These days website owners will do anything to get traffic; and this includes all the gimmicks and tricks you can shake a stick at. One prime example of chicanery used to get traffic is Scribol.com, a London based start-up that has managed to gain massive traffic to the tune of 26 million unique visitors. Just a year old, the website has managed to move from a few hundred page views a month to well over 140 million and growing. But what’s interesting is that the majority of visitors to Scribol never intend to visit the site in the first place, and that’s how the trickery comes in.

Scribol leverages what it calls ‘publishers’ or ‘partners’ and it’s these websites that funnel much of the traffic that land on Scribol’s pages. In a very simple terms, here’s how it works: a visitor lands on a partner website, and let’s say for the sake of argument it’s Break.com. That visitor while watching a video sees a thumbnail in the related videos section and says to him or herself “hah! Let me see what’s going on here”. They then click what seems to be a video or story related to Justin Beiber and instead of going to the actual story, they end up at Scribol. The whole thing is pure trickery and is nothing but glorified interstitial advertising—and this if you are not aware leaves web visitors fuming.

Scribol no doubt gets a lot of visitors to their sites but I wonder what their bounce rate is? Probably 100%, though I could be wrong.

Do you think the overt trickery to get visitors to a website should be banned? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

(Source: sitetrail.com)

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