I’ve put up with this for far too long. And I’m not going to any more.
Publications that have the habit of linking only to their own web sites rather than to the subject of their articles will no longer get any traffic from me on any device. In fact, I’m going to go so far as to down-rate them on apps like Apple News and block my own devices from being able to navigate to their pages.
The straw on this particular camel’s back was a Variety article* about Disney’s new Movies Anywhere service. They reference the service multiple times throughout the article, having the name of the service linked but only to their own Variety.com URLs. When they do mention the URL of the Movies Anywhere service they spell it out like MoviesAnywhere.com and do not have it linked.
This is being about as bad of a net citizen as you possibly can be. It is also terrible for their readers. They, and many other publications, are reader hostile and this is but one of their tactics.
So, I’m done with them. I’ll be making a list of publications over time and sometime in the future I’ll share it**.
* No, I won’t link to it. They don’t deserve it.
** Added to them should be any publications that use Taboola.