Blurry Line Between Editorial and Advertising?

Zinio’s done something curious this month with Popular Mechanics. They’ve published a Digital Lifestyle Guide and offered it up to readers for free. The issue is sponsored by NewEgg - nothing special here. We often have digital editions which are paid for in whole or in part by sponsors. But what’s curious is that the digital edition talks about many products people can buy - some of which are sold by NewEgg and some of which aren’t. But in many cases Zinio only created links to buy the products from the products sold by NewEgg.

So on page 37 of the publication (I’d link directly to it but Zinio - unlike NXTbook - doesn’t have page specific permalinks) we see the Top 2 digital camcorders this year. But NewEgg doesn’t sell the #1 ranked one, so the link is only live for the #2 one. More troubling is that links to some manufacturers (which appear on the page) aren’t made live, either (see Page 21) and that some article headlines link to product purchase pages at NewEgg (Clicking on the headline of an article about installing a graphics card takes you to the NewEgg Graphics Card purchase page (p.45)).

Is this a violation of church and state? That’s debatable - what’s not in debate is the fact that this likely isn’t in the readers’ best interest. Links are the cornerstone of digital editions and they should be used to first benefit readers, not advertisers.

We love the NewEgg sponsorship and think other publishers can learn from it - but think all links which appear in printed versions should be made live online and that links created should be as relevant as possible.