Who funds fake news?

Fake news is a for-profit business. It's the latest version in a long line of online con jobs, preying on people's weaknesses.

Take things like false news. You know, a lot of it is really spam, if you think about it. It’s the same people who might have been sending you Viagra emails in the ’90s, now they’re trying to come up with sensational content and push it into Facebook and other apps in order to get you to click on it and see ads. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook CEO

The digital duopoly, Facebook and Google, which profit from fraudulent advertising, have tried and failed numerous times to stop the viral spread of misinformation:

The world of digital advertising is a nightmarish joke. In Mark Zuckerberg’s first post about fake news, Facebook managed to serve an ad for fake news next to it. Mark Thompson, New York Times CEO

This November 2016 screenshot, taken by journalist Doc Searls, documented Facebook's inability to stop fraud, even on Facebook. Right next to their CEO's apology post were two clickbait and switch links. Both appeared to be ESPN.com sports news. But both went instead to a diet supplement article at espn.com-magazines.online, a fraud site (now gone).

The fake-news business is financed mostly by advertising technology companies, a.k.a., adtech. Advertisers pay adtech firms to pay publishers to run ads. The process is convoluted, hackable, and far from precise: Microsoft, Citigroup, and IBM ads end up next to Jihadi terrorist videos. Small business owners inadvertently fund neo-nazi sites.

So which adtech firms fund fake-news? To find out we merged and updated all the major, curated fake-news site lists. Then we ran each through BuiltWith's tech-detecting tool to find out which sites use which type of adtech scripts:

1. Advertising, to display ads on a site.
2. Analytics and Tracking, to gather data on site visitors.

Our next step in this project will be to ask the adtech firms below how advertisers can prevent their ads from displaying on fake-news and fraud-ad sites. We'll report back with their replies.

Of the 610 active fake-news sites in our database, 460 are ad-supported. Here are the adtech products that fill their coffers.

Fake news top-50: Advertising adtech
Number of the 460 ad-supported fake-news sites and of the top 1M sites that use each product

Adtech	Fake	Top 1M
DoubleClick.Net	406	489,845
Google Adsense	302	181,091
Google Adsense Asynchronous	205	117,973
AppNexus	182	77,445
Ads.txt	173	53,151
Criteo	169	44,735
Rubicon Project	165	65,819
The Trade Desk	163	55,432
IponWeb BidSwitch	159	43,982
Index Exchange	150	74,433
Google Direct	149	48,377
Google Publisher Tag	146	54,305
Advertising.com	143	47,755
Rocket Fuel	132	34,256
SpotXChange Reseller	131	26,820
AppNexus Reseller	129	32,776
RubiconProject Reseller	129	24,319
Tremor Video Reseller	123	18,207
Pubmatic	121	37,268
AOL Reseller	121	23,945
Turn	119	30,584
ContextWeb Reseller	117	26,650
Yahoo Small Business	115	57,631
Google Reseller	114	29,099
PubMatic Reseller	114	26,162
Drawbridge	113	27,941
BlueKai	112	38,377
Taboola	112	28,231
BlueKai DMP	112	39,271
OpenX Reseller	111	27,843
Criteo Publisher Marketplace	108	12,281
Openads/OpenX	106	44,109
IndexExchange Reseller	105	26,534
FreeWheel Reseller	105	22,505
Simpli.fi	103	26,935
Burst Media	102	20,460
LKQD Reseller	102	19,334
Yahoo Ad Sync	101	23,602
RubiconProject Direct	101	18,550
Media Innovation Group	100	41,326
SpotXchange	99	22,236
SiteScout	99	19,850
Facebook Custom Audiences	98	186,435
AppNexus Direct	97	20,637
DemDex	96	35,619
ContextWeb	94	27,168
Walmart	93	30,120
Adobe Audience Manager Sync	92	28,621
Amazon Associates	91	32,170
RevContent	91	1,936
Adtech links go to BuiltWith usage statistics.

Fake news top-50: Analytics and Tracking adtech
Number of the 610 active fake-news sites and of the top 1M sites that use each product

Adtech	Fake	Top 1M
Google Analytics	491	689,711
Google Universal Analytics	421	562,658
comScore	249	67,965
Quantcast Measurement	220	77,139
Facebook Domain Insights	204	104,034
Rapleaf	180	68,745
Everest Technologies	167	59,437
MediaMath	157	45,037
Google Analytics Classic	156	208,603
Lotame Crowd Control	144	44,255
LiveRamp	136	47,212
Datalogix	107	38,923
Netmining	94	16,437
IgnitionOne	94	16,408
Facebook Pixel	88	146,149
OwnerIQ	88	17,671
Facebook Signal	87	170,825
Facebook Conversion Tracking	87	134,789
Moat	66	29,515
Yahoo Web Analytics	56	26,290
Krux Digital	56	21,335
New Relic	48	74,070
Global Site Tag	47	107,266
Google Analytics with Ad Tracking	47	15,940
Efficient Frontier	46	19,542
Tynt Tracer	46	14,904
Gemius PL	41	19,833
Google Analytics Enhanced Link Attribution	39	47,036
Signal	38	17,245
MediaMind	36	19,254
Google Conversion Tracking	34	119,753
ExposeBox	34	4,157
Chartbeat	33	6,382
Bombora	31	9,403
Google Analytics Event Tracking	31	43,512
Demandbase	29	5,371
Fastly	26	14,055
Twitter Analytics	23	30,621
Alexa Certified Site Metrics	22	10,725
33 Across	22	3,195
Yieldr	22	3,163
StatCounter	21	15,398
Shareaholic	21	5,387
Alexa Metrics	19	8,993
Cross Pixel Media	18	5,529
Dynatrace	16	8,947
Nielsen//NetRatings	16	8,457
Hotjar	14	49,700
Yandex Metrika	12	42,861
Google Analytics IP Anonymization	12	19,027
Thanks to BuiltWith for donating their services.

A marketer can't easily prevent their ads from running on fake-news sites (and thus supporting fake-news publishers). The advertiser can send the adtech firm blacklist of unwanted domain names. But owners of these sketchy sites often remove them quickly, e.g., when discovered as fraudulent, then, just as quickly, spin up another fraud site at another domain name.

Blacklists can't keep up. We'll describe this flaw in the adtech process when we contact the above firms, and ask how they intend to give advertisers an effective option for not funding fake news. We'll tell you how they respond in a future post.