It really is my strong suspicion that the majority of conversions are due to misleading users, though. Let's divide ads into two categories: - "Punch the monk

It really is my strong suspicion that the majority of conversions are due to misleading users, though. Let's divide ads into two categories: - "Punch the monkey for herbal supplements." There are a lot of ads for gimmick products or products that simply don't work well at all. (Some are pure scams, and some just advertise terrible things, but we might as well lump them all together.) People still buy them, because people are credulous. - Targeted ads for useful products. On Stack Overflow right now I see an ad for some tool that analyzes log files and spits out metrics and data. That sounds pretty useful, but the ad is not helping me make an informed decision. If I decided right now to buy that product, even if it worked for me, the ad would not have served me well. The better way to buy things is to decide what you need, make an independent survey of the products available to you, and figure out which one is best via reviews, experts, comments, specs. Successful ads encourage you to short-circuit this process and just pick something, which I don't think is a positive thing.