When you see the commerce department of the Tanzanian government take out a five-page ad in Newsweek magazine about how wired for business Dar es Salaam is, you'll see words at the top of each page in probably small but still legible print saying something like, "SPECIAL ADVERTISING SUPPLEMENT." The rules of the publishing game (which are, as you may not expect, subject to widespread interpretation and largely unknown to the reading public) say the label should be there, and that the supplement can't appear in the magazine's table of contents.

Now, in print publications lower on the food chain than Newsweek, where publishers care less about credibility (or readers) than ad dollars -- I'm talking about trade publishing -- relationships with advertisers are chummy, and editorial standards more malleable.

Unfortunately, because ad dollars were scarce for a long time, Web publishing has grown up closer to the trade press model. Even mainstream media got excited for a while about how this new medium was going to help erode the troublesome, unprofitable barriers of the old.

So where this is going is: Advertisers know readers are confused -- they're counting on it. Big-media Web sites are playing along. That's why you see advertising sections on big mainstream news sites labeled as "marketplace," "special section," "partner center" and other silly euphemisms.

You can bet anything labeled "sponsored link," "featured link," "special partners," "featured partners" and other permutations means, "paid ad." Plain and simple. Those of us who've been in media a while find this painfully obvious. But a lot of plain folks who use the Web don't understand it, advertisers know it, and publishers are helping to exploit the confusion.