Today I was reading an article on The USA Today web site which pontificated on the $64K question, “is the Fed done cutting the Prime Rate?”. In short, the economy is still in the doldrums, however, the Fed believes it’s work is done, yada, yada yada.

I thought it was interesting, so I clicked the Digg button, expecting to be teleported to the Digg.com web site and share the story with the community. TIME OUT. Instead of going to Digg, I was served an interstitial page, with a display ad from Dell. A new navigation bar appeared at the top asking me to click a button if I wanted to keep reading USA Today. What the F? Didn’t I just click the Digg button? I think I declared where I wanted to go.

The bottom line is USA Today is inserting buttons from sites like Digg, Facebook and Reddit, not only to look hip (Web 2.0 logos do that for an old gen media company) and to acquire free traffic, but what’s really evil?… These branded buttons are being used to bang the CPM/C meter. Dell, you’re a sucker if you pay for the bill.

And what about Digg? Unless Digg is paying for their presence on USA Today (would love to know officially) which I doubt, then they are being degraded and simply used for the purpose of creating unearned revenue for USA Today. I would think that would violate their Ts & Cs, but I’m not a lawyer.

Bottom line, this is the EXACT type of practice that desensitizes end users to online advertising. A big thank you should go to USA Today for eating it’s tail and damaging the online advertising industry.