Report: Top brands are sending $2.6 billion to misinformation websites

The journalism industry is struggling worldwide - with newsrooms across the world cutting staff, shutting their doors, or fighting to stay afloat.

But a new analysis from NewsGuard and Comscore has found that the misinformation industry is booming - with $2.6 billion in estimated advertising revenue 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.

The data underscores the scale at which online misinformation and disinformation is unintentionally bought and paid for by major advertisers, who place their ads on thousands of websites using programmatic advertising.

The analysis was conducted by combining our data at NewsGuard - we deploy trained journalists to track online misinformation - and Comscore, which measures audience, traffic, and advertising metrics for tens of thousands of websites. Together, we used a sample of 7,500 sites whose traffic and advertising costs are measured by Comscore and a dataset of over 6,500 news and information websites whose credibility is rated by NewsGuard, cross-referencing the data to estimate digital advertising spend on websites in the dataset that we rate as untrustworthy.  

By cross-referencing that data against our list of thousands of digital publishers that repeatedly publish false news, we estimate that 1.68% of display ad spending among the sample of 7,500 sites had gone to misinformation publishers. 

If applied to the $155 billion global programmatic advertising industry, that would equate to an estimated $2.6 billion in global ad spend on misinformation websites each year.