Because Screw the Readers, That’s Why ⇥ uptake.co

Brad McCarty:

Tell me this – Do you want to go to a site, click on something that looks like a story and instead have an ad fed to you? Because that’s what Mashable just “invented.”

I’ve seen something similar on Fark, but at least it’s from a website (Buzzfeed) that is already popular on Fark (not to mention that it’s clearly marked as an ad). Still, it’s misleading — at a casual glance, it looks just like a regular story.1 As readers are getting more accustomed to not clicking on ads, Mashable and Fark appear to be going for tricky clicks.

  1. This is doubly irritating for someone, like me, who is a “TotalFark” subscriber. ↥︎