What is Sponsored Content?

Outside Online and our partner sites www.away.com and www.gorp.com depend on advertisers to pay the bills. Without the support of these companies, we wouldn’t be able to provide all this content and travel services for free. The Internet changes quickly and as a result we are constantly adopting new ways to help advertisers better present their messages to you. (Our hope is that many of these advertisers will be promoting products or services that help you get outside.)

Some of these new advertising positions include the sponsorship of content. Advertisers are paying us to associate their brands and messages with our editorial content. While there are many different ways of incorporating sponsored content, the one thing that remains consistent: Unless specifically labeled as “Advertising” or “Advertorial,” all content on our site is written by writers and editors without the influence of advertisers.
The only thing that advertisers may be able to influence is placement on the site. Sometimes, we’ll highlight a specific article or section because an advertiser would like to sponsor that content. But even in these situations, our editors make sure that whatever we highlight makes sense from a user standpoint. For example, we may highlight our guide to Colorado on the homepage if we get advertising from a resort in Colorado.

As always, we appreciate any and all thoughts on what we’re doing here at Outside Online. You can reach us at online@outsidemag.com.