University of California Riverside: Online consumers shy away from sponsored product listings. “Consumers… tend to view sponsored listings with suspicion and often prefer to click on what are called ‘organic’ listings that appear high in their product search results but are not sponsored, said Mingyu ‘Max’ Joo, an assistant professor of marketing in UCR’s School of Business and lead author the study. Platforms and sellers expect the ‘sponsored” and ‘ad’ signs to be visually prominent. In fact, a sponsored listing can be detrimental when it replaces a seller’s organic listing that would have appeared in the top few positions in the search results.”