I had a library patron searching for printable teddy bear patterns, and when she clicked on one of the links, it instantly directed her to a porn site. And then, the back arrow would just take her to other porn sites, not the Google results. The address of the site had a .ru top-level domain (I told her to look at the addresses of results and not to click any that weren’t .com).
What’s the point of having a website do this?
To sell porn, obviously.
The website in question may have also been hijacked.
.ru indicates a Russian based site. Redirects are usually all about advertising and control over your viewing pleasure !
I read a while back (on here I think) that the actual porn sites are pretty clean and virus free now since most of the people that use them know what they’re doing and are pretty computer savvy. The ones that have redirects and malware are church websites since it’s just some lady trying to program a website and many of the people visiting the site aren’t protecting their computer, don’t know they shouldn’t click on banner ads and basically are more likely to do exactly what happened in the OP.
So, on the one hand the entire site could have been fake. Created just with the intent of putting malware on the computer of someone who wouldn’t even think to expect and has no idea how to clean it.
OTOH, the site could have been designed by someone that shouldn’t be designing website.
If I’m gonna sell porn, why have a website ostensibly about teddy bear patterns redirect to my porn?
Also, why hijack a website about teddy bear patterns in order to sell my porn? No one looking for teddy bear patterns who gets redirected to porn is gonna say, “Hey, that’s convenient…I’ll take care of my porn shopping quick and then go back to my sewing.”
Okay, but what’s the point of the porn and redirects? Why not hide the malware in the teddy bear patterns? If someone breaks into my house to steal things, it’s weird if they also spray paint obscenities all over my walls.
CTR or Click Through Rate. This is how web sites and advertisers measure the traffic and generate income. It is difficult for an advertiser to monitor how many people actually consider purchasing the products displayed but easy to measure the CTR.
So the porn sites try to capture your personal traffic to boost their CTR. Doesn’t matter to them that your clicks are an effort to escape, they are driving an increase in clicks and that is how they and their advertisers get paid. They send you to even more porn sites that they are partnered with to enhance their CTR, you keep clicking to get out, everyone is happy, except you.
Even here on the SDMB, if you are a guest and are not blocking ads you can see ads after the first or second post and some at the page bottom. These are all useless CTR ads to direct you to a site that only wants you click, and maybe if you are really stupid, to buy the product.
“1 Dirty Little Secret to Eliminate 15 years of Mortgage Payments” or the 1 Weird Trick type ads. If you get interested enough to click on these links you will find that in order to read the whole thing you will have to click on page after page to finally realize it is a bullshit story. The ad guys do not care if you fall for the one weird trick, they got your clicks and that’s how they get paid.
The porn sites get more CTR by trying to capture you and make it hard to leave without more clicks that will redirect you to other partnered sites, etc.
When the death of the guy from Brokeback Mountain was announced, our secretary went to Wiki and searched his name, clicked on the link and was presented with a full screen picture of an erect cock, that she could not exit out of. She had to call me to fix it; hehe, simple Alt F4 exited the screen and back to normal… suggest everybody try it now.
Sometimes it’s just people screwing around because they can but most is probably to get clicks.
Note that the actual porn sites are not only not doing this, but they’re actually victims, too. When a porn site (like any other site) buys advertising, it’s because they hope that the advertising will lead to an interested consumer buying their product. But nobody ever buys anything from these scum-pages, and in fact, it’s often impossible to even try because the pages continually reload faster than you could do anything on them. So the porn sites end up paying the scum-sites for advertising that they’ll never benefit from.