Forbes has been misleading advertisers for years, a new report alleges

Forbes, the 100+-year-old business media brand with a name that used to carry some heft, has, since at least 2017, been running an alternate version of its website where it places ads that brands purchased to run on Forbes.com, according to a new investigative report from The Wall Street Journal.

Advertisers – which include the six major ad agencies, Disney, Microsoft, American Express, and McDonald’s – are more unhappy than Ebenezer Scrooge at the beginning of A Christmas Carol. Per the report, the alternate site, which operated under the moniker “www3.forbes.com” and was only accessible via content-recommendation companies like Taboola and Outbrain (think: the clickbait-sounding sponsored articles you often see at the bottom of news sites), repackaged Forbes’ content in a way designed to serve as many ads as possible.

For instance, one 700-word article was turned into a 34-slide slideshow, exposing its readers to ~150 ads versus seven in the original piece (😳).

• Forbes is blaming Media.net, an ad-tech company that manages its bidding software, for the misrepresentation, saying it accounted for just ~1% of the company’s ad impressions.
• Five advertisers told the WSJ that 10%–28% of the ad impressions they bought on Forbes.com since 2022 appeared on the ghost site – which boasted a completely different demographic.

🗑️ Zoom out: ~15% of the $88 billion spent each year on open-web advertising goes to “made for advertising” sites that are overstuffed with ads and designed to fool advertisers, according to the Association of National Advertisers.