Why are SMH business readers seeing The Age?
So here’s a question that has Dr Mumbo baffled.
For the last few days, something curious has been happening within the business pages of smh.com.au. When one mouses over a business story, the page preview tells the user they’re about to see another SMH page, logically enough.
But on completing the click, the reader is instead whisked onto fellow Fairfax Digital site theage.com.au.
It doesn’t occur on every page, and appears to be limited to the business section.
Which is all somewhat odd.
Now cynics – and Dr Mumbo of course isn’t one – might start asking whether there’s a lucrative CPM deal on with theage.com.au that doesn’t include smh.com.au. Because filtering the Sydney clicks over to the Melbourne site would certainly then make sense.
But if he was an advertiser targeting Victorians, he might just be tempted to ask for some evidence that he’s not paying for an NSW audience. Just in case.
But of course, there’s bound to be a reasonable explanation. He just can’t guess what it is.
Wow, that’s some kind of faith you’ve got in Fairfax’s online execution and the responsiveness of their server guys.
Me, I’m a subscriber to the cock-up not conspiracy view of history.
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would an ip list indicate location of hits , and since sister papers and business is not local would a domain sharing arrangement seem appropriate, plus terms of contract would stipulate some terms I would think
tricky though and verified
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The logic is simple: The Age still has some level of trust when it comes to business news. The SMH…. well…
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This is happening to a lot of SMH stories, and not just redirections to The Age. There are several stories in the technology sections which redirect to an identical story on Fairfax’s online-only west coast effort, “WA Today”.
My first thought was that this was to boost traffic numbers to the WA site – SMH can afford to lose an extra click in order to boost WAToday – but you’re right, advertising might be the leader here.
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I would have thought it was a content issue, not an ad serving issue – which is usually somewhat independent.
I’d put it down to a problem with articles that are being served across multiple mastheads.Of course it’s either a ‘problem’ or a nice way to push traffic on to multiple sites.
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this would have zero to do with ad serving … totally unrelated.
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Here’s a wacky idea – maybe it’s a technical glitch. Put away the tinfoil hats, everyone.
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