Forbes drops online ads
p2pnet.net News:- Forbes magazine says it’s dropping the paid advertising links experiment it began in August.
Jim Spanfeller, president and CEO of Forbes.com, his staff felt the links might, “blur the lines between paid advertisements and staff-written copy,” says the Associated Press.
“There was a lack of comfort,” Spanfeller said. “And since we are an editorially-driven company, it wasn’t worth having our editors feel uncomfortable, so we decided to step aside.”
The links were generated by a technology called IntelliTXT, a product made by a San Francisco-based company called Vibrant Media Inc, says AP, going on: “Certain common words would be double-underlined in stories and provide links that were paid for by advertisers.”
Spanfeller said the links would still be used on automatically generated pages, such as full-page company profiles.
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See:-
paid advertising – Forbes Removes Ad-Sponsored Links on Site, Associated Press, December 3, 2004
