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Comment by ChicagoBoy11 | Hacker News Reader

Is it just me, or do other people actually LOVE this new trend of plugging your product/work/yourself through interesting blog posts? Like, I don't care how much $$$ this guy could spend on advertising --- this blog post is certainly far more effective in getting me to buy the product. I learned something, I was entertained, I now "trust" this individual, I got a great demo of the product's use... love it!

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Personally I did feel a little cheated when I realised that the article was an advertisement.

Content marketing like this blurs out what is someone's genuine opinion and what is advertisement.

I do not like it. Where I live, in Norway one has to clearly mark content marketing as advertisement or risk some steep fines.

It's written on Hunchly's own blog so I'm pretty sure it would be fine in Norway as well.

I didn't even know there was a product to buy after I read it

I hate ads and sponsored content but, like you, I loved this article. It's an easy read and the product doesn't play a fundamental role in the technical analysis or getting the message across. It's not shoved in my face. I learned something new (ad fraud on Facebook) and became aware of this guy's product without hating the process. Good balance.

One could argue that it's a huge piece to get a one-liner across, but I feel that's true about a lot of news stories, so base rate fallacy applies.

In general I don't mind the idea but this article sounded forced. I don't think I needed a run down of how their product worked to be told that Facebook lets advertisers pick a display URL that doesn't have to be related to the target URL.

If they just said that and put the ad target to their domain I wouldn't have minded.

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