Online publishers have been doing a lot of
soul-searching lately about how to give their advertising revenue a shot
of adrenaline without upsetting their readers. Native advertising, in
which stories commissioned by sponsors are dressed up to resemble
editorial material, is one of the most widely discussed efforts by
publishers (including efforts at The New York Times).
A new technology starting to catch the
attention of publishers, especially outside the United States, could
further feed the debate over native advertising by turning any visual
element on a web page, including editorial photographs and videos, into
advertisements.
The technology from a Finnish start-up called Kiosked works
like this: publishers who want to earn revenue from photographs and
videos on their sites place a snippet of code from Kiosked on their
pages. When a reader visits the page, Kiosked does a split-second scan
of the written material that accompanies a photo on the page — perhaps a
news story or a product review. It then presents a selection of one or
more relevant products or services the reader can buy online, overlaying
the items on a strip that hovers above the photo.
Kiosked says the publishers using its
technology, which it released last fall, include The Telegraph, the
British newspaper; IDG, the publisher of technology magazines and Web
sites; and a variety of fashion, technology and sports publications in
Europe, including Rugby Week and T3.
In a telephone interview, Micke Paqvalén, the
founder and chief executive of Kiosked, said the company’s technology
“engages consumers in content” rather than acting like pushy, intrusive
advertisements.
“We want to be viewed as a service, not as an
advertisement,” Mr. Paqvalén said. “We are always looking at it from a
consumer point of view, and consumers are extremely conscious. They will
respond if it becomes overcommercialized.”
The big question with native advertising is
whether readers realize they are seeing an advertisement to begin with
(publishers like The Times give readers various visual cues to denote
sponsored content). With Kiosked, advertisements and editorial content
are not merely adjacent — one rests on top of the other. And the ads are
harnessing images, the most visually arresting element of a Web page,
where ads have not typically intruded before (other advertising
technologies let people provide hyperlinks to products from words in
articles).
The advertisements on photos seem less
jarring in some instances than others. On device review sites and
fashion magazines, the line between editorial and advertising
photographs has long been a little fuzzy. Readers are there, after all,
for articles that help them figure out what to buy.
On a a review
on PC Advisor of the Xbox One, for instance, Kiosked’s shopping widget
pops up over a photograph of the game console, with links to buy Call of
Duty and other games from an online retailer, Base.com.
An article
on animal print clothing on a Dutch fashion Web site, Fashionista, has
links to related merchandise that appear over a picture of a model with a
rooster T-shirt.
Other examples feel a bit more intrusive. An image
on a Rugby Week story about a recent British match, for example, has
links to buy jerseys, leggings and other sports equipment. A photo
of James Cracknell, an Olympic rower and endurance athlete, that ran
with a question-and-answer column in
The Telegraph is festooned with
links to buy hiking boots, a Nike FuelBand and sunscreen.
Publishers that use Kiosked can decide what
types of visual content will and won’t have the shopping links,
banishing them from photographs of, say, suffering in Syria and other
images where the tone is especially incompatible with commerce.
Publishers get access to a battery of
analytical tools so they can see which images get people shopping the
most. And since they collect revenue from successful purchases, it is
easy to see how tempting it will be for publishers to make editorial
decisions about photographs based on such considerations.
To Mr. Paqvalén, publishers should be able to
get a piece of the action since their editorial material is, in many
cases, already helping people make purchases on web stores.
“In the world we’re in today, the publisher
is creating impulses, and e-commerce merchants are capturing the value
of these impulses,” he said. With Kiosked, he said, publishers
themselves “become the web shops of the future.”
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