The Frumplingtons

When I visit the BBC News page at Twitter, I go mainly to check the latest headlines. If I click on a link I expect it to take me to a page somewhere on bbc.co.uk where I can get more detailed information on the item I’m interested in.

I do not expect to be bounced, without warning, to an affiliate link. Which is exactly what happened to me earlier this evening.

Here’s the page I was looking at (this was around 6.30pm). Notice the item at the bottom of the page, which starts, “Identity theft is a concern for all Brits”.

The link below is given as http://tinyurl.com/57hrt3. Nothing unusual about that. Most links on Twitter are automatically converted to tinyurl.com links, to avoid breaking the Twitter layout. Tiny URL then redirects the link to its proper destination, which I, not unreasonably, was expecting to be somewhere on the Beeb.

However, this particular link went somewhere else. This one took me to a site that wanted to invite me to sign up for a free credit report.

To say I was surprised would be an understatement. For a moment, I thought the browser might have been hijacked.

The full link is quite cumbersome. I’ve split it up a bit so it doesn’t mess up our own layout.

https://www.creditexpert.co.uk/order1_1.aspx?PageTypeID=
CEUK_SP_TakeControl_01&sc=410025&bcd=tradedoublertestlink
&tduid=bb9aa3019b396e363cdf3a52e6e99081&areaid=22&pkgid=
UKMON&SiteID=100002&SiteVersionID=487

Naturally, this made me a bit suspicious. This isn’t a BBC page, I thought. So I did a bit of investigating. To find out where a tinyurl.com link goes before you actually click on it, you have to use Tiny URL’s preview facility. So, I took the original link (see earlier in this post) and changed it from this,

http://tinyurl.com/57hrt3

To this,

http://preview.tinyurl.com/57hrt3

And here’s what I found:

So, it appears that whoever posted the link on the BBC Twitter page to what I naively thought would be a news story, was actually using a tradedoubler.com affiliate link without giving me any warning about where the link was going. Tradedoubler is a legitimate website, and so is the credit report site that the link eventually went to. This is not the argument. The point is, if I had known beforehand, I would definitely not have clicked on it. If you’re not sure what tradedoubler is all about, here are a few words from their ‘About’ page.

TradeDoubler is a global performance-based digital marketing company offering a range of products and services to optimise your return on investment.

Our dedicated teams of digital marketing professionals strive to optimise the performance of your digital marketing activities.

[…] we help deliver online sales targets for more than one thousand of Europe’s top blue-chip online advertisers.

[…]dramatically improve the results from your online marketing initiatives. […]

Of course, there’s nothing wrong with making profit. But I personally prefer to have some idea of where a link will take me, rather than be, in effect, tricked into visiting a website. This seems to me like a desperate tactic and certainly not one I would have expected the BBC to be associated with. Why, instead, couldn’t the link have pointed directly to the credit report site, rather than going through a two-cents-per-click affiliate site first?

On a regular BBC News page, external links are usually clearly marked with the wording “The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites”. On their Twitter page it seems that you have to find out for yourself.