Advertising Companies Making Money from Obituary Spam

Thousands of families have witnessed counterfeit obituaries of loved ones filling Google search results. Edge As reported in February, the obituaries — which often appear to be generated by artificial intelligence — are aimed at ordinary people, not just celebrities, and are designed to extract clicks and, in turn, advertising revenue from readers.

One of the sites that the Check My Ads report focused on is HausaNew.com.ng, a content factory that was until recently producing obituaries and news about local deaths in cities across the United States. The site posted an impersonal, clickbait obituary for 20-year-old Harrison Sylver, who committed suicide earlier this year. Sylver’s mother, Nancy Arnold, told Check My Ads she’s discovered dozens of similar sites with counterfeit obituaries — including some that gave false 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 companies, the site makes money by placing digital ads on its website: 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 an article about Sylver’s death but instead flooded the web with poorly written, inexact obituaries of other people, such as Edge previously reported. The site displayed ads alongside this content, ultimately profiting from it. Using the well-known.dev site, Check My Ads compared connections between SarkariExam.com and ad exchanges to see which advertising companies were placing ads on the site (since the information on well-known.dev is self-reported, there’s a chance it’s not up to date, the report warns). Obituaries that previously appeared on SarkariExam.com appear to be unavailable.

One ad company, TripleLift, admitted to Check My Ads that its clients’ ads were appearing on SarkariExam.com and said it had launched an internal investigation. Ryan Levitt, TripleLift’s vice president of communications, told Check My Ads that the company plans to update its terms to make it clear that AI spam in the form of obituaries is prohibited. SarkariExam.com has made about $100 million through TripleLift over the past two years, the company told Check My Ads. Other ad exchanges, such as ad technology company Teads, have not responded to Check My Ads’ findings. Teads was just acquired for $1 billion.

Google has said it will take action to reduce the visibility of obituary spam sites, but a report by Check My Ad suggests the search engine company was still profiting from the content: The site HausaNew.com.ng, which published Sylver’s obituary, likely had Google-supported ads on its site.

“We’ve reviewed the examples you provided and have taken 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 level,” a Google spokesperson told Check My Ads.