Online media companies rely more and more on paid advertising to keep their lights on and their content engines humming. "
[Native advertising](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_advertising)
" is a popular alternative to the unsightly banner ads and infuriating pop-ups of Internet Advertising 1.0. Native ads mimic the core content of the site they're advertising on, ideally avoiding any interruption of the user's experience.
![](https://storage.googleapis.com/kaggle-media/competitions/kaggle/4493/media/dato_banner3.png)
When native advertising is done right, users aren't desperately scanning an ad for a hidden "x". In fact, they don't even know they're viewing one. To pull this off, native ads need to be just as interesting, fun, and informative as the unpaid content on a site.
[Dato](https://dato.com/)
is sponsoring this competition with the noble goal of making native advertising live up to its name. With a dataset of over 300,000 raw HTML files containing text, links, and downloadable images, they also want to give Kagglers a challenge that encourages creativity. Given the HTML of websites served to users of StumbleUpon, your challenge is to identify the paid content disguised as just another internet gem you've stumbled upon.
If media companies can better identify poorly designed native ads, they can keep them off your feed and out of your user experience.
For details on using GraphLab Create for the competition, check out
[Dato's post](http://blog.dato.com/kaggle-competition-stumbleupon-and-dato-ask-whats-truly-native)
.
Acknowledgements
The dataset for this competition was generously provided by
[StumbleUpon](http://www.stumbleupon.com/)
.
![](https://storage.googleapis.com/kaggle-media/competitions/kaggle/4493/media/stumbleupon_logo.png)