First of all let me say I’m a fan and avid reader of forbes online material. I have no proof what they are doing is illegal and I am posting this just because I am curious, and I’d like to start the discussion. Lately, they have all types of material set up to be digested over a large span of pages. With about a small paragraph or so to read on each page, you get to the first page, and then there is a timer set to direct you to the second page after about 6 seconds.
There are a few reasons why I think they might be using this to get more impressions of their advertisments.
- Timed redirects are not consitant with a useful GUI.
- They make the back button much more difficult to use.
- They assume a reader reads at a certain speed. (you can adjust the speed of the redirects, but what’s the point?)
- They assume a user doesn’t want to get up and get a cup of coffee, or stop reading the page and you must either stop the page redirects or keep reading at the same pace.
- Forbes has been known to shove advertising down our throats, with not only one welcome page, but two.
To Forbes: Learn the lesson Google taught the world. Treat the user right, and the advertising dollars will come. Please find a balance between a great online experience, and advertising revenue. Just becuase your contract doesn’t consider it fraud, doesn’t mean it isn’t and that the contract can’t be updated, there’s enough worries about fruad without a large company creating more. We all know there will be more copy cats and all we need is you creating the child of the popup. I can’t imagine every website out there changing to this scheme, you would be blamed for ruining the internet.
GeekSpeaker 