Forbes Caught Stuffing Digital Ads Meant for Dot-Com on Clickbait ‘Ghost’ Site | Report
Forbes ran a second version of its website where since at least 2021 it stuffed ads that were intended to run on Forbes.com in what The Wall Street Journal characterized as “another sign that brands don’t always get what they pay for in the opaque digital-advertising market.”
The secondary site was shut down on Tuesday after The Journal started asking questions about it, the report said.
A Forbes spokesperson in a statement called the story “deeply misleading” and said it “misrepresents the scope and operation of a legacy Forbes subdomain.” The emailed statement said the site was shut down “to eliminate any potential confusion.”
The Wall Street Journal reported that for years, the alternate site repackaged Forbes reporting into formats that could fit more ads than traditional news stories — for instance a 700-word story from the main site that was turned into a 34-image slideshow on the alternate site. Other work was reformulated into “listicles” on the site, whose address began with www3.forbes.com, The Journal reported.
Brands including Disney, Microsoft, American Express, McDonald’s, The New York Times, American Express and the Wall Street Journal had their ads run on the ghost site, which hosted ads placed by all six major ad agencies, the report said.
The ghost site didn’t appear in searches and couldn’t be reached through Forbes.com. Instead, it was promoted through content-recommendation companies like Taboola and Outbrain, “which place paid links to clickbait-style content at the bottom of many sites,” the report said.
Ad buyers told the outlet that ads on the ghost site weren’t worth what they paid, because the clickbait stories didn’t reach the Forbes audience, and because they were packed onto overcrowded pages. Adalytics, an ad-research firm that provided information to The Journal, said the brands that purchased the ads expected them to appear on Forbes.com.
Forbes, in its emailed statement, said that the subdomain was “an insignificant part of our business” that was “developed as an alternative means to consume existing Forbes.com content.”
The report said that Forbes blamed ad-tech company Media.net, which manages its ad-bidding software, for the misrepresentation.
Media.net said there was an unintentional error in its software that told buyers they were bidding on Forbes.com ad slots when they were in fact bidding on slots for the alternative site. Five advertisers told The Journal between 10% and 28% of ad impressions they bought on Forbes.com since 2022 appeared on the ghost site.
Forbes spokesperson said the now-shuttered site represented “only about 1% of Forbes’ overall user base.”
Forbes has been owned by Hong Kong-based Integrated Whale Media since 2014. It entered a deal last year to sell a majority stake to Austin Russell, the 28-year-old billionaire founder of electric vehicle startup Luminar Technologies. But the pact, which valued the title at $800 million, fell through when Russell couldn’t come up with the cash.
The WSJ report said the ghost site had run since at least 2017 and had been placing ads intended for Forbes.com since at least late 2021.
“Some advertisers bought premium ad placements, but received clickbait placements,” Rocky Moss, chief executive of ad-research firm DeepSee, who had one client affected, told The Journal. “Imagine if a car dealership slapped a Lexus sticker on an economy Toyota and sold it to you as a Lexus.”
Correction: A previous version of this story stated that Austin Russell bought a majority stake in Forbes last year. That deal in fact fell through.
The post Forbes Caught Stuffing Digital Ads Meant for Dot-Com on Clickbait ‘Ghost’ Site | Report appeared first on TheWrap.
