The Internet giant without portfolio has finally gotten into the social-media mix with its purchase of micro-blogging site Tumblr. Or so news reports tell us.

From Tuesday’s New York Times:

A Flashy Bet for Yahoo on a Shift in Social Media

Yahoo’s $1.1 billion proposed acquisition of Tumblr is a huge coup for the young founder of the even younger start-up and a splashy move by Marissa Mayer to shake up her company.

It also heralds a larger shift in social media. Facebook arguably invented modern social networking, and is still the king. But increasingly its approach is seen as passive and outdated as people flock to sites like Tumblr where they can be more actively engaged in creating personal, expressive content to share — and which could potentially translate to advertising dollars.

“People love a stage or a pulpit from which they can broadcast,” S. Shyam Sundar, a director of the Media Effects Research Laboratory at Pennsylvania State University, explained. “The genie is out of the bottle. Everyone loves it and it’s very seductive for users to get online and be a source of content, rather than just consuming passively.”

So far, so good. Except Yahoo! is preternaturally adept at screwing up what it acquires.

The Times chose this for its history lesson:

But Wait. Didn’t Yahoo Try a Deal Like This Before?

When Yahoo announced its headline-grabbing acquisition, it boasted that the deal gave it access to an “unduplicated” audience of users and that its target was a “popular personal publishing” platform.

“Yahoo will be able to integrate and distribute a powerful set of state-of-the-art editing tools and content published through personal home pages in an array of services,” the company declared.

But Yahoo wasn’t talking about Tumblr. Those quotes came from a news release Yahoo issued in 1999 when it acquired GeoCities, which allowed users to create their own Web pages — not unlike Tumblr — for $3.6 billion in stock. The site was closed in 2009.

According to the Times report, both Yahoo and GeoCities were money losers at the time of the merger, and “both companies had loyal followers that quickly left in droves.”

Fair enough. But an even better case study comes from Gizmodo:

How Yahoo Killed Flickr and Lost the Internet

Web startups are made out of two things: people and code. The people make the code, and the code makes the people rich. Code is like a poem; it has to follow certain structural requirements, and yet out of that structure can come art. But code is art that does something. It is the assembly of something brand new from nothing but an idea.

This is the story of a wonderful idea. Something that had never been done before, a moment of change that shaped the Internet we know today. This is the story of Flickr. And how Yahoo bought it and murdered it and screwed itself out of relevance along the way.

Now Yahoo has a chance to do the same to Tumblr.

This time, though, the murder weapon will be native advertising.

From MediaPost:

Yahoo To Ramp ‘Native’ Ads On Tumblr

With its $1.1 billion acquisition of Tumblr, Yahoo on Monday made clear that it plans to allow the blogging service to continue to operate as a separate business and brand. That includes no Yahoo branding on Tumblr. At the same time, the Web portal will look for ways to integrate advertising, search and content management on the back-end to bolster growth across both companies.

Except listen to Tumblr founder David Karp three years ago (according to the Times): “We’re pretty opposed to advertising . . . It turns our stomach.”

Yes, well, bring on the Pepto-Bismol, because here’s what Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer doublespoke yesterday: “It’s easy for us to imagine engagement on the core site will improve as we integrate this content.”

Translation for the monetized-impaired: We will wring every dollar possible out of Tumblr.

And likely watch it Flickr out in the process.

ESPN: The Magazine Puts a Print Spin on Sponsored Content

Sidebars to feature advertiser’s logo

Branded content has gotten plenty of attention as it’s taken off online where the division between editorial and advertising real estate can be fuzzier (see: Forbes,The Atlantic, BuzzFeed, Gawker), but publishers have shied away from using similar strategies in print. Now, ESPN: The Magazine is taking a page from electronic media by letting an advertiser incorporate its logo into editorial content.

Starting with the magazine’s 15th anniversary issue this week, ESPN will run an editorial sidebar bearing the words “Cold Hard Facts presented by Coors Light” at the top. The ESPN edit team will have full control over the sidebars; MillerCoors won’t have final approval or get to preview the content ahead of time, according to editor in chief Chad Millman.

Right. Raise your hand if you think ESPN will ever again have a bad word to say about Coors, Miller, or Chad Millman.

Us neither.

Does BuzzFeed Know the Secret?

Jonah Peretti’s viral-content machine purports to have solved the problems of both journalism and advertising at once, all with the help of a simple algorithm.

Perhaps you are unfamiliar with the website BuzzFeed—though this is increasingly unlikely, as it’s currently enjoying a viral moment. The site is a hyper active amalgam: simultaneously a journalism website, a purveyor of funny lists, and a perpetual pop-culture plebiscite where you can vote on articles with bright-yellow buttons reading lol, wtf, and omg. You can find news there, really serious news by first-rate journalists, about subjects like lobbying scandals and killer drones. You can also find an enormous amount of stuff like “The 40 Greatest Dog GIFs of All Time.” If you’re into that, in fact, there’s an entire section devoted to animals.

Not to mention big chunks devoted to native advertising, which is sponsored content (read: marketing material) that’s virtually indistinguishable from editorial content. According to the New York piece, “[c]urrently, BuzzFeed is running 38 ad campaigns, which usually consist of about a month’s worth of posts, and cost an average of around $100,000.”

And BuzzFeed is entirely unapologetic about the blurring of the line between advertiing and editorial:

Peretti says that twentieth-century media businesses sowed the seeds of their own destruction by treating advertising as a “necessary evil.” He, by contrast, doesn’t care whether a post is produced by a journalist or sponsored by a brand, so long as it travels. He’s a semiotic Darwinist: He believes in messages that reproduce. “Some editorial content sucks, some ads are awesome,” Peretti [said], “and for many readers this line is even more important to them than church and state.”

But others aren’t quite so sanguine. As Felix Salmon writes on his Reuters blog (via the Nieman Journalism Lab):

[The New York piece is] wrong that native advertising is fundamentally “mundane”, and provides just a “modest” uplift to whatever you can achieve through more traditional channels. Native pageviews might hard to come by — but any smart brand would absolutely prefer a single native pageview to a dozen banner-ad impressions. The difference between the two isn’t something marginal, on the order of 20% or 30%: it’s huge — a good order of magnitude, at least.

Beyond that, Salmon says, “[i]n terms of disruptive force . . . native has a huge advantage over banners in that it is much more effective in connecting with consumers. And there’s another way that it’s disruptive, too: it utterly upends the standard ad-agency business model.”

The issue there is not that ad agencies lose their precious 15% commission. It’s that consumers gradually lose the distinction between advertising and editorial, which means they gradually lose confidence in the integrity of editorial content.

Anybody else worried about that?

Now the New York Times has jumped on the brandwagon.

Sponsors Now Pay for Online Articles, Not Just Ads

Articles in a series on Mashable.com called “What’s Inside” looked for all the world like the hundreds of other articles on the digital media site. But journalistically, they were something very different.

The articles, about technology topics in a wide variety of products, including modems and the Hubble Space Telescope, were paid for by Snapdragon, a brand of processor chip made by Qualcomm, and the sponsor of the series. Most were even written by Mashable editorial employees . . .

Advertisers and publishers have many names for this new form of marketing — including branded content, sponsored content and native advertising. Regardless of the name, the strategy of having advertisers sponsor or create content that looks like traditional editorial content has become increasingly common as publishers try to create more sources of revenue.

The Times piece over all is so relentlessly sunny-side-up, it reads like sponsored content for sponsored content.

Unfortunately, this is getting to be a habit with the Times. Last month the paper ran a similarly judgment-free piece by Stockholm-syndrome ad columnist Stuart Elliott about sponsored content on television.

Hey, Timesniks: Keep this up and you’ll need to change your slogan to “All the steno that’s fit to print.

Letting Down Our Guard With Web Privacy

SAY you’ve come across a discount online retailer promising a steal on hand-stitched espadrilles for spring. You start setting up an account by offering your e-mail address — but before you can finish, there’s a ping on your phone. A text message. You read it and respond, then return to the Web site, enter your birth date, click “F” for female, agree to the company’s terms of service and carry on browsing.

But wait: What did you just agree to? Did you mean to reveal information as vital as your date of birth and e-mail address?

Most of us face such decisions daily. We are hurried and distracted and don’t pay close attention to what we are doing. Often, we turn over our data in exchange for a deal we can’t refuse.

Helpful graphic of an experiment by Alessandro Acquisti, a behavioral economist at Carnegie Mellon University:

Explanation:

Aiming to learn how consumers determine the value of their privacy, Mr. Acquisti dispatched a set of graduate students to a suburban mall on the outskirts of Pittsburgh. To some shoppers, the students offered a $10 discount card, plus an extra $2 discount in exchange for their shopping data. Half declined the extra offer — apparently, they weren’t willing to reveal the contents of their shopping cart for a mere $2.

To other shoppers, however, the students offered a different choice: a $12 discount card and the option of trading it in for $10 if they wished to keep their shopping record private. Curiously, this time, 90 percent of shoppers chose to keep the higher-value coupon — even if it meant giving away the information about what they had bought.

So, since we apparently are incapable of protecting our own online privacy, lawmakers are starting to do it for us. And, as it has in so many other areas, California is leading the way.

From the Wall Street Journal:

New Online-Data Bill Sets Up Privacy Fight

Internet Firms Push Back on California Proposal Requiring They Disclose What Has Been Done With Users’ Information

Silicon Valley is fighting privacy advocates over a California bill, the first of its kind in the nation, that would require companies like Facebook and Google  to disclose to users the personal data they have collected and with whom they have shared it.

The industry backlash is against the “Right to Know Act,” a bill introduced in February by Bonnie Lowenthal, a Democratic assemblywoman from Long Beach. It would make Internet companies, upon request, share with Californians personal information they have collected—including buying habits, physical location and sexual orientation—and what they have passed on to third parties such as marketing companies, app makers and other companies that collect and sell data.

That would represent a mortal wound to digital outlets whose lifeblood is sucking data like bone marrow from their users.

Think Facebook, Google, Amazon, and etc. are going to roll over and play dead?

Think again.

Now comes her sneaktweet for Nike (via the Boston Herald).

From Monday’s edition:

Menounos tweet:

See Menounos connection to Nike here.

Far be it from the hardtracking staff to label Maria Menounos a tweetslut, but c’mon, yeah?

The Googletron will not be pwned!

From Search Engine Land:

As News Publications Experiment With Sponsored Content, Google Says Keep It Out Of Google News

News publications having “sponsored content “deals are on the rise, and Google’s apparently concerned enough that it’s issued a warning today that publishers should keep such content out of Google News.

In a post today on the Google News blog, the company writes:

If a site mixes news content with affiliate, promotional, advertorial, or marketing materials (for your company or another party), we strongly recommend that you separate non-news content on a different host or directory, block it from being crawled with robots.txt, or create a Google News Sitemap for your news articles only.Otherwise, if we learn of promotional content mixed with news content, we may exclude your entire publication from Google News.

So what’s Google all kerfoogled about? Just this:

Problem is, that Wireless Changing Healthcare link isn’t editorial content, it’s advertorial content, compliments of the Post’s new Brand Connect service.

Except it’s not at all clear that what you’re linked to is an ad in sheep’s clothing.

Judge for yourself:

Google has good reason to be concerned. The more this kind of stealth marketing jumps the advertising/editorial fence,  the less credible Google search results become.

Fair is fair: Google has done a reasonably good job keeping its search results separate from its ad results.

Representative sample:

If Google can’t continue to keep that basic level of separation, look for more and more people to separate themselves from Google.

It all started when the hardtracking staff saw page 12 of Sunday’s Boston Herald:

It was this item that caught our eye:

That got us to wondering who was paying whom. So we started poking around.

And here’s what the hardpoking staff discovered.

#1. Maria Menounos’ original tweet:

#2. Other #fabfound tweets:

#3. The connection between Marshalls and #fabfound:

#4. The hardtracking staff’s tweet to Maria Menounos:

Oddly enough, Maria hasn’t responded yet.

But you get the picture, yeah?

Not so in the case of media maven Jim Romenesko. Sponsored content posts on his blog are no ads in sheep’s clothing.

Here’s how they look among the other posts:

And here’s what you click to:

In both cases, it’s perfectly clear what you’re reading.

An advertisement.

And that’s exactly the way it should be.

That said, here’s the latest front in the stealth marketing juggernaut: Haul Videos.

Representative sample (this has 1,713,861 views).

Story via All Things Considered:

Showing Off Shopping Sprees, Fashion ‘Haulers’ Cash In Online

Before getting to her homework, Abigail Moscaritolo, 19, sits in her unadorned room and adjusts her webcam. With little effort, she spills about the cute things she bought last week: a lazy white tee, a couple of basic black tops, bohemian-like earrings.

“This was on sale for $20 with 70 percent off, so you do the math,” she says, holding up an oversized shirt.

She’s making a “haul video” — the YouTube equivalent of calling a best friend and gushing about a recent shopping spree. Trivial details are accepted and overexcitement is encouraged.

“I thought it’d be cool to give fashion inspiration to other people,” says Moscaritolo, who constantly reassures her audience that she’s not bragging about her finds.

It’s also, for some, lucrative.

There are many ways haulers partner with companies, [Caitlin Ellsworth, a.k.a. Glamourista 16] says. Some review products from retailers that then pay them. Others receive commission on sales generated by videos that feature a company’s product. In some cases, girls with corporate sponsors host contests to give away products.

“You can definitely make a lot,” Ellsworth says. “Some girls are making six figures. So, it can definitely be a good job.”

In every scenario, haulers are required under Federal Trade Commission guidelines to disclose in videos if they received free things.

Raise your hand if you think that happens much.

Us neither.

To the hardtracking staff, this is just a bunch of longhaired teenage girls babbling about their latest fashion finds.

But to stealth marketers, it’s gold.