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Major companies that make their living off of ad revenue respect the distinction between content and paid content. The New York Times has a tiny “advertisement” on the top as well as refuses to print text in the exact font as the articles. Sites like Fark label links “Sponsored Link” and even smaller sites like I-Am-Bored correctly label an ad “AD”.

The problem with stumbleUpon is they rely on the deception as part of their business model. Located on their ad page, they have, “See how many people rated your content thumbs-up or thumbs-down.” This obviously would get slanted if people knew they were looking at paid content.

Digg fights hard to keep purchased links from hitting their list. Imagine if they actually implemented an ad model that interweaves paid links with content, without stating which are ads. The community would revolt and digg would be forced to, at a minimum, label the advertised links.

Returning to the New York Times, what if they didn’t implement a distinction and people read an advertisement thinking it was potentially real journalism? If you think that could create problems, then realize it’s actually happening on stumbleUpon. StumbleUpon has been getting much more popular and as a result, more advertisers want to use it as a platform (and more ads will unknowingly appear on stumble). Advertisers are deceptive, and stumbleUpon has delivered a perfect platform for them to deceive you.