Thread by @CraigSilverman, It’s damn hard to make money producing original journalism. But know what [...]

It’s damn hard to make money producing original journalism. But know what works kinda well?

Throw together a WordPress site, copy and paste *other* people’s journalism, and run ads via Google. This guy got millions of views thx to links from Drudge: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/craigsilverman/drudge-report-links-site-plagiarizes-stories

The Drudge Report Has Been Linking To This Armenian Guy's Site Instead Of The New York Times

Drudge referred roughly 8 million views to the site since November.

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/craigsilverman/drudge-report-links-site-plagiarizes-stories

Here's a network of 100 sites dating back to 2015 that plagiarized stories from major news organizations, masqueraded as local news and financial outlets, and manipulated Google News and search results to earn money through ads: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/craigsilverman/these-fake-local-news-sites-have-confused-people-for-years

These Fake Local News Sites Have Confused People For Years. We Found Out Who Created Them.

As they stole stories from real newspapers, these sites baffled scientists, activists, and journalists. Until now.

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/craigsilverman/these-fake-local-news-sites-have-confused-people-for-years

CNBC reporter @megancgraham got tired of seeing her stories copied and pasted onto scraper sites. So she set up one of her own and showed how easy it is get it accepted by ad networks: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/17/broken-internet-ad-system-makes-it-easy-to-earn-money-with-plagiarism.html

To show how easy it is for plagiarized news sites to get ad revenue, I made my own

The ad tech space is so convoluted, it's easy to make money from legitimate advertisers just by setting up a web page. That means there's significant incentive to create garbage — not just low-qual...

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/17/broken-internet-ad-system-makes-it-easy-to-earn-money-with-plagiarism.html

Here's a story about a site called http://forbesbusinessinsider.com that "copies and pastes entire articles from other publishers and reposts them with very slight changes." https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-50432080

Sham news sites make big bucks from fake views

Websites that copy news stories from legitimate sites are making money from Google and Amazon ads.

http://forbesbusinessinsider.com

Another option is to fill a site with poorly aggregated local news content and exploit your knowledge of digital advertising to generate a massive fake audience so you can rake in the money: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/craigsilverman/fake-local-news-sites-albany-edmonton

A network of fake local news sites generated millions of pageviews as part of an ad fraud scheme, researchers say.

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/craigsilverman/fake-local-news-sites-albany-edmonton

Original journalism is time and resource intensive, but copying it is easy and instant with a website plugin.

Local news is dying, but fake local news is lucrative if you know how to play it right.

Please support real news in any way you can.

You can follow @CraigSilverman.

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