Articles hosted on the domain that Forbes disabled on Tuesday (2024-04-02) were packed with advertisements. Traffic was driven to the page through clickbait links.

For years, Forbes maintained a hidden alternative version of its main site, where it served advertisements intended for display on Forbes.com. This sad tale became yet another testament to how advertisers often get duped in the opaque internet advertising market.

Forbes shut down the alternative site on Tuesday after receiving inquiries from The Wall Street Journal about the existence of such a site. The dummy site featured articles from the main site stretched into formats that could accommodate much more advertising. Dubious information delivery methods like "slideshow" and listicles (articles consisting of a series of points presented as a list) were employed there.

On the dummy site, an article originally comprising 700 words was turned into a 34-slide slideshow. As a result, a person reading such an article in its entirety could encounter about 150 advertising banners instead of the 7 shown in the original article.

"Enhanced" articles like these on the www3.forbes.com site (now inaccessible) couldn't be found on the main site or through search engines. Instead, they were promoted through recommendation services like Taboola and Outbrain. These platforms reside at the bottom of many websites, and their recommendations may feature ads with clickbait headlines.

Advertisers claimed that ads on the alternative site couldn't be worth the money they paid because they were reaching a different audience and appearing on ad-cluttered pages.

The company Adalytics, which researches the advertising market, shared its opinion with WSJ stating that advertisers were confident they were placing ads on the main Forbes.com site.

Representatives from Forbes shifted blame onto Media.Net, the AdTech company that manages the ad trading software on the platform. Forbes stated that only a small portion of ad impressions ended up on the dummy site. Forbes refuted allegations of the existence of an alternative site, calling it a "subdomain."

"As the subdomain represents a very insignificant portion of their user base and business, we decided to shut it down," company representatives said on Tuesday. Forbes claimed that Adalytics did not provide access to review the investigation.

Media.net, handling advertising on Forbes, stated that due to an unintended error, the software was sending data from the "subdomain" in a way that made them believe they were trading ads on the main site. In reality, the site hidden under this guise was www3.forbes.com. The company claimed it rectified the error before the site was removed.

Whack-A-Mole

According to Adalytics founder Krzysztof Franaszek, Forbes has been engaging in such placements for several years, at least since late 2021.

Rocky Moss, CEO of DeepSee, a company specializing in advertising research, said he was shocked to see the publisher mixing the ad inventory of several sites in a way that advertisers didn't understand what they were buying.

"Advertisers were buying premium ad slots on a premium site and getting placement on a clickbait site," Moss said. "Imagine if a car dealership slapped a Lexus sticker on an economy Toyota and then sold it to you at the Lexus price."

According to the Association of National Advertisers, about 11% of the $88 billion spent annually on online advertising goes to so-called MFA sites, meaning sites made specifically for advertising. They are overflowing with ads and are designed to deceive advertisers.

Two years ago, Adalytics discovered a glitch affecting publications owned by Gannett. At that time, advertisers thought they were buying ads on one site, but their ads were actually being displayed on another. The error went unnoticed for over 9 months. The publisher stated that the error was unintentional.

This time, according to Adalytics' report, ads from brands such as McDonald's, Disney, Microsoft, JPMorgan Chase, American Express, New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal were observed on the alternative site. All six major players in the agency market: WPP, Omnicom, Publicis, Interpublic, Havas, and Dentsu, also bought ad inventory on this platform. Representatives of these companies and agencies declined to comment or did not respond to requests for comment.

Elderly Audience

Aidem, a small digital advertising agency, announced it would pause all ad purchases on Forbes, conduct a thorough audit of all ad impressions ever purchased from Forbes, and demand refunds for all ads placed on the Forbes alternative site.

A Forbes representative stated that only 1% of ad impressions landed on the alternative site but declined to substantiate their claims in any way, stating that this assertion requires further investigation.

Five affected advertisers, in addition to those mentioned above, claimed that the scope of the problem is much larger. According to reports provided to WSJ, between 10% and 28% of ad impressions purchased on Forbes.com since 2022 actually occurred on the alternative site.

Approaches to content and such ad placements, like those on the Forbes alternative site, are not the best experience for advertisers. Typically, brands don't want their ads appearing on a page with a high volume of ads. Also, advertisers usually try to avoid automatic ad refreshes, whereas on the Forbes alternative site, this occurred every few seconds, leaving ads with no chance to convey their message to users.

Furthermore, the audience landing on the alternative site differed from that visiting the main site.

Forbes readers usually consume business news, most often aged 25 to 34. On the other hand, the audience landing on the alternative site reads tabloids and is most often aged 55 to 64. This is a less attractive audience for many advertisers.

"Instances like these highlight that the entire industry needs to be more vigilant in holding dishonest players accountable," said Jay Friedman, CEO of Goodway Group. He also plans to conduct a thorough examination of all ad impressions purchased on the Forbes site and demand refunds on behalf of his advertisers.