Disinformation Sites Take in Millions from Online Ads Provided by Ad Tech Companies

The Global Disinformation Index (GDI) has published new research that shows disinformation sites across Europe take in more than US$76 million in ad revenues every year.

Adverts were found on known disinformation sites across Europe for household names like Amazon Prime, Burger King, Mercedes Benz, Samsung, Spotify and Volvo.

These online ads were provided by a variety of well-known ad tech companies, with Google (Ad Services and DoubleClick) and Criteo leading the pack.

• Google serves 57% of the disinformation sites in the GDI study and provides 62% of the revenue (US$48 million annually).
• Criteo provides ads to 13% of the sites and accounts for 17% of the revenues paid (US$13 million annually ).

Other companies covered in the research are Amazon, Moneytizer, OpenX, Pubmatic, Revcontent, Rubicon Project, Taboola, Teads, The Trade Desk, Twitter and Xandr.

All of these companies provided ad services and revenues to the sample of 1,400 known disinformation sites in Europe. These sites include the European language and country variations of www.rt.com, www.sputniknews.com and www.epochtimes.com. They also include national disinformation sites such as www.czechfreepress.cz (Czech Republic), www.demotivateur.fr (France), www.journalistenwatch.com/ (Germany) and www.mediterraneodigital.com (Spain).

By enabling disinformation websites to receive remuneration, Google, Criteo and the others are not adhering to the spirit of the EU Code of Practice on Disinformation.

The Code outlines a self-regulatory commitment “to disrupt advertising and monetization incentives” for disinformation. Code signatories include Google, the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA).

“Brands are being let down by ad tech companies. These companies are not making sufficient efforts to ensure they are not funding disinformation in the EU and beyond,” said Clare Melford, executive director of the GDI.

“Without rating sites for their disinformation risks, brands and ad tech firms have no efficient way to protect brand safety. GDI’s risk ratings are an attempt to upend the problem,” said Dr. Danny Rogers, CTO for the GDI.

About the study

The study is based on a detailed analysis of a sample of 1,400 sites from European countries such as Bulgaria, Czech Republic, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Slovakia and Spain. Most sites named in the report have already been flagged publicly for carrying disinformation. All sites have been provided by third parties. The research was conducted between February and March 2020.

The list of disinformation domains was compiled from respected third parties working to combat disinformation, including KremlinWatch, Konspiratori.sk, Le Monde and StopFake.org. The GDI crawled the pages of these domains to determine which ad tech companies were bidding to serve up programmatic adverts on them. Given data protection regulations in EU member countries, these crawls were able to be complemented by a digital map of the ads on the sites in our sample, which in turn linked specific ads to the ad companies servicing the sites.

For the sample of 1,400 domains, the GDI undertook the following methodology:

• used Alexa rankings to estimate the number of views per month for each domain.
• estimated the CPM (cost per mille) for each domain in the sample using a conservative market average of US$ 0.70 (US$ 0.70 per 1,000 pageviews).
• automatically crawled each header bid in our sample to identify which ad tech companies provided ad technologies and services to that domain.
• used these findings to calculate the estimated revenue paid by ad tech company to each of the domains in our sample and then extrapolated this figure to the share of EU-targeted known disinformation sites in our database.

About GDI

The Global Disinformation Index is a UK-based not-for-profit that operates on the three principles of neutrality, independence and transparency. Their vision is a world in which we can trust what we see in the media. Their mission is to disrupt, defund and downrank disinformation sites. They provide disinformation risk ratings of the world’s media sites.