But going beyond that, even when differences are not subtle as in that blog post you still have a large swath of people who won't be able to distinguish ads from non-ads. Just go in the heart of a large city and observe the web-surfing habits of some regular Joe Shmoe and you'll be pretty astounded with his ad-detection heuristics. Large internet companies know and understand this very well, and indeed design their products as such. Heck, when I'm designing webapps I do this too, I guess I'm just cognizant about what actually I'm doing.
http://blumenthals.com/blog/2012/01/31/is-google-intentional...
But going beyond that, even when differences are not subtle as in that blog post you still have a large swath of people who won't be able to distinguish ads from non-ads. Just go in the heart of a large city and observe the web-surfing habits of some regular Joe Shmoe and you'll be pretty astounded with his ad-detection heuristics. Large internet companies know and understand this very well, and indeed design their products as such. Heck, when I'm designing webapps I do this too, I guess I'm just cognizant about what actually I'm doing.