[dorgo]

What we see here is evolution of advertisement. From low quality spam-like ads to higher quality advertorials, which must provide some usefullness to the reader in order to carmouflage as normal content and to attract attention. I work in a marketing agency and there is a big shift from Adwords + SEO to "content marketing". Big money is put into creating interesting or funny stuff to attract attention (and backlinks).

[teddyh]

If the content is sponsored, this fact must still be disclosed according to FCC regulations. These disclosures could be detected. In fact, there is already a Firefox extension to do this: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/addetector/