The parent company of the far left blog site Newsweek has been caught buying fake web traffic as part of an effort to scam ad buyers.
The Newsweek Media Group admitted Thursday that it purchased web traffic to several of its sites, a move that critics say was intended to trick a government agency into buying ads.
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a federal agency responsible for certain regulation in the financial sector, last year awarded Newsweek‘s sister publication, the International Business Times (IBT), a large bulk of its video and display advertising campaign, BuzzFeed News reported Thursday.
But a new report from the consulting firm and social media watchdog group Social Puncher says much of IBT‘s online traffic was actually “junk traffic with a share of bots” redirected from piracy websites.
The result of the Social Puncher analysis aligned with previous reporting from BuzzFeed and analyses by other social media watchdogs that found that IBT‘s U.S., U.K., and India websites were all purchasing fraudulent or invalid traffic.
This news drops shortly after Newsweek had its offices raided by cops. The police seized several servers.
Lots of the old media organizations have had a hard time making the jump into the new media landscape powered on the Internet. It is not a surprise that some would engage in fraud in order to make themselves look more prominent than they are.
This type of chicanery is probably much more widespread than we think. Most news websites are horrible. They are littered with paywalls, pop up advertisements, auto play videos and other things that make viewing them a miserable experience. They’re obviously trying to milk as much as they can from their readers. It’s part of the reason why the independent media which doesn’t use such gimmicks continues to grow in popularity.
The old media is becoming less and less relevant day by day. Stories like this prove how desperate they are just to stay afloat.
