Advertising companies that make money from obituary spam

Thousands of families have witnessed fake obituaries of loved ones cluttering Google search results. As On the edge reported in February, the obituaries – which often appear to be generated by AI – target everyday people, not just celebrities, and are written to extract clicks and subsequent advertising 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 producing obituaries and news about local deaths in US cities. The site published an impersonal, clickbait 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 websites 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 site makes money by hosting digital ads on its site: sites typically earn a few cents each time someone visits their pages or clicks on an ad.

Another obituary site identified by Check My Ads, SarkariExam.com, did not publish a story about Sylver’s death – but it flooded the web with poorly written and inaccurate obituaries of others, such as On the edge previously reported. The site ran ads alongside this content, which ended up making a profit. Using the site well-known.dev, Check My Ads cross-referenced connections between SarkariExam.com and ad exchanges to see which advertising companies appeared to be placing ads on the site (because the information on well-known.dev is self-reported). reported, there is a chance it is not up to date, the report warns). Obituary articles that previously appeared on SarkariExam.com appear to no longer be accessible.

One of the advertising companies, TripleLift, acknowledged to Check My Ads that its clients’ ads were appearing on SarkariExam.com and said it had opened an internal investigation. Ryan Levitt, vice president of communications at TripleLift, told Check My Ads that the company plans to update its terms to make it clear that AI obituary spam is prohibited. SarkariExam.com has earned about $100 through TripleLift over the past two years, the company told Check My Ads. Other ad exchanges, such as advertising technology company Teads, did not respond to Check My Ads’ findings. Teads was just acquired for US$1 billion.

Google has said it will work to decrease the visibility of obituary spam sites, but the Check My Ad report suggests that the search engine company profited from this 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 reviewed the examples you shared and took 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 and site levels,” a Google spokesperson told Check My Ads.