Too much advertising, not enough value.

I’ve been noticing a disturbing trend lately. Everyone is so hard up to get on the Internet Advertising band wagon and make their millions that they have given up providing content.

In fact when you look at a lot of “news sites” it seems that they don’t care about the content and are really there just for the advertising. For example have a look at this picture:

https://www.net-security.org/secworld.php?id=8616

The Red square is the article…the entire article. The Yellow square is the list of links to their other similarly value-sparse articles.

Here is another example from the same site.

https://www.net-security.org/article.php?id=1358\&p=1

In this case, the article is spread across three pages of advertising space. Just the right hand column alone get’s more real-estate than the article column. Look at the huge amount of space at the bottom for the Checked By Verisign logo. Not only does it get the bottom banner, but it get’s the middle right side for the same ad. Nice.