“Native advertising, the overladen vehicle upon which so many of publishers hopes now rest, faces the same challenges in an atomized content world. When working as intended, native advertising is commercial content intended to elicit the same user experience as the editorial content that surrounds it. In an atomized world, no editorial content surrounds it. It exists alone in the stream, adrift from the content it was intended to mimic.

With that unbundling, the only economic purpose for a site that makes its living from native advertising to create content other than native advertising is to maintain its brand. This means that the media company becomes a native advertising creative agency with an absurdly expensive brand marketing department formerly known as the newsroom”