The ad companies making money off of obituary spam

Thousands of families have witnessed fake obituaries of loved ones crowd Google search results. As The Verge reported in February, the obituaries — which often appear to be AI-generated — target everyday people, not just celebrities, and are written to extract clicks and subsequent ad revenue from readers.

One of the sites the Check My Ads report focused on is HausaNew.com.ng, a content mill that, until recently, was churning out obituaries and news about local deaths in towns across the US. The site published an impersonal, clickbait-y obituary of 20-year-old Harrison Sylver, who died by suicide earlier this year. Sylver’s mother, Nancy Arnold, told Check My Ads that she discovered dozens of similar sites with fake obituaries — including some that reported inaccurate details about where her son grew up, what his hobbies were, and how he died. HausaNew.com.ng now redirects to a “Canada Travels” homepage filled with random job listings, and a search for Sylver’s obituary yields no results.

Like other obituary content mills, the website makes money by hosting digital ads on its website: sites generally make a few pennies each time someone visits its pages or clicks on an ad.

Another obituary site identified by Check My Ads, SarkariExam.com, didn’t run a story about Sylver’s death — but has flooded the web with poorly written, inaccurate obituaries of other people, as The Verge previously reported. The site has run ads alongside that content, ultimately profiting. Using the website well-known.dev, Check My Ads cross-referenced connections between SarkariExam.com and ad exchanges to see what ad firms appeared to be placing ads on the site (because the information on well-known.dev is self-reported, there’s a chance it’s not up-to-date, the report warns). Obituary articles previously appearing on SarkariExam.com appear to no longer be accessible.

One of the ad firms, TripleLift, acknowledged to Check My Ads that their clients’ ads were appearing on SarkariExam.com and said they had opened an internal investigation. Ryan Levitt, TripleLiftʼs vice president of communications, told Check My Ads the company plans to update its terms to make clear AI obituary spam is prohibited. SarkariExam.com made about $100 via TripleLift over the last two years, the company told Check My Ads. Other ad exchanges, like ad tech company Teads, didn’t respond to Check My Ads’ findings. Teads was just acquired for $1 billion.

Google has said it will work to decrease the visibility of obituary spam sites, but Check My Ad’s report suggests the search engine company has nevertheless profited from that very content: HausaNew.com.ng, which published an obituary about Sylver, appears to have had ads on the site that are served by Google.

“We’ve looked into the examples you shared and taken the appropriate action. When we find content that violates our publisher policies, we take action and remove ads from serving. We enforce our policies at both the page-level and site-level,” a Google spokesperson told Check My Ads.