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Fake news is a problem. Yet the sites that publish it keep surviving because ad servers keep sending them advertisements.
According to a white paper published last month by researchers at the University of Michigan School of Information, 48% of ad traffic on “fake” news publishers is served by Google. Nearly a third (32%) of “low credibility sites” like Breitbart, Drudge Report, and Sputnik News were delivered by Google.
- The researchers analyzed more than 1,700 publishers, identifying 545 as either “fake” (sites filled with pseudoscience and straight-up lies) or “low credibility” (hyper-partisan), using a data set compiled by Melissa Zimdars, an associate professor at Merrimack College.
- Additionally, the researchers found that the “top-10 credible ad servers,” like Lockerdome and Outbrain, make up 66.7% of fake and 55.6% of low-quality ad traffic. Even so, the researchers said that the $$ these firms make from such placements represents a “negligible fraction” of their overall revenue.
- Using digital emulators that mimicked browsing behavior on the sites, the researchers could identify which ad servers were supporting misinformation sites.
The researchers didn’t reach out to Google, but the search engine told Marketing Brew in a statement that the company removed ads from “more than 1.3 billion pages that breached” its policies in 2020. “We have strict publisher policies against promoting dangerous and misrepresentative claims,” it said.—RB