A few weeks ago, I received an email from a major media publishing company, asking if I would write branded content native advertising. The first thing I did was to look up a definition of branded content and native advertising online. There is mention of BuzzFeed starting this phenomena and then the major publishers such as the New York Times, The Washington Post and USA Today. In these cases the advertiser and the publication work together to create content about the advertiser.
I understand why this happened, I have been a publisher since 2007 and have over two decades of experience writing. The trend has been for people to increasingly read content on devices in which you cannot see the advertisements and it is difficult to click on the ads. On top of that, there is a trend for search engines like Google to not even send searchers to content that has too much advertising on it. Ad blocking software can remove ads from the web reading audience completely.
