Woodkirk Stone
- Advertisers spend up to $ 2.6 billion a year on disinformation sites, according to a new report.
- NewsGuard and Comscore calculated the spend on a sample of 7,500 websites.
- Insiders have spotted brands like Home Depot and Vrbo running programmatic ads on disinformation sites.
Despite the maturation of digital advertising, major marketers still buy ads that inadvertently fund sites that spread disinformation online.
Advertisers who buy automated online ads contribute up to $ 2.6 billion in estimated ad revenue each year to websites peddling disinformation, according to a new report from measurement firm Comscore and NewsGuard, a company that uses journalists and artificial intelligence to identify disinformation on the Internet.
NewsGuard and Comscore have crossed 7,500 websites that Comscore measures with a NewsGuard tool that checks the credibility of websites. They found that 1.68% of display ad spend on these sites went to disinformation publishers, which represents $ 2.6 billion of the $ 155 billion global programmatic advertising industry.
While the report doesn’t name any specific companies, Insider spotted programmatic ads from Home Depot, TaskRabbit, and Vrbo on NewsGuard sites classified as disinformation sites like One America News Network and Independent Sentinel. These ad-supported sites promote topics ranging from false health claims and anti-vaccine myths to election misinformation.
Spokesmen for Home Depot and TaskRabbit told Insider that the ads were placed by their respective ad networks. TaskRabbit also said it has added One America News Network to its list of excluded sites for future advertisements.
Vrbo did not respond to Insider’s request for comment.
The report highlights the extent to which major advertisers continue to unintentionally fund online disinformation.
Disinformation websites use social media algorithms that prioritize engagement to bring together a large audience online, NewsGuard co-CEO Gordon Crovitz said. These are then monetized by third-party companies called demand-side platforms that brands use to buy programmatic ads.
And while some businesses have grappled with how and where ads appear, the automated nature of programmatic advertising means that advertisers can always end up running ads alongside misinformation.
“Some of these disinformation sites are funded by foreign governments, but there was a mystery around where the thousands of others got their funding. The answer indirectly comes from top notch advertisers,†Crovitz said. “Disinformation is not just a cottage industry – it has become an important part of the internet economy.”
It has also been difficult to stop the problem because the most widely used programmatic advertising platforms like Google and The Trade Desk do not break down the ad revenue they provide to disinformation sites against legitimate sites, Joshua said. Lowcock, US Digital Director of Universal McCann. and Global Head of Brand Safety for IPG Mediabrands.
“It is important to continue to draw attention to the problem, as this will force brands and DSPs to follow,†he said. A DSP is software that buys advertisements online. “We need Google, the Trade Desk, and every DSP that has programmatic inventory pools to share their site listings and clean up their offering.”
And disinformation is a growing concern for company shareholders. Shareholders of Omnicom and Home Depot, in particular, recently tabled resolutions asking companies to investigate whether their advertising dollars have helped spread hate speech and disinformation.
Ultimately, misinformation steals clicks and ad dollars from legitimate publishers, eating into their revenue.
In the United States, $ 1.62 billion of the $ 96.89 billion in digital programmatic ad spending forecast in 2021 will go to disinformation websites, according to the Comscore and NewsGuard report. By comparison, $ 3.5 billion went to all US newspapers in 2020.
So, for every $ 2.16 in digital ad revenue sent to legitimate newspapers, $ 1 goes to disinformation websites, according to NewsGuard.