Relaxing policy rules for regulating the presentation of sponsored content to a user of an online system based on characteristics of the user

A computer program product comprising a computer readable storage medium having instructions encoded thereon that, when executed by a processor in an online system, cause the processor to:

• enforce, by the processor, a content policy, the content policy preventing insertion of sponsored content items into a top row in a feed of content, the content policy further describing a minimum number of organic content items positioned between sponsored content items;
• receive, by the processor, information describing one or more sponsored content items from one or more publishing users, each sponsored content item including content and a bid amount;
• receive, by the processor and from a client device, a request to present a feed of content to a user of the online system, the feed of content including one or more sponsored content items and a plurality of organic content items;
• retrieve, by the processor and from an action log, characteristics of the user maintained by the online system, the retrieved characteristics comprising a historical rate at which the user performed one or more actions with previously presented sponsored content items;
• generate, by the processor, a value indicating a tolerance of the user for sponsored content items included in the feed of content based on the retrieved characteristics;
• rank, by the processor, the value of the tolerance of the user relative to values for tolerances of other users;
• map, by the processor, different positions in the ranking with different minimum numbers of organic content items positioned between sponsored content items;
• select, by the processor and based on the mapping, a decreased minimum number of organic content items positioned between sponsored content items;
• determine, by the processor, to relax enforcement of the content policy based on the generated value;
• generate, by the processor and in response to the determining to relax enforcement of the content policy, the feed of content including a first sponsored content item in the top row of the feed of content, and a second sponsored content item separated from the first sponsored content item by the decreased minimum number of organic content items;
• and
• send, by the processor, the generated feed to the client device for presentation to the user on the client device.