If you're taking money from X to try to push people to buy X instead of saying "our honest opinion is that Y is the best-value product and we recommend it" and putting that front and center, it's safe to say that you are manipulating people. The non-manipulative use of that real estate is showcasing high value products such that you feel it reflects well on your business to point them out. If they were organically there already, they wouldn't need to pay you.

This is the worst kind of advertisement.

Other ads just take up screen space and bandwidth: they displace more useful uses of these scarce resources, but they don't cause any direct harm. By contrast, ads targeting people in the market for a good or service actively displace quality signals. In doing so they make quality uneconomical and thus destroy it. They make the world a worse place.

The reason behind the banner reveals to us the incentives that drive the way the whole system functions, which in turn decides the quality of the majority of advertisements.

If the reason is "because they paid us to" then it leads to the absolute horror show we all see these days.

And no, papering over this issue by maximizing click-through rate along with revenue in your optimisation problem does not cut it. The only advertisements I will accept are those that dont have any weird incentives backing them. Example that is OK: shopkeeper recommending dell laptops because his previous customers have given good reviews for it. But if the shopkeeper takes even a bottle of wine from a dell salesman, oops, I'm blocking that ad.

In my "analysis", approximately zero advertisements in the internet today run the way I accept them. This can mostly be attributed to the fact that google/meta run most of the ads and they definitely take money from merchants:).

It logically follows from this that I need to use an adblocker everywhere.

Same goes for all of marketing and sales: all forms of deceit (something that we are taught as kids to be morally wrong) that are normalised today. Entire trillion dollars companies' primary product is deceit.

It is possible to do these things without deceit, but the tragedy of the commons dictates that the deceitful win.

That seems less evil, at least in the sense that it doesn’t require staking people and collecting dossiers about their personal information.

I’m surprised your business model doesn’t completely dominate over the social media algorithmic nonsense. I’d expect people who searched for something to be actually interested in it.