“It adds something and costs you nothing.” News consumers on the value exchange of native advertising and related responsibilities for news media

ABSTRACT

(131w) As news media developed native advertising to attract advertisers, they depend on an increasing cost (time and energy) of news users to engage with it. Thus, they have to take news users’ needs into account as well. Following stakeholder marketing and service-dominant logic, this paper contends that the news ecosystem is a service ecosystem with value exchanged and co-created between stakeholders. Through in-depth interviews with users from a popular free news app, this study explores how news users perceive the value exchange of native advertising on news sites and the perceived value of individual native advertisements. The perceived value is determined by news users’ goal to consume newsworthy and informative content. To cater for this goal, native advertising needs to properly align content, advertiser type and ad position in the newsfeed.

KEYWORDS:

• Stakeholder marketing
• native advertising
• news media
• service-dominant logic
• audience 8000w

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the Fonds Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek [1S46720N]

Notes on contributors

Dorien Luyckx

Dorien Luyckx is a joint PhD researcher at the Department of Communication Studies of the University of Antwerp and the Institute for Media Studies at KU Leuven. She is a member of the MIOS research group (Media & ICT in Organizations & Society) at the University of Antwerp. Her work focuses on the business model of news media and how to resolve tensions between different stakeholders (e.g. advertisers, news media, audience).

Karolien Poels

Karolien Poels is a full professor of Strategic Communication and Persuasive Technologies at the Department of Communication Studies, University of Antwerp, Belgium, and member of the research group MIOS (Media & ICT in Organizations & Society). She studies how individuals use and experience social media and other types of online environments and how these insights can be applied by organizations for persuasive communication (advertising, health promotion, corporate communication) and their interactions with consumer/user protection and empowerment.

Tim Smits

Tim Smits is a full professor in Persuasion and Marketing Communication at the Institute for Media Studies, KU Leuven, Belgium. He published on various topics within these fields, but his main research focus pertains to persuasion and marketing communication dynamics that involve health and/or consumer empowerment and how these are affected by situational differences or manipulations.