I don't believe the purpose of making the ads look like part of the page is to trick people into clicking on them. It does solve the problem of visitors being turned off by a page where the ads are more important than the content (because they don't look like ads at first glance). People will figure it out as they start to engage with the page though and for some of them it will leave the same bad taste that something like this does:

(If you want to experience the fully-animated horror for yourself, just pick any random article on www.dailymail.co.uk and turn off your ad-blocking)

Will the ads will also be embedded in site search results, custom filters and RSS feeds or is that something that will be coming in the future? How does the AI assistant fit in to this since it seems to bypass the question page ads entirely? Are you getting other sorts of revenue from our engagement with that feature that offsets the ad revenue?

I feel like y'all are boiling the toad here and the ads are just going to get worse and worse as each escalation doesn't return the amount of revenue you were hoping for. In my opinion, you should start investigating other sources of revenue that leverages the community's good will, like selling merch, instead of making us your product.

I don't believe the purpose of making the ads look like part of the page is to trick people into clicking on them. I think it is designed to stuff more ads on the page without making the amount of space that is non-content apparent at first glance. People will figure it out as they start to engage with the page though and for some of them it will leave the same bad taste that something like this does:

(If you want to experience the fully-animated horror for yourself, just pick any random article on www.dailymail.co.uk and turn off your ad-blocking)

Will the ads will also be embedded in site search results, custom filters and RSS feeds or is that something that will be coming in the future? How does the AI assistant fit in to this since it seems to bypass the question page ads entirely? Are you getting other sorts of revenue from our engagement with that feature that offsets the ad revenue?

I feel like y'all are boiling the toad here and the ads are just going to get worse and worse as each escalation doesn't return the amount of revenue you were hoping for. In my opinion, you should start investigating other sources of revenue that leverages the community's good will, like selling merch, instead of making us your product.