I thought about where exactly patio11 crossed the line into evil territory, and I realized that there is no line.
All ads are deceptive, because they are all trying to steal your attention by showing up when you are looking for something else. That we've developed the ability to ignore most of them doesn't change the basic principle. But the degree of deception can certainly vary.
By running ads, you are pawning off the user value of your site. The more effective the ads, the more value they are losing. It's a zero-sum game.
Ads are clearly not a zero-sum game, any more than links offsite are a zero-sum game. Transfers in attention are like transfers in money. It is entirely possible for both sides of "I give you money, you give me a banana" to end up better off. Similarly, if you're looking at a list of ways to teach kids subtraction, "I give you thirty seconds, you show me subtraction bingo" leaves both sides better off.
But with advertising, the attention transfer is involuntary. The user is always trying to spend their attention on something else, and they aren't getting what they pay for. If attention is currency then advertising is clearly bait-and-switch fraud.
The user is exchanging some portion of their attention to receive whatever service the publisher is providing.
If you want to watch this football game, you give some portion of your attention to our advertisers. If you want to view whatever the regular content is on the site patio11 advertised on, you give some of your attention to patio11.
There's nothing involuntary about it. If you don't like ads, don't watch TV shows, or view websites that show ads. The only part that's different from a normal transaction is that you aren't very strongly forced to give up the attention the publisher is asking from you. You can get up during TV ads, run an ad blocker, or develop ad blindness on sites. This extra ability of yours doesn't change the face that you agreed to possibly give up some of your attention to an advertiser to use whatever service you're using.
But we don't agree in advance to give up our attention in exchange for things. Nor do advertisers feel obliged, per se, to give us something in return for looking at ads. It is simply assumed that we don't own our attention, and it is up for grabs to anyone who can get their hands on it.
We expect to see ads in many situations, but only due to past experience, not because we ever made a deal with anybody.
And the most effective ads, the ones that advertisers strive to create, are those that are the most unexpected.
I'm not so sure. Road-side billboards are typically pretty obvious ads. They stand out by shape, colour and presentation generally. What patio11 is doing is more like putting up a billboard styled with police colours or reminiscent of a "Bingo Fun - 12 miles" in white text on a green background, copying distance and direction signs. I believe signs emulating the blue-white checked police signs we get here in Australia are illegal or at least very heavily discouraged.
I'm sure there's a discrepancy relating to a public space and a private site, but at best this is a grey area and I'm surprised that patio11 would do this as anything other than a discussion point or temporary experiment.
Or, you're converting the nebulous "value of the site to a user" into cold, hard cash. The game isn't zero-sum, it's closer to an IPO (or some other stock-issuing event) in that sense: theoretical value becomes real value, but now you don't have "control" of everything anymore.
If you're a teacher, and you're at a site looking for how to teach a lesson on subtraction, and I tell you bingo cards do that, and you pay me money for bingo cards, you're saying in the most explicit way that people know how that bingo cards were exactly what you were looking for.
Why not submit your site to that community for review (assuming it's as relevant as you say) and get a real star rating in the process? Your listing would look the same as your current ad and you presumably wouldn't be paying to advertise (unless the site accepts only paid submissions).
Because BCC's landing page / free trial is superior to the experience of the organic site, for both teachers who want bingo cards and for me. If it were one of the organic listings, I'd have to manually create 8 cards or whatever and then upload them. They'd go behind a signup wall. People would then be asked to signup to the site to download the eight cards. Very few of them would buy BCC. Instead, they should sign up for my site, where a) they can create more cards and b) the ones who experience a lot of value from classroom bingo will actually pay me money.
If you're getting 100% conversion then I guess you can do no wrong. But anyone who saw your ad and didn't buy was looking for something else. No matter what you put in your ad, it's not going to be more valuable than the content it displaces, save for strange and rare accidents.
anyone who saw your ad and didn't buy was looking for something else
What an astonishing statement.
Let's disregard the fact that some of the most popular entertainment in history first appeared as advertisements (everything from the annual, ephemeral crop of Super Bowl ads, to the 72-years-old-and-counting "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer", to arguably every music video ever). Let's disregard the clear evidence that people deliberately search for popular TV commercials in YouTube. Let's ignore the philosophical debate about whether every one of 37Signals's blog posts is also an "ad" for 37Signals products, or whether every one of my HN comments is also an "ad" for YCombinator. [1]
It's still obvious that an ad can be valuable without leading to a purchase. If I go out to buy an electric guitar, I don't do so by clicking on the first guitar ad I see and then pressing the green BUY button. Instead, I do some kind of research. At the very least, I go to a store with a bunch of different kinds of guitar and stare at their packaging and styling. More likely, I visit the sites of a bunch of guitar makers and then choose one. But just because I chose to buy a Strat rather than a Gibson Les Paul doesn't mean that I didn't derive value from viewing Gibson's website, or reading their blurb about Les Paul.
Similarly, just because I'm ultimately not going to buy bingo card creation software doesn't mean I don't benefit from knowing that such stuff exists.
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[1] Yeah, but we're discussing a cheap little low-class interstitial ad on a website, right? Should I even try to compare it to a whole fancy thirty-second spot, or a music video?
Maybe, because a 140-character ad is better for many purposes than these bigger ads. It certainly takes less than thirty seconds to read.
The problem with all of these common justifications for advertising is that they are all despite itself. Yes, the occasional ad is more entertaining than the content, and occasionally an ad will give you exactly the information that you need.
But fundamentally, ads do not exist in order to entertain or inform you. They exist to distract you from what you want to see, towards something someone else wants you to see. In general, content is always more valuable than advertising.
If looking at ads is the cost of looking at content, so be it. The point is that it is a cost, not a gift.
All ads are deceptive, because they are all trying to steal your attention by showing up when you are looking for something else. That we've developed the ability to ignore most of them doesn't change the basic principle. But the degree of deception can certainly vary.
By running ads, you are pawning off the user value of your site. The more effective the ads, the more value they are losing. It's a zero-sum game.