[Smudge]

Curious about the first one -- was there some kind of conflict of interest? As far as I can tell all you were doing was taking public information already available on the page and disclosing it with a much more visible banner. Was your employer heavily involved in Native Advertising campaigns or something?

[erlehmann_]

OP is an engineer at Google: http://www.ianww.com/

[bbcbasic]

Talk about biting the hand that feeds ;-)

[Trundle]

Imo it'd actually help google if anything. As far as I know, they're not in the sponsored content game. If hypothetically, OPs thingo blew up and sponsored content articles became useless, that's more advertising budget freed up to go in to Googles pocket.

[webtechgal]

That could cut both ways -

The sponsors whose content articles get blown up might get pissed with Google and take their ad spend elsewhere...

[erlehmann_]

I consider advertising evil, as the primary goal is to replace useful thoughts with thoughts of buying and consuming things.

[bbcbasic]

In case it wasn't clear, I meant the OP is biting the hand that feeds.