Anime News Network is the world's most trusted anime news source. That trust extends, by association, to every piece of content published on ANN. A well written, engaging piece of sponsored content can be an excellent way to go beyond advertising and truly connect with potential customers in an environment where they are at ease.
Whether it is an advertorial or sponsored article, a good piece of sponsored content isn't a distraction or an annoyance to ANN's visitors. It's an actual piece of content they are interested in and thankful for. An advertorial can be a funny story about that occurred during the production of your product. It can be a gallery showing off never before seen details about a gorgeous product that you are about to release.
A good sponsored piece of sponsored content is about the reader. The ultimate goal of a sponsored article is that if we removed the “Advertisement” label, the brand name, and the call to action, then the content would blend into the Anime News Network.
Pulling off a good advertorial can be hard. But once the process is mastered, the connection you can develop with our readers goes beyond any other form of advertising. And while it's challenging at first, we have a team of professional writers and marketers than can either help guide you, or create the advertorial for you.
Anime News Network offers four types of sponsored content; Sponsored Articles, Advertorials, Product Spotlights and Promoted Press Releases.
A sponsored article is a piece of content that ANN would write with our without your sponsorship, you are simply making it possible for us to offer this content to our readers. Generally speaking, sponsored articles will be on a topic related to your marketing goals; if you want to promote your cyber security software, our team will write an article about the ten best hacking anime (pw:haxx), and in the conclusion we will segue into a paragraph promoting your product or service.
An advertorial is an article specifically about your company, brand, product or service. One key difference between advertorials and sponsored articles is that a sponsored article is written by ANN staff to our standards, and an advertorial is written by you (see writing services below), and you have full control over the content of the advertorial.
Product Spotlights are a form of mini-advertorial specially made for physical merchandise such as figures, clothing, boxed sets and other merchandise. Each Product Spotlight consists of an image gallery, with one to two sentences per image describing the products highlights.
Promoted Press Releases are just that, regular press releases that ANN will "promote" to our front page. ANN posts dozens of press releases every week, but none of these are published on our front page, so they do not get a ton of visibility with our readers. However if you have an important press release, you can promote it to our front page for significantly more visibility. In addition to the front page visibility, promoted press releases are also published with all of your images and formatting, whereas all other press release are published as plain text. For example, here is a regular press release, and here is a promoted press release.
Please note that this service is only available for press releases that Anime News Network would otherwise publish. Our independent news team reserves final say on whether or not to publish a press release. Generally, this service is recommended for customers who already have their press releases published by ANN on a regular basis.
Your text can be any length you want, however we recommend keeping it under 800 words. Unless an article is extremely interesting, readers tend to stop reading after 800 words or so.
Examples of what kind of topic your article can have:
Letter from you
Entertaining Infographic
ex: 19 Ways The Protagonist Dies in Our Show
Sample chapter (or images)
Note: this is a good example of something that can be more than 800 words
Top ten (or 12) list
ex: 12 Reasons to Visit Kyoto this Summer
Informative text, introduction to your product/service
ex: How the Gamma Camera S System Works
How to guide
ex: How to buy Manga on Buymanga.com
Your article can not:
Be a review of your product or services
Appear as if it were written by Anime News Network (in the case of advertorials)
Promote illegal activity or piracy
Contain nudity, salacious images or pornographic text
Contain any material not suitable to be read or viewed by a 13-year-old
Contain any content that might be inappropriate to publish on our website (if in doubt, ask, we reserve the final say in this)
Please note that all links in Advertorials, Product Spotlights and Sponsored Articles are rel=sponsored (i.e.: no do follow links). The links in Promoted Press Releases are do-follow.
For an additional fee, Anime News Network can translate your advertorial from Japanese to English ($.15 per Japanese character) or assign a freelance writer to create a compelling advertorial based on your guidelines ($250 for up to 800 words and up to 3 revisions). Additional services available include copyediting ($100 for up to 800 words) and graphic (prices vary, but around $100 per image).
Even if the advertorial is written by a freelance writer that we provide, the by-line will remain “A Paid Advertisement by ….” If the writer is an important person within your company, or an otherwise notable individual, a second by-line “about the author” can be added at the end of the advertorial; however this can only be done if the writer has no affiliation with ANN.
