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Forbes International accused of placing ads on dubious subdomain

Numerous brands including Microsoft, Disney, JPMorgan Chase, Johnson & Johnson, Mercedes Benz etc. purchased advertising space on www3.forbes.com, likely assuming it was legitimate ad space on forbes.com.

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Forbes misleading ads

A recent report from Adalytics, an ad quality company, claims that Forbes misled advertisers by suggesting they were purchasing media on Forbes.com when, in reality, they were buying media on a hidden, low-quality 'made for advertising' (MFA) subdomain, www3.forbes.com.

Forbes ceased operations of the website altogether after receiving inquiries for the same.

According to Adalytics, the dubious website has been displaying advertisements since at least May 2017. It repurposed Forbes articles into longer formats, such as listicles and slideshows, and exposed readers to an unusually high number of advertisements. While Forbes's main website typically features 3 to 10 advertisements per article, users of www3.forbes.com may encounter over 200 advertisements per page view.

Unlike Forbes's flagship site, the www3 subdomain did not include subscription paywalls and did not permit search engine crawlers to index its articles, rendering them inaccessible through organic search. Users who attempted to access the www3 subdomain directly were automatically redirected to the main Forbes website. Approximately 70% of readers primarily accessed the site through display advertisements from other websites, many of which were clickbait advertisements from content recommendation services such as Outbrain and Taboola.

Numerous brands purchased advertising space on www3.forbes.com, likely assuming it was legitimate ad space on forbes.com. These include Microsoft, Disney, JPMorgan Chase, Johnson & Johnson, Mercedes Benz, Oracle, Fidelity, Marriott, Ford, United Airlines, and others, as per the report.

Additionally, Adalytics noticed several advertising agencies conducting transactions on the www3 subdomain, such as Omnicom Media Group, Publicis' Starcom, Havas, IPG's Kinesso, Dentsu's Accordant, GroupM's Mindshare, Horizon Media, Stagwell's Gale, and more.

Many advertisers not only paid for what they thought was premium ad space on Forbes's main site, but their ads, which were displayed on the www3 subdomain, were unlikely to reach their intended target audiences. Visitors to the www3 subdomain tended to be older compared to the main Forbes domain, making them less desirable audiences for many brands.

Despite some media buyers explicitly blocking the subdomain, their ads were still shown on the site.

According to the Adalytics report, 'No Trustworthy Accountability Group-certified or Media Rating Council-accredited ad verification vendors appear to have detected Forbes’s practice of misdirection or alerted media buyers to the misrepresented subdomain inventory.' 

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