Brands paid for ads on Forbes.com. Some ran on a copycat site instead

livemint.com:

Forbes for years ran an alternate version of its website where it packed ads that were intended to run on Forbes.com, another sign that brands don’t always get what they pay for in the opaque digital-advertising market. The alternate site, which Forbes shut down Tuesday following inquiries from The Wall Street Journal, featured stories from Forbes.com that were stretched into formats that can fit many more ads, like slideshows and articles written in a list format, known as “listicles." One 700-word article was turned into a 34-slide slideshow, exposing the person who read it on a computer to about 150 ads instead of around seven for someone who read the original piece.

The reformatted articles—whose address began with www3.forbes.com—couldn’t be found on Forbes.com or using search engines. Instead, they were promoted through content-recommendation companies such as Taboola and Outbrain, which place paid links to clickbait-style content at the bottom of many sites.

Ad-buyers said the ads on the alternate site weren’t worth what they paid because they reached a different audience and appeared on overcrowded pages. When brands bought some of the ads, it was with the understanding that they would appear on Forbes.com, according to Adalytics, an ad-research firm that shared its findings with the Journal.

Forbes blamed Media.net, an ad-tech company that manages Forbes’s ad-bidding software, for the misrepresentation, and said it only affected a small share of overall ad impressions. Forbes also disputed the notion that it operated an alternate site, which it described as a “subdomain." Because the subdomain “represents a very small part of Forbes’ user base and an insignificant part of our overall business, we’ve decided to