Forbes Removes Ad-Sponsored Links on Site - Why We Ask? - Our Audience Likes The Benefits

Snide's Remarks: The publishers of The Auto Channel will continue to support the linking of certain words to advertisers who are trying to deliver their message to an interested audience.
It's hard for me to believe that our viewer's can't distinguish between an ad and editorial. I think that the "sponsored results " which appear at the top ofsupposedly neutral and accutate search results on search engines like Yahoo Google MSN AOL etc. are the dishonest use of the Internet. If Forbes is so concenred about confusing their readers, why does their site review recognize Kelley Blue Book as the standard? What do you think? E me at msnide@theautochannel.com.

NEW YORK Dec 3,2004; The AP reported that Forbes magazine is removing paid advertising links from stories that appear on its Web site, abandoning an experiment it began in August.

Jim Spanfeller, the president and CEO of Forbes.com, said the company stopped using the sponsored links following concerns from his staff, who felt that the links might blur the lines between paid advertisements and staff-written copy.

"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."

Spanfeller said that the company did not find that users of the Web site were confused about the links, which were labeled as being paid for by advertisers.

The links were generated by a technology called IntelliTXT, a product made by a San Francisco-based company called Vibrant Media Inc. Certain common words would be double-underlined in stories and provide links that were paid for by advertisers.

While the links will no longer be used on stories, Spanfeller said they would still be used on automatically generated pages on Forbes.com such as full-page company profiles.