I followed a webclip link out of gmail today and it dropped me off at a news story on Forbes.com. I wanted to read this story. However, I was presented with something horrific. I was presented with the results of a tragic effort that I can only presume is a scheme to show as many "punch the monkey" advertisements as possible.

What is this scheme? Well. I landed on the page. This page had two average-length paragraphs. No sooner had I finished reading the first paragraph than the page reloaded and showed me another, new piece of text.

Six seconds later. A new page.

Repeat.

Turns out Forbes.com has some sort of slideshow they try to use to display stories. To make matters worse, there are advertisements everywhere. By the time I figured out what part of the page I was supposed to be looking at, it went to the next page. Sure, you can stop the slideshow, but I only found that out afterwards.

Thanks Forbes. I almost read one of your stories.

Clicky for an example article

Thumbnail screenshot of the page follows. Enjoy the massive amount of whitespace and adspace.