I wonder whether, as web use becomes more sophisticated, people will accept this is part of the deal with online news. Personally, while adverts elsewhere on the page don’t much matter to me, it does bug me to think that the usefulness of the text I’m reading is compromised by commercial concerns.

And when it comes to the kind of content that can be produced credibly away from the big online papers, blogs and non-traditional news sites who don’t ‘leverage this opportunity’ will clearly be doing their readers a favour.

Where the BBC has links to “Related Sites” other news providers have “Advertisers Links.” When you look at an article in the “Media” section what do you see – adverts taking you to the “Media Jobs” page on the website – where their advertisers are paying to be seen.

Its not a coincidence that the practise of linking out to relevant sites is one which only the BBC seems to have continued with – they are funded by licensing fees and can afford not to turn every available space into a message from their sponsors.

Also Web Search Engines such as Google and Yahoo! rate your site by looking at the number of outbound as well as inbound links you have. The more inbound, compared to outbound links you have the higher you will rank on Google, the more traffic will be sent to your site and the more you can charge for ADVERTISING!

I’d humbly offer this quote

When writing directly for the web, make sure that you insert any outward links around the appropriate words within your body copy, rather than in a side panel or at the bottom.

from my Press Gazette article on SEO for journalists. Ironically, PG didn’t publish inline links at the time, so it ended up looking stupid.

Another (probably worse given its target market) example is Computer Shopper. They’ve started putting inline links into their news stories (hallelujah!), but articles written for the magazine still aren’t transferred onto the website with inline links. It wouldn’t matter so much, but Dennis employs hateful Vibrant inline adverts.

If we’re all agreed that failing to put in relevant links is a disservice to your readers, then failing to do so but remembering to put in shit adverts is taking the piss out of them.