Effects of Ad Quality & Content-Relevance on Perceived Content Quality

Native advertising, ads that are highly cohesive with actual content in format and style, is a pervasive online trend. We report on a two-stage Mechanical Turk experiment exploring the effects of perceived quality of native ads on perceptions of site quality. First, a set of native ads was rated (N=98) for perceived annoyance and trust. Second, we compare four conditions of an aggregation of news headlines (N=237): 'no ads', 'low quality ads', 'high quality ads + content-relevant', 'high-quality ads + not content-relevant'. Our results indicate that native ads, which in isolation have been rated as high quality, could still have a negative effect on perceived site credibility and perceived site quality if they are too content-relevant. In addition to the effect of ad quality alone (e.g. non-annoying, trustworthy ads), there is an additional impact for ads that are too similar to content; avoiding confusion is important for quality perceptions.