Forbes has come a long way down since the days of Malcolm Forbes, Sr. He did many exposes of bad business practices. Forbes is now owned by Integrated Whale Media Investments of Hong Kong.<p>If you're not that familiar with how ad serving works today, watch this IAB video.[1] Note how the online auction process works. After information about the user (location, demographics, income level, previous purchases, what user has looked at) has been obtained from a data provider, that info is submitted to an ad exchange. Advertisers then have an opportunity to bid for placing an ad in that space, and have 10ms to bid.<p>But sometimes, no advertiser bids in that round. The ad space is now "remnant space" - ad space where all the big advertisers declined to buy. Remnant space is very cheap, maybe 5% of premium space. The first ad exchange goes out to a second lower-tier ad exchange, where the cycle repeats, at a lower price point. That's where junky ads and malware get inserted. Remnant-space sellers include Rubicon, PubMatic, and AdMeld (now owned by Google).<p>Many publishers are reluctant to set a minimum price and leave ad space unsold. Rather than fill unsold space with some non-ad content, or a house ad (Forbes running an ad for some other Forbes publication), they sell the space to one of those bottom-feeder services. This hurts their reputation and readership, and probably isn't worth the small revenue it generates.<p>Forbes covered the issue of ad exchange trust in 2014.[2] Their ad people need to read their own magazine.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Glgi9RRuJs" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Glgi9RRuJs</a>
[2] <a href="http://www.forbes.com/sites/roberthof/2014/12/10/can-you-trust-your-ad-exchange-new-index-may-provide-the-answer/" rel="nofollow">http://www.forbes.com/sites/roberthof/2014/12/10/can-you-tru...</a>