Critically, a tracker’s presence on a misinformation website doesn’t tell us how much money each ad tracker generates. There may be multiple trackers on a site. Not all will generate equal profit, and some trackers might generate little profit. If we considered what percentage of a misinformation website’s profit each vendor pays, we would almost certainly see Google’s portion grow.
For example, according to the Global Disinformation Index, an organization that researches how mis- and disinformation are monetized, 77% of the profit from ads listed on a group of nearly 500 COVID-19 disinformation websites came from Google or a company owned by Google. This means Google may have paid as much as $19.2 million of the $25 million potentially earned by GDI’s list of COVID-19 misinformation sites in 2020. (OpenX and Amazon paid out the second and third largest shares of revenues in the Global Disinformation Index report.) One website in the DFR list simply redirected to an Amazon listing rather than using an Amazon Associates tracker, which is an example of another way mis- and disinformation sites monetize and spread false claims.
Recently, NewsGuard, maker of a media literacy browser extension that provides trust ratings for users browsing the internet, published a special report titled Advertising on Misinformation, which explored how misinformation websites generate a substantial profit selling ad space. The report stated that “$2.6 billion in estimated advertising revenue [are] being sent to publishers of misinformation and disinformation each year by programmatic advertisers, including hundreds of millions in revenue supporting false health claims, anti-vaccine myths, election misinformation, partisan propaganda, and other forms of false news.”
