Courses/CS 461/Museum of unintended consequences/Unethical ads on web pages look like content

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From Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox, August 20, 2007.

Summary:
Users rarely look at display advertisements on websites. Of the four design elements that do attract a few ad fixations, one is unethical and reduces the value of advertising networks.

I've been reluctant to discuss one of the findings from our eyetracking research because the conclusion is that unethical design pays off.

In 1997, I chose to suppress a similar finding: users tend to click on banner ads that look like dialog boxes, complete with fake OK and Cancel buttons. Of course, instead of being an actual system message -- such as "Your Internet Connection Is Not Optimized" -- the banner is just a picture of a dialog box, and clicking its close box doesn't dismiss it, but rather takes users to the advertiser's site. Deceptive, unethical, and #3 among the most-hated advertising techniques. Still, fake dialog boxes got many more clicks than regular banners, which users had already started to ignore in 1997.

The unintended consequence aspect of this is that advertisers are exploiting the "mechanism" that users install in themselves on how to work with web pages. Once advertisers know that users will click on something that looks like a form but are likely to ignore something that looks like an ad, they will make ads that look like forms.

A generalization of this is virtually any confidence game such a phishing. A confidence game takes advantage of mechanisms we build into ourselves.