I recently disabled meta-refresh in IE8 (in order to prevent various news websites from auto-refreshing every minute or two).

An unintended consequence of this is that in FT, I can no longer just click on a link to an externally referenced site - they're coded to use a redirect function ( "redirect-to/?redirect=http%3A"(etc) ).

I'm curious to know why links are created this way? I could imagine the technique being used for Ad revenue, but just to link to a referenced external site, what is the benefit as opposed to just linking directly to the site?
(Please excuse my ignorance in asking this - I'm sure there's a very simple explanation.)

Seems I need to either re-enable meta-refresh in the brower I use for Ft, or manually copy the link info, editing it so that I can I can paste the actual destination URL into another window (which involves changing the URL characters back to ascii). Possibly the best compromise is to use Firefox with refresh-blocker - the link still doesn't work, but it at least then displays the external link information as a subsequent clickable link.