John Oliver is absolutely right in a recent piece on Last Week Tonight: websites have to pay the bills, and it can get very tricky when the pay isn’t great. We’ve seen other titles run advertorials and mark them very, very subtly, something which we don’t do ourselves. We make it obvious.
   Throughout our history, advertorial has been marked ‘A Lucire special promotion,’ in print and online. There have been rare exceptions in print, but the last time that happened was five years ago. In fact, in some cases on this website, we’ll even make it very clear in the headline (‘Sponsored video’), in the first line (‘A Lucire special promotion’) and in the footer (‘Post sponsored by …’). So there is no doubt when a story is being paid for. Instead of burying when advertorial is running, we’ve progressively made it more obvious over the years.
   Interestingly, our advertorial for L’Oréal Paris last week was popular with readers, and our Chocolate Heaven story was viewed a lot on social media, even more than some recent regular articles, so we know some readers enjoy the odd piece. In some cases, we don’t even share our advertorials on social media unless the client specifically asks us to.
   We believe that our readers are smart—however, we don’t believe we gain loyalty by fooling you. If you don’t want to read an advertorial, you have the option not to click on it when you see it linked—because it’s clear when it is paid for.
   We aim to be careful with readers with these ads—you’ll never be confused when there’s advertorial, and in 17 years it’s always been very clear online, to the point where it is now our policy on- and offline.—Jack Yan, Publisher