The online news site, owned by AOL Time Warner, is featuring advertising text links that appear at the top of Technology, World and US news pages, next to news headlines.
Sreenath Sreenivasan, head of the new media journalism program at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, said in an interview with Business Week: "Clearly (CNN.com) needs to mark this 'adv' or 'advertisement' in that gray space, because it looks too similar to the rest of the news site."
The use of sponsored text links, or contextual advertising, is on the rise as an alternative to popular video, audio and other rich media adverts.
At least one other company plans to sell text advert links on major news sites such as ABCNews.com.
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