It's a gray area - where do you draw the line between reporting on a cult and advertising a product? Is http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-trending-39158975 an advert for that site? Is http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20170303-we-should-thank-bu... an advert for Buffy? Is http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-39188826 an advert for the arms industry?

I got a full screen ad that couldn't be closed when trying to visit the link in Firefox for Android.

Do you live outside the UK?

The BBC is publicly funded, visitors to BBC news from outside the UK will get served ads.

Maybe it's sad, but my immediate reaction was all of this is staged. Maybe I've just been on /r/hailcorporate too many times.

Don't be sad, it's just an electronic pressure cooker, not a magical device. You still need skills, accessories and good taste to produce good food :)

Do you think the BBC was paid to post this?

Is [direct] payment a necessary component of advertising?

Generally, yes.

Maybe I'm confused. Are you talking about the Instant Pot story, or the ads around the story? I'm seeing a Car Fax ad, an ad for a movie, a t-shirt company ad, some other google ads and some ads promoting other BBC properties.

I can't speak for grandparent poster, but when I read the article, it seemed like it was more advertisement than journalism. So it passes the duck test. It doesn't really matter to me if anyone actually paid BBC to run the story, because to me, it is at least 51% advertisement and no more than 49% news story.

If this were filed under World News, I would agree. But it's in the business section and they run lots of stories like this. It's one notch more newsy than the entertainment section.

And I usually consider the entertainment section of anything to be more than 80% advertisement. If you usually run an ad-blocker on your browser, make sure you also have an ad-blocker running in your brain. The more passive you are about your information sources, the more likely it is that someone could use one to push one of their ideas on you.

Having worn a foil hat for a while myself, I still find occasion to put it back on every once in a while. Question everything. Never stop asking yourself how you really know what you think you know.

In life, like in software, never trust your inputs.