Global media company Forbes has been accused of misleading advertisers into believing that they were buying media space on Forbes.com, but in reality, their ads were put up on a "made for advertising" subdomain - www3.forbes.com.
Last week, a news report from Adalytics titled "Does Forbes operate 'made for advertising' pages and transact mis-declared ad inventory?" accused Forbes of repurposing articles into longer format stories and exposing readers to an unusually high number of ad impressions. On the original Forbes domain, readers may see 3-10 ads throughout an article, whereas on the www3.forbes.com subdomain, they would encounter over 200 ads in a single page view.
"Forbes appears to have set up a dedicated sub-domain - called www3.forbes.com, which appears to have a very different ad serving experience relative to the 'normal' www.forbes.com sub-domain," said Adalytics.
Forbes has been operating and serving ads on the "Made for advertising" subdomain since May 3, 2017, according to the report.
While the flagship site has paywalls, the subdomain had none and prevented search engine crawlers from indexing its articles, making them indiscoverable through organic search.
"Several experts assert that this “www3.” subdomain of Forbes can be classified as “Made for Advertising” or “Made for Arbitrage” (MFA). One consumer was shown 27 New York Times subscription ads and 201+ ads total while viewing a 52 slide slideshow on the “www3.” Forbes subdomain. The New York Times paid an effective cumulative CPM of $60.39 to serve ads to that one consumer," said the report.
On April 2nd, 2024, the "www3." Forbes subdomain became no longer publicly accessible, according to Adalytics.
Readers trying to access the www3 subdomain were redirected to the original domain. Reports say that roughly 70% of the readers accessed the site through display ads on other sides, many of which were clickbait placed through native advertising platforms like Outbrain and Taboola.
"Forbes’ website appears to be set up to automatically redirect users who try to open www3.forbes.com to www.forbes.com, preventing the user from reviewing the content on the www3. subdomain unless they input an exact page URL or first click on an Outbrain ad on another website that redirects them to the www3 subdomain," said Adalytics.
Brands such as Microsoft, Disney, Mercedes Benz, Marriott, Ford, Oracle, Johnson & Johnson, and JPMorgan Chase were reportedly misled by Forbes.
The advertisers were reportedly not only kept in the dark about the site but also charged the same CPM for serving ads on the original domain.
Adalytics reported also spotted many leading ad agencies like Omnicom Media Group, Publicis' Starcom, Havas, IPG’s Kinesso, GroupM’s Mindshare, Horizon Media, Stagwell’s Gale and Dentsu’s Accordant transacting on the said domain.
Reports also noted that advertisers believed they were paying for premium ad inventory on the flagship site of Forbes, but in reality, the ads served on the dubious subdomain were quite unlikely to reach advertisers' target audience.
Adalytics said that Forbes contacted them on March 20 after Forbes itself was contacted by The Wall Street Journal.
Forbes has reportedly hit back, turning the tables on the Adalytics' report calling it "deeply misleading." Accusing the transparency platform of being a "for-profit company that offers services to advertisers," Forbes told a publication that Adalytics refused Forbes' request for a copy of the research for review, but the same was shared with The Wall Street Journal.
