100% understood mine is not a popular position. The consensus from journalists and readers re advertorial is generally the same as yours. &quot;Nobody wants them or has ever wanted them&quot; is not a true statement: people buy and sell advertorials all the time. They are and have been a fact of the media business since there has been a media business.<p>There&#x27;s no meaningful distinction between advertorial, product placement, sponsorships and the like in this context. E.T. eating Elliot’s Reese’s Pieces, J.Lo and Harry Connick Jr. drinking Pepsi on American Idol, Salvatore Ferragamo right under NYT’s front-page stories, WFAN&#x27;s Boomer and Carton talking about their dinner at Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse were all bought and paid for by advertisers. This is how the business works and has worked. This is how your newspaper, magazine, TV show, radio program, web site, and movie are produced and brought to you.<p>For many people, advertising in general is crap. Done well, it can be good, informative, and entertaining. Most of us have ads we like. A lot of times, these stick out because they&#x27;re exceptions. I&#x27;ve seen solid BBQ recipes and ERP project planning tips made possible by Reynolds and SAP. And I&#x27;ve seen plenty of shrill, shilly examples of paid content where I never made it beyond the first graf.<p>Crap ads, crap editorial, crap advertorial is about crap execution, it&#x27;s not that those things are inherently crap. The people who execute them well will have success and will able to produce other work that success allows.<p>With regard to &quot;poison the well,&quot; even outside of advertising -- in the &quot;pure editorial&quot; world -- there are always biases and points of view in play. Humans are impure. Watch a State of the Union, basketball game, or Counter-Strike tournament, and then read or watch coverage of the same from any two media outlets. There will be differences from what you observed and how they were reported. The well water is of a different quality than your understanding of it. But that&#x27;s just, like, my opinion, man.<p>With regard to &quot;net negative,&quot; I build capabilities for people to tell stories and share them with people who care about those stories. I&#x27;ve gotten hundreds of creators published and paid by global publications by which they would not otherwise have been associated. I&#x27;ve helped these creators grow their communities, their body of work, their credentials, and their careers. They have hard data to consider this a net-positive, and I agree.