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On one hand I want to say it's "evil" because we've grown up in a place where ads != content. And even though I feel as if I should object to ads being "hidden" among normal content, I don't.

The purpose of going to a website is to seek out a certain type of content. If somebody then paid to have that content delivered to you, what makes it inherently more "evil" than any other content? If it fulfills your need, what does it matter whether or not it were paid to be placed there? In fact, why must we know that they're ads at all?

"Cheating" would be placing a listing that does not accurately represent the content behind it. So if I click on your ad and it isn't what it claimed to be, that's misinformation. But an ad for a free trial of a Bingo Card Creator among other software listings seems equally legitimate, whether or not it was paid to be placed.

It's akin to product placement in movies. A scene requires somebody to be drinking a soda, so a beverage company approaches the director and says "well, while you're in the market for people drinking soft drinks, might we recommend Coca-Cola." The viewer ends up getting advertised to, sure, but the ad still fulfills the role of any other item that would have been there otherwise--it just happened to be paid for.




A good and fair question.

Generally telling the truth to strangers strengthens society. If someone chooses to lie to strangers, society properly should brand that person as not worthy of business and maybe worth imprisoning for fraud. Because future lies are potentially costly, it makes sense for us to watch for (and sometimes punish) lies harshly even when that lie is itself not very costly.

Beyond the straightforward definition of truth though is a larger concept of integrity which means, roughly, that what you say and what you do together form a meaningful "whole." For example, many people believe movies can have artistic integrity--such a movie displays the filmmakers' best guess as to the meaningful truth of its situations. If they were paid to use Coca-Cola or to show the can in a particular way, then the movie doesn't have that integrity, and we maybe should be skeptical of their commitment to the truth generally.

Similarly, sites such as BusyTeacher implicitly purport to rank results in some "honest" (even if not transparent) way. If a particular product, in their honest assessment, should be number 3 and should show that information and should take up that amount of screen real estate, then Patrick wouldn't have to pay for the ad -- the same info would be there organically. If they are showing a paid ad but marking it very clearly as such--there's integrity in that as well. But if they are showing the ad in a way that is misleading, even if only at a glance, then they are compromising their integrity. By the way, to my eye the Google ad looks like an ad at a glance, while the BusyTeacher ad looks like a listing at a glance, but others might disagree, so I'm not really trying to weigh in on the ad itself, just why it might, in theory, be bad.

So although this may be "bad behavior" I also think the costs are small. The advertiser profits, the site profits but loses their integrity (which they probably don't much value), the users are somewhat misled (those who bounce are somewhat harmed; those who end up purchasing are probably not harmed). But in a broader sense, I do think that our community is improved by generally encouraging and helping each other be honest, especially those we do business with (even if it's only an arms-length advertising arrangement).


You are basically right, but when you are talking about a website that is designed and promoted as a sales catalog, you have to be more open to the notion that is OK to have advertising. Unlike a movie, commerce is the visitor's reason for going to the site.

In all these subtle ad cases, anti-ad people can avoid the ads, and people who honestly don't care will ignore the distiction and click the ads. How much coddling can we insist a site do for its mentally-laziest non-paying users, possibly acting against their willingness to view ads?




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