I always just assumed it was a form of “dark pattern” meant to try to stop people from leaving their website once they’ve entered (e.g., coming from a different site, you can’t just hit backspace or click back to immediately exit their site. You’re stuck now).
Comment on Redirect to prevent back button
Eiri@lemmy.ca 2 months ago
I’ve always wondered. Is there really a benefit to a ton of redirects like that? Like, do they gain anything by making it harder to back out?
Or is it just extremely incompetent website programming?
prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 months ago
Eiri@lemmy.ca 2 months ago
I think that’s right for a website where you accidentally clicked an ad and now it’s trying to convince you you have a virus and you need to download their virus to remove it. Or maybe for an ad pop-up where annoying you might increase the chances that the content makes it into your brain.
But for a news website i have trouble seeing the logic.
HK65@sopuli.xyz 2 months ago
News websites get revenue via ads. This makes people load the same page again, loading the ads again.
Eiri@lemmy.ca 2 months ago
I’d have expected ad providers to catch on pretty quickly that there’s cheating involved, no?
prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 months ago
Any page that makes their revenue through ads do everything they can to maximize engagement, and that means keeping them on your website as long as possible. So any little thing they can do, they will.
gwen@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 months ago
more ads displayed with each redirect i guess?