Travel web sites may not make a fortune in advertising, but they are fortunate in the sense that there are so many potential advertisers out there. So in case you haven’t noticed, any big mainstream site is going to pummel with you with ads in so many ways, from so many directions, that you had better have a really fast connection and a good pop-up blocker. The more “mainstream media” roots the site has, the more annoying it is likely to be: newspapers and big magazines are the worst. Apparently they have to make up for that army of staffers they hired to compete with the independent site owners and bloggers who are creating better content on the road from a laptop.
One really annoying trend though is sites trying to pump up their “page views” by making you click on screen after screen to read one story. Their “cost per thousand” ad rates are based on page views, so if they can make you click on 10 pages just to read one or two stories, the suits are patting each other on the back for being so clever. There are plenty of sites I respect who do this way too much ( Budget Travel Online and SmarterTravel.com for starters), and others that are so unbelievably insufferable that I don’t even bother unless there’s something really worthwhile to read ( Wendy Perrin’s blog on Concierge.com for example). Those don’t hold a candle to the recent desperate lunge for page views published by Forbes Traveler, however. This one’s a doozie that takes whoring for ads to a new level.
If you visit an MSNBC story called The 50 Most Visited Tourist Destinations in the World , you get a nice little intro with some tidbits, then a link to ForbesTraveler.com. When you arrive at the latter, you find out that it’s a slideshow on 50 PAGES! As in they want to to click “next” 49 times so they can get 50 pageviews out of you. But actually you have to click more than 49 times, because between some pages there’s a huge interruption advertisement that covers the whole screen. You have to click “skip this ad” to get past the broadband-hugging monster. Sometimes it’s an ad that is at least vaguely related to what you are reading, but on some sites you just get pummeled by junk banner ads from the likes of Vizi Direct, a company that mostly deals in those trickster “You are a winner!” scam ads.
If you want to see more about the 50 most visited tourist destinations, set aside some time and happy surfing. I can think of at least 49 other things I could be doing in that time though, like visiting travel sites that respect their readers instead of treating them like call center clients to be abused and put on hold. Next time you read a travel story on the web, see how many pages you have to wade through to read the whole thing. If it’s one (without resorting to the “print view” button), then bookmark it—that site is a keeper.
