TV commercials have been steadily losing their primacy -- but they're still out there, and sometimes they capture the attention of the public. Now a Samsung spot has earned the opprobrium of the Reddit community, which is in general the wrong community to be on the wrong side of. I am here, ladies and gentleman, to defend the ad...or video promo, or whatever the hell it is.

What are readers to think of naked advertorial not disclosed as advertorial -- or the carnival midway that is the home page? The very environment signals everything they need to know: don't trust anything they see there. The collapse of the classified and display markets has devastated publishers' businesses. But the sponsored-content solution is claiming those publishers' very souls.

What to me is the saddest aspect of digital dislocation to witness is the accompanying moral surrender. Not only have once relatively dignified institutions demonstrated a willingness to do repugnant things for the sake of survival, they have rushed to do so. Which gets us back to the subject of this series: native advertising.

Publishers are not only selling their souls, they're barely extending the lives of their businesses in so doing. On the contrary, they are accelerating their own demise, because no reader will long patronize those who wantonly deal with the devil. The natives are restless, and also feckless. The question is what to do now. But it is no conundrum, nor structural problem, nor Gordian knot. It's simple: Disclosure.