It was only in May–just two months ago!–that Polygon, once one of the internet’s most prestigious and successful video game websites, was sold to Valnet, a media company that runs publications that can generously be called content farms.
It hasn’t taken long for the latter’s influence to start showing on the former.
This is the first story published under the tag “Advertiser Content” (and is also the first Polygon story published by this author), but you can bet it won’t be the last. And while stories like this are nothing new–sponsored content has long run on many other sites, like PC Gamer–efforts are normally made to either make the stories look different to a site’s regular content or, in the case of the PC Gamer ad I just linked to, be about something that’s clearly not written by the outlet’s regular team.
This Polygon piece looks just like a regular news item, and is worded exactly like you’d expect something appearing on a Valnet site to be worded, the only points of difference being that tiny (though brightly coloured) “Advertiser Content” badge and the ghastly sentence “This content was produced in collaboration with Valnet Inc. and the sponsor, Gunzilla Games.”
Fun fact: the game being advertised here, Off The Grid, is from the same company that now owns Game Informer.Â
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