Papers › Distinguishing Commercial from Editorial Content in News
Distinguishing Commercial from Editorial Content in News
Timo Kats, Peter van der Putten, Jasper Schelling
How can we distinguish commercial from editorial content in news, or more specifically, differentiate between advertorials and regular news articles? An advertorial is a commercial message written and formatted as an article, making it harder for readers to recognize these as advertising, despite the use of disclaimers. In our research we aim to differentiate the two using a machine learning model, and a lexicon derived from it. This was accomplished by scraping 1.000 articles and 1.000 advertorials from four different Dutch news sources and classifying these based on textual features. With this setup our most successful machine learning model had an accuracy of just over 90%. To generate additional insights into differences between news and advertorial language, we also analyzed model coefficients and explored the corpus through co-occurrence networks and t-SNE graphs.
Code
Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.
Code Syntology ran Syntology
Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.
Tasks
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.
Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections