Native Advertising: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)
Why Hacker News recommends it
Recommended as a funny, clear explanation of native advertising whenever sponsored content in media is discussed.
What it is
A John Oliver Last Week Tonight segment on native advertising, showing how ads are disguised as editorial content in news media, including BuzzFeed and major newspapers.
Recommended by 2 HN commenters across 2 different months, 2014 to 2026.
What Hacker News said
Strong rec aaronbrethorst · 2014-09 · on “The invasion of corporate news”
In case you haven't seen it yet, I highly recommend taking the next 11 minutes to watch John Oliver talk about native advertising: [this video]
Recommends TruffleLabs · 2014-08 · on “BuzzFeed Raises $50M from Andreessen Horowitz”
Watch John Oliver's Last Week Tonight video segment on native advertisement [this video] (10 min long). There is a bit on BuzzFeed where he points out that many of the posts that are "top" are really from paid advertisers. Saying BuzzFeed is developing a journalism team is probably not the best wording. I would suggest BuzzFeed is building up a great PR, advertising, and marketing engine. They will make money. But is it journalism?
Cites mambodog · 2014-08 · on “BuzzFeed Raises $50M from Andreessen Horowitz”
[ads that pretend to be news stories] John Oliver recently commented on this stuff (so called "Native Advertising") on Last Week Tonight: [this video]
Cites TeMPOraL · 2015-10 · on “Reddit prepares to launch new news website 'Upvoted'”
Me too. Native advertising is plain evil, in a way even the worst drive-by malware flash popups aren't. They're ads designed with the sole purpose of tricking readers into thinking they're viewing a real article, and they abuse the trust readers have towards the news source. I think John Olliver covered the topic well enough[0], so let me just say that I only hope that Upvoted will label the ads clearly so that it's obvious for everyone they're reading paid content (imagine advertisers letting them do that, though...). > It could be a piece on Tesla Wait, since when Tesla does native ads? Do they do ads at all ? [0] - [this video]
Cites OptionOfT · 2026-01 · on “The A in AGI Stands for Ads”
I remember when Netflix took out a whole page ad for their Orange is the new Black show. John Oliver had a piece on it [this video] This is a natural extension of it. But what is revolutionary is the scale that this is now possible. We have so many people out there who now blindly trust the output of an LLM (how many colleagues have you had proudly telling you: I asked Claude and this is what it says <paste>). This is as advertiser's wet dream. Now it's ads at the bottom, but slowly they'll become more part of the text. And worst part: you don't know, bar the fact that the link has a refer(r)er attached to it. The internet before and after LLMs is like steel before and after the atomic bombs. Any