Fake news is still a lucrative business that draws revenue from several major ad networks, according to a BuzzFeed investigation published Tuesday.
The viral — but legitimate — news company found more than 60 publishers of fictional news who were working with large internet advertising networks including Revcontent, Google AdSense, and Content.ad. While the advertising on those sites mainly consisted of content-recommendation ads (ads designed to look like legitimate news stories), BuzzFeed also found banner ads, such as one from the Gap, on sites publishing fictional news.
An additional analysis commissioned by BuzzFeed and a co-investigator on “A Field Guide to Fake News” found that even when sites were booted from one ad network, many times they just moved on to another provider in a never-ending game of whack-a-mole.
“What matters the most is that they get their [ad] impressions,” one proprietor of a fake news site told BuzzFeed. “As long as the traffic is real and the ads are being served to real people, it’s never a problem.”
BuzzFeed evaluated 107 sites known for publishing fictional news stories and found that 62 of them ran ads from at least one ad network, with 29 using multiple services.
Out of the 45 sites without ad networks, 28 are now offline, four redirect to addresses already on BuzzFeed’s list, and one is out of the fake news business.