What the bloody hell is Forbes Online thinking? I once worked for a company that partnered with Forbes, in an effort to deliver their content to mobile devices… pre-RSS days, I was required to parse through their HTML pages for content and I remember thinking “what a mess!” at the time.

Has anyone seen Forbes’s online site lately? My God…

On my Messenger window, I noticed that Krispy Kreme had a news story on it. I clicked through to that and got a page from MSN Money. While I was reading that, I noticed a blurb from Forbes about “Five Nasdaq Stars”. Caught my interest – having worked for a company that got delisted from NASDAQ twice – so I thought I’d take a look at it.

I think of myself as having a thick skin, when it comes to online advertising. Years of looking at pop-ups, pop-unders, and embedded images, I can sift through almost any page and basically ignore the ads.

Not the case here: I couldn’t find the article.

On this page there are 30 separate ads. 30. Not including the in-menu ads that appear if you happen to roll over the top level menu. Some ads are for other Forbes products, like magazine subscriptions or their Attaché web feature… but they’re ads just the same. What a feckin’ mess – a far worse mess than what was there three years ago. I’m simply in shock.

What was the article about, anyway? I don’t know. I couldn’t read it. And even if I could read it, why should I? I mean, it was about financial performance and advice – why on earth would I trust a source that is such an obvious advertising whore? Unless they’re going to split some of that ad revenue, I’m going to be justifiably skeptical.

From now on, I’ll stick to reading Forbes if someone else references the article, via RSS – otherwise it’s freaking ridiculous.