I was pleased when some of the discussions placed on MN by advertisers were explicitly marked as paid for by the creation of the Sponsored Discussions topic, and with text at the top mentioning the fact there was a fee. That seemed a good piece of extra transparency.
I was wondering about other areas though, particularly the product tests and some of the live webchats and the Q&As. The fact that the term "sponsored" is never appended to any of them makes it seem a bit unclear what is paid for and what is not.
I'm guessing that all of the product tests are paid for, so I wondered why they hadn't been renamed too. I guess too that most or all of the webchats aren't paid for, but I am sure that many of the Q&As exist as part of a paid-for advertising package. For example, a Lloyds insurance Q&A a while ago was part of an advertising campaign on the site I think?
If just some and not all of the paid-for threads are explicitly tagged as such, it might create a wrong impression (especially in the case of Q&As) that there is no commercial influence on their presence. I know that there are MN editorial rules that require Q&A guests to be truthful and not too pluggy, but it still seems that their paid-for nature (where applicable) ought perhaps to be explicit?