• by P.J. Bednarski , Staff Writer @pjbtweet, June 16, 2015

Here’s a sad stat for a new medium. The Reuters Institute is reporting that one-third of news consumers in the US and UK feel deceived or disappointed by sponsored content. 

That’s the phrase that people in the business use to call native advertising -- except they never use that phrase with the public.

The rate of disillusionment goes up to 43% in the United States, where, Reuters says there is just more native advertising for people to get disgusted by.

You can make too much about citizens’ level of negative feelings about material that they privately consume ravenously. That would include pornography and television violence, which every so often surveys show people can’t stand. By pretty wide margins, many of us hate Congress (but we like our representative), and we hate cable (but, really, we aren’t all racing to disconnect).

The Reuters Institute Digital News Report runs the table on topics, touching on many topics, and noting the rise of mobile, the cooling of laptops and the rise in Facebook and other social media. It's good data, but not necessarily anything you don't already know in broad strokes.

As for native advertising and my suspicions about what people really think, I’m not trying to make what is sometimes called a “spirited defense” of native advertising. I'm merely noting that the general public has a general disappointment about a lot of things. That’s life, and  I’m in a happy mood today. 

The report carries a lot of reader crabbiness about all kinds of ads. Sample:  “ ‘Self-playing videos are the devils [sic] creation. You’re browsing the news late at night and suddenly an ad for laxatives is blasting out from your laptop at full volume!’ " said 51-year old Tanya in the United Kingdom.

One interesting observation about native advertising is that the better it is, the more it tends to irritate some people. 

An essay that’s part of the Reuters report says, “Readers appear to be more engaged with content that replicates the style and tone of the news brand, but as a result, are more likely to feel misled and deceived by the news brand. While news brands have much to gain from this new form of online advertising, the danger of further blurring of the line between advertising and editorial could harm the credibility of news brands, with little lasting impact on advertisers. Consumer attitudes show that, when it comes to native advertising, the stakes are far higher for news brands than for advertisers.”

So, native advertising may not be doing anybody in the publishing business any favors in the long run.

It should be noted that millennials are a lot less bothered than everybody else. Reuters suggests this is partly because they’ve grown up in a native advertising/BuzzFeed kind of world.

WHERE’S THIS SHIP GOING? Eleven weeks after it began, more than half of video Vessel’s stuff is streaming overseas, reports the Guardian.  

“If they only earn revenue through advertising, clearly the US market is helpful – it’s pretty mature and advanced, and rates tend to be higher than they are outside the US,” Vessel founder Jason Kilar told the newspaper.“But if most of their consumption is outside the US, the advertising monetization is quite different.”

Which, I think, is a way of saying all those foreign views might be great for some Vessel contributors, and not so great for others who are more or less unknown outside of These United States. In a growing global marketplace, it might be just fine. But I doubt Vessel would say that’s the direction it would prefer Vessel to be sailing at this point in its young existence. The United States is just too big of a market.

By the way, separately, Vessel today launched an Android app in beta.

Vessel launched as a site that would take better care of creators, mainly by offering them a fatter take from advertising revenue than YouTube does. Kilar tells the Guardian about one vlogger who will  nearly triple his income--to $3,600-- by adding Vessel to the mix of places the video can be seen and monetized.