Lost in the Digital Swamp, Link by Link

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I was on my phone, reading an article from a respectable news outlet, when I came across an ad tempting me toward a seedier corner of the web. It featured a photograph of an anonymous woman leaning over the bathroom sink, her head cut out of the frame, backside front and center, iPhone gleaming on the counter nearby. “Husband Divorced His Wife After Looking Closer at This Photo,” the headline read.

I squinted. Was this some kind of … butt-related mystery? I clicked the link. Soon I was mired in a distended slide show, crammed with photos of random women and bloated with distracting doodads, including a decoy “Next” button that misdirected me to an advertorial for a supplement claiming to cure erectile dysfunction with a blend of ingredients like “horny goat” and “potency wood.” When I finally arrived at the slide show’s terminal page, the promised divorce-inducing photograph appeared: It was a decade-old viral photo, one that had been debunked by Snopes.

I went on that ride courtesy of one of the internet’s many “content discovery solutions.” These companies occupy real estate at the margins of websites like CNN, Politico and TMZ, and fill them with links to content landfills with names like Buzz-Hut, CollegeFreakz, Dogsome and TimezOff. The links are often ads for stuff like bedsheets and dental implants that are disguised as news articles — or else barrel-scraping clickbait that tempts the reader toward still more ads — and because the thumbnails and headlines are written by the individual advertisers themselves, they range in caliber from straightforward sales pitches to gross body stuff. The links appear under the banner of “Related Content,” “You May Also Like,” or — their most accurate descriptor — “Around the Web.”

While some news sites, including The New Yorker and Slate, have recently banished such links from their pages, deeming them too déclassé to rub shoulders with their own content, others welcome the easy revenue boost. According to the data analysis firm Datanyze, Taboola and Outbrain are the oldest and biggest services in the business, but even upstarts like Revcontent and Adblade have significant sway over what we see on the web.

And people still bite on this??