Selling their souls to the advertisers? How native advertising degrades the quality of prestige media outlets

ABSTRACT Native advertising – disguising sponsored content as journalistic material – is not a new phenomenon, but only recently has it reached news media outlets that stand for high-quality journalism. To investigate the potential impact of native advertising on perceived media quality, a 2 (source: low vs. high quality media outlet) × 3 (content: ad-free article vs. declared native advertising article vs. undeclared native advertising article) factorial between-subjects experiment was conducted. This experimental study found that news media outlets that stand for high-quality journalism damage their quality as perceived by recipients when publishing properly declared native advertising.