"Forbes" is said to have deceived advertisers. Advertisements that were supposed to be on the prestigious Forbes website were instead served on a junk site.
The incident represents a larger problem in the media industry. The whole thing is a side effect of so-called programmatic advertising. Instead of booking advertising campaigns directly with publishers and website operators, the vast majority of advertising business today takes place via huge online markets where advertising space is auctioned off automatically in a fraction of a second. tmk