Everyone's (well, almost no one's) a critic

I think watermarks indicating clear sponsorship may have their place on content sites -- but probably not on the home page of a mainstream news site.

In that event, the likelihood of consumer misunderstanding and appearance of conflict of interest becomes much higher, because the content linked there is broad.

Neither the advertiser who ordered it nor the site manager who placed it can be completely certain at the time they decide to do it that the contents of that page won't appear to be some kind of conflict.

Even in situations where a watermarked sponsorship might be appropriate (e.g., Kraft sponsoring a page of cheese recipes), I have to believe there are better ways to design it than the madison.com example, which took a cluttered page and made it almost unusable.

Jay,

Thanks for helping out with this experiment. I still think there's some closet critics out there who should weigh in, but I guess they all have their own blogs for that ;-) .

But does anybody out there care to discuss the issue of AT&T's wallpaper ad on Madison.com, which was first raised by Ken Sands and explored in this E&P article?

http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_con...

I really think this is an interesting case. How many of you think the wallpaper or watermark ad at Madison.com is appropriate?

Where do we draw the line?

Discuss.

Jay DeFoore
Online Editor
www.editorandpublisher.com

Jeff Johns Talks Web Design With E

A web developer, colleague and friend of mine Jeff Johns recently talked shop with Editor and Publisher's Jay DeFoore as he lent his expert opinion on some recent newspaper website redesigns. The article highlighted several websites and Jeff, an online