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Native Advertising: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)

LastWeekTonight · 12.6M views · 2014-08-04 · 11:23

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Overview

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.

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Recommended as a funny, clear explanation of native advertising whenever sponsored content in media is discussed.

Recommended by 2 HN people across 2 months · HN mentions 2014–2026

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What people said

aaronbrethorst · 2014-09 · Strong recommendation

In case you haven't seen it yet, I highly recommend taking the next 11 minutes to watch John Oliver talk about native advertising: [VIDEO]

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TruffleLabs · 2014-08 · Recommendation

Watch John Oliver's Last Week Tonight video segment on native advertisement [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?

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OptionOfT · 2026-01 · Reference

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 [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. Anything after is contaminated.

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Sources

Video by LastWeekTonight, played through YouTube.

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