Researchers Find Google Serves Nearly Half Of All Ad Traffic On Fake News Sites

The study, Market Forces: Quantifying the Role of Top Credible Ad Servers in the Fake News Ecosystem, by University of Michigan School of Information researchers Lia Bozarth and Ceren Budak finds that 48% of all ad traffic on “fake” news sites are served by Google, while 32% of ads served on “low quality” sites rely on the firm.

The study concludes that ad tech giants- including Google, but also other major players such as MGID, Lockerdome, Yandex, Pubmatic, and Outbrain- are earning relatively negligible revenues from problematic sites, but are still “responsible for delivering a substantial fraction of ads on fake and low-quality news sites,” and therefore represent a point of leverage to reduce the economic incentives for mis- and disinformation.

The study confirms observations by journalists such as BuzzFeed’s Craig Silverman, and adds to the case that interventions aimed at reducing the market incentives for mis-and disinformation can be effective. Activist organizations such as Sleeping Giants have targeted disinformation purveyors by demanding that advertisers refuse to support them through programmatic exchanges and networks- and as the researchers note, many of the sites compiled by Zimdars in 2018 no longer exist.