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The business magazine Forbes: Dodgy online advertising damages the image
Photo: Roselle Chen / REUTERS
A rude awakening for advertisers who assumed that their advertising would appear on the website of the renowned Forbes magazine (Forbes.com): Instead, it appeared on a subpage that can safely be described as clickbait. As the "Wall Street Journal" reports, an article with just 700 words was said to have been transformed into a 34-part picture series at the address www3.forbes.com, during which readers were confronted with 150 advertisements.
For years, the online advertising industry has struggled with ads being shown elsewhere than was promised to paying advertisers. This is also a problem for online media: after all, sales that are intended for high-quality journalistic offerings end up in the pockets of fraudsters and dubious providers. The whole thing is a side effect of so-called programmatic advertising. Instead of booking advertising campaigns directly with publishers and website operators, the vast majority of advertising business today takes place via huge online markets where advertising space is auctioned off automatically in a fraction of a second.
As a current study by advertising analyst Adalytics shows, surprisingly large amounts of advertising sales now end up on so-called “made-for-advertising” websites. These are usually automatically created offers that serve the sole purpose of delivering as much advertising as possible. The Association of National Advertisers estimates that more than a tenth of advertising sales now flow into such offers; in the USA alone, more than ten billion dollars. Those who commission advertising campaigns are usually not aware of this, although there are now many service providers who are supposed to avoid such incorrect bookings.
Serious media is losing reach
The fact that a respected journalistic outlet is now resorting to such means seems like a breach of a taboo. Confronted with research by the Wall Street Journal, Forbes has taken the controversial offer offline and points to the low advertising volume, which is said to have been incorrectly reported. An advertising service provider is responsible for the errors.
Falling advertising sales are now having a major impact on the media landscape in the USA. While respected offers are being discontinued, according to a current study by NewsGuard, the so-called “pink slime” websites are flourishing, which consist largely of cheaply compiled content and partly of disinformation. The organization, which assesses the credibility of news offerings, counted 1,197 such portals, compared to just 1,200 reputable local journalistic offerings.
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