I know it is wearying to see ads masquerading as editorial, and it's especially difficult for us at io9 since we've been covering the show True Blood for over a year without any incentive other than the fact that it's part of our beat. Oh, and some of us actually like the damn show, and even think the idea of a fake vampire blog is a cool ARG.

What is uncool is that the ARG is not marked as advertising, and is therefore designed to hoodwink io9 readers in two ways. One, it makes it seem that our parent company has bought a blog written by vampires. Two, it taints our legitimate editorial posts about the show True Blood, calling into question our coverage and reviews because it seems that we've been paid off to write about the show. Already, Media Bistro has commented that io9 is "promoting" True Blood by posting a clip from it. This simply isn't true. If you look at the tag True Blood on io9, you can see that we have been posting clips and recaps of the show starting last year, long before the Blood Copy campaign launched on Gawker. In particular, our resident vampire expert Meredith Woerner has made the show her beat, and recapped every episode for you last season.

This isn't the first time we've written about media created by sponsors of the site. We've had ads from Star Trek running next to coverage of the movie on our blog for the past few weeks (and not all of that coverage was exactly flattering). We've had book ads for books that we reviewed like Neal Stephenson's Anathem. A few weeks ago, we had an ad for a new Alastair Reynolds book next to a somewhat negative review of the novel.

Blood Copy's ads, however, are not clearly marked as advertising and that is the problem. We're not happy with that, and you shouldn't be either. But that isn't going to stop us from covering a show that we think is worth critical attention. Please learn to be a critical reader yourself, and when a post comes up with a red circle around it that says "Blood Copy," realize that is an ad. Anything else is legitimate io9 content.

This goes for other ads you see on the site too. Hopefully, nobody has yet mistaken the Star Trek CheezIt ads on io9 for actual editorial.

The point is, we're not going to change our coverage of a media property just because somebody paid to put an ad on our site. We aren't going to make fun of Sookie any less because of this advertising deal, and we aren't going to stop telling you when the episodes get too cheesy for words. At the same time, if there is a good episode or breaking news about the series we'll tell you about that too - just as we have been for the past year.

If you aren't happy about the Blood Copy advertising campaign, you can make your voice heard in comments on that fake blog. They aren't going to turn comments off or edit them.

And you have my apologies in advance for the Blood Copy sponsorship campaign. If it had only been clearly marked as an advertisement, it might have been a pretty cool ARG. As it is now, I'm afraid it's only advertising.

UPDATE: I am happy to report that Blood Copy posts will now come with a notice that says "sponsored post." Thanks to Gawker top brass, who heard everybody's complaints and acted quickly.

At first glance, Total Conspiracy is just a hilariously awesome conspiracy site, including pictures of flying dogs, alien coins (from the U.S. Treasury), and alien-influenced mathematicians. It's chock full of weird ranty videos by sitemaster Jeffrey Freedman, and essays on things like flu vaccines as an alien scheme to weaken us. (And I love the whole thing in the video, where he demands to know if the government had anything to do with the death of Robert Heinlein.)

But eagle-eyed reader James pointed me to the science fiction book covers in the latest video, posted above. Not only do they have great parody titles like Weirdo In A Weird Land, Probed: A Love Story, Scales Of Fear, The Boy Who Forgot The Time, Welcome To Our New Mechanical Overlords, My Big Fat GIant Revenge, and I Have No Brain And I Must Yell. But they also feature MVA characters like Bob (the blob), Dr. Cockroach PhD, Ginormica and a couple others.

Could this, too, be a conspiracy? Could Dreamworks be controlling the mind of an innocent UFO conspiracy nut, trying to get him to promote their movie? Only you can decide, by exposing your truth. [Top Secret Conspiracy, thanks James!]

We had grown sick of all the ARG marketing schemes for movies like The Dark Knight, which try to drum up fan support and brand recognition for forthcoming franchises with semi-mysterious websites and phone numbers and instructions on where to buy a cake that has an iPhone in it. Profoundly uncreative, the Batman ARG had done little more than inspire a lot of people to wear Joker makeup. While other ARGs are more fun and thought-provoking, we felt that in general ARG-making had become so bland that you could practically never tell what the games were about. They're little more than walk-in ads.

So we schemed, and said to ourselves, "Well what if we came up with an ARG that was so generic that people would think it was related to practically every movie coming out next year?" Seemed like a sure win — people would see the ARG and start guessing "Oh it's for GI Joe," or "It's for Watchmen." But we wanted our super-generic ARG to be a commentary on the super-generic nature of ARGs too, which is a rather tall order.

You Are Being Deceived was carefully crafted to seem as if it could be about Watchmen, G.I. Joe, or Heroes. Well, carefully crafted might be too strong a phrase — perhaps "slapped together in a caffeine-induced frenzy" would be more accurate. We put together the basic ingredients of every generic ARG: a "personal blog" written by somebody who has gotten into a huge conspiracy they don't understand and is telling you all about it; a corporate website from the conspiracy-manufacturing company (why do all ARGs include fake corporations?), and a phone number you can call (listed on the blog) to get more clues about the conspiracy.

We even invented a back story about how an evil corporation is controlling superheroes and the populace via a chemically-enhanced television signal. On the You Are Being Deceived blog, you'll see the main character, code-named Sheep Snake, who discovers that all her paranoid theories about chemtrails are nothing compared to the mind-control plot hatched by her employer Elegiac International. Using superheroes (like, say, the ones in Heroes or Watchmen), they're selling this thing called RapidEnhance that's already being used on soldiers (like, say, the ones in G.I. Joe). When Sheep Snake discovers the plot, then gets a FedEx package with her friend's severed arm in it, she goes on the run with a plan to stop Elegiac from turning the whole world into TV-watching, mind-controlled drones.

So why didn't anybody call Sheep Snake's voice mail, or send us e-mails, or even look at our ARG? You can claim it's because the ARG was lame, and that wouldn't be entirely inaccurate. But was it really lamer than the Batman ARG, which was just a website with a few messages telling people to dress up like the Joker to see some footage?

What's more likely is that nobody saw our ARG because we didn't have tens of thousands of dollars to promote it. We printed out 1000 postcards, and thought we'd just hand them out to people — even if only a few saw it, they might blog about it and it could spread via word-of-mouth. We even enlisted the extremely non-devious-looking Gina Trapani from Lifehacker to hand out our cards so nobody would guess it was the io9 crew behind it. She tried handing them out in the Expo, and was promptly kicked out for handing out postcards without having a booth. Without a ton of cash to pay for giant signs, a booth, or to hire people to hand out millions of cards outside the Convention Center, there was no way we could get our ARG started. We wound up handing the cards out surreptitiously, but mostly we left them out on the "freebies" table where they disappeared (but to where?).

Ah, you say with a cynical smile, you are so naive. Did you really think you puny creatures with your 1000 cheap postcards printed with a URL could put even a tiny dent in the promotional juggernaut that is Comic-Con? The simple answer is yes, we really did. I think that's partly because we'd actually fallen for the ARG hype, despite the fact that we'd criticized it and should have known better. We imagined that ARGs really could be kind of grassroots and DiY, and that people would want to go to a cool URL like YouAreBeingDeceived. We thought our snarky little ARG might stir up some shit. But we deceived ourselves.

ARGs are not grassroots. They are not about community, or word-of-mouth. They really are about saturating the market with brands in order to generate interest in something, just the way old-fashioned advertising is. I don't mean to disparage the cleverness of ARGs — a lot of them are terrifically fun. But the ARGs that get noticed at a media event like Comic-Con are always going to be the ones with lots of resources behind them. To create a "grassroots feeling," you need to have a top-down corporation with wads of cash. So when you play an ARG associated with a commercial property, you are in some sense being deceived. You're being made to feel as if you've discovered something, as if you're part of a community spontaneously coming together to play at something, when in fact you've been targeted by an extremely well-funded marketing campaign.

Or maybe it's a plot by Elegiac International to control your minds and corrupt your heroes. Yeah, I like that version of the story better.

For one thing, the synopsis gets enough stuff right that it seems to come from someone who actually had seen the movie. Even the most obsessive fan wouldn't have known those details back when this review got posted. Then there's the fact that it spends so much time referencing viral marketing crap, like the Japanese Slusho! drink and the evil Tagruato Corporation. Again, an obsessive fan might have thrown that stuff in, but it looks more like someone trying to keep up the dizzy dance of viral marketing a little while longer. We love the part where the faker swears he/she doesn't work for Bad Robot, J.J.'s production company.

The question is, how much does it cost to pay someone to post fake spoilers on IMDB? We're curious! Does anybody know?