choice to click an IntelliTXT link. But the format is not enough to distinguish them as ads to the casual user, at least at this point in IntelliTXT's life. And -- in the 2007 iteration, at least--you don't have to click on the link for the ad to appear. Just rolling over it does the trick.

It's also interesting that, according to Battelle, Stevenson basically argues that the links don't inherently represent a conflict because the publisher decides what words to link, so that if the links aren't appropriate, it's the publisher's responsibility. Battelle doesn't quote Stevenson's exact words, but if Stevenson did in fact mention only the publisher, I wonder why he doesn't think the editor should be the decision maker when it comes to links.