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Comment by axegon_ | Hacker News Reader

Exactly what I was thinking:

BBC is not allowed to show ads in UK. It's likely that the journalist who wrote the article is totally unaware that the page has this kind of spam in other countries. Hilarious though.

It's baffling to me how many major news outlets have willingly compromised their integrity in this way, to the point of permitting Outbrain/Taboola to use look-alike fonts and formatting.

In an era where legitimate reporting gets called "fake news", why make that easier to do?

Because Outbrain and Taboola can easily be 1/10th or more of a legit site's revenue, on the order of millions of dollars. I'm not saying that's a good thing, it's a very difficult argument with the amount of money you could potentially miss out on.

It's similar with affiliate links. Make tons of money but compromise your integrity and point your users to the exit door.

Sure, in the short term.

The damage to their reputations may cost substantially more in the long run. Doesn't take many "I clicked a NYT article and it was a scam" experiences to permanently sour someone on the outlet.

How many people do care about reputation of a news source beyond "it's mainstream" vs. "it's a tabloid" vs. "it's something random I've never seen before"? I think most people these days don't follow news sites, they click through to individual articles from their IMs and social media feeds.

I cancelled a NYT subscription over their continued employment of folks like Bret Stephens (https://www.vox.com/2019/8/27/20834957/bret-stephens-bedbug-...) and Bari Weiss (https://theintercept.com/2017/08/31/nyts-newest-op-ed-hire-b...). It wouldn't be shocking for someone to do so over Taboola.

It's not a legitimate site any more once it starts making money that way. You might as well sell cigarettes in a health food store. Outbrain and Taboola are cancer and the world would be better off if their offices were flattened by a meteor impact.

I assert it doesn’t affect the legitimacy of the site at all. Also, I don’t think selling cigarettes undermines a pharmacy.

I may place less importance on “brand coherency” and more on “value to myself” than others.

This is a BBC worldwide thing, we don't get any of this on the UK site. Bit of a strange stance.

Such a strange stance. To point out the hypocrisy visible to 99.2% of the world's population.

If it’s not visible to the original author and his/her primary audience then is it actually hypocrisy?

Or an unfortunate case in point (irony)?

I think parent commenter was talking about it being a strange stance on the part of BBC, not on the part of the person pointing out the hypocrisy.

Not sure what you mean, I was saying it's a strange stance for the BBC.

I rarely see all this stuff, since I'm using adblocker, but this is legitimately funny.

https://beta.trimread.com/articles/569

at least they make money off those ads. kind of a revenge

I had no idea the BBC showed ads outside the UK. It's really upsetting how far it has fallen in recent years.

While I agree that standards have fallen at the BBC in recent years, this is not an example of that. BBC sites have shown ads outside the UK for more than ten years on the basis that UK licence fee payers shouldn't have to subsidise their sites for visitors outside the UK. The ad income pays for that. Same with BBC Worldwide, the BBC's commercial arm, that sells BBC content to other broadcasters outside the UK.

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