InPowered wants you to trust advertisements by removing marketers from the equation.
The company has opened up its platform for free starting Tuesday, allowing anyone to find popular articles written about products or brands and push those stories on social media.
[seealso slug=http://sale-online.click/2012/12/13/infographic-native-advertising/%5D%3C/p%3E%3Cp%3EThis free service leads to inPowered's "paid amplification," which pushes the selected content to native ads and then tracks its success. The company has already accrued a variety of larger clients like Disney, AT&T and Chevrolet.
The company is one of a group of companies, including Outbrain and Skyword, that have attracted clients that want to find and promote content instead of creating it.
Bigger players have also started entering the space. Google allows brands to push their Google+ posts into ads. Facebook has been exploring social ads, featuring items that users have Liked.
InPowered is confident enough in its system that it is now giving away a service previously behind a paywall.
"Too many ‘content marketing’ vendors ask companies to start paying up front, before the company knows what impact the service will have on business metrics," Peyman Nilforoush, cofounder and CEO of inPowered, wrote in a press release. "At inPowered, we’re introducing a fundamentally different approach where everyone can utilize our free content discovery and amplification platform and see real results, then they can upgrade to paid amplification services, if they choose, for greater impact.”
A quick search on inPowered turns up a series of articles with stats on readership. Pictured below, a search for Mashable turned up three well-read stories, including recent news about fundraising. If so inclined, Mashable could then use those stories as promotion or pay to push out native ads featuring the content.
Native ads have become a lucrative but controversial part of Internet advertising. Traditional display advertising has suffered as users have become savvier about what and where to click.
Despite accusations that native advertising is by nature misleading at best and dishonest at worst, respected outlets (like Vanity Fair and the New York Times) have started to accept the strategy.