I got this oddball story from JAPAN. Not the US media. It is amazing! Study: New Online business that does studies about Ad-tech use shines light on fringe, fake news sites’ sounds like yet another story about how evil those of us who give out news are ‘alt news’ and thus, not trustworthy.
But shock of the day, this story actually alerts us to the existence of something that tracks everyone in a very strange way!
What distinguishes mainstream news sites from those devoted to fake news or other hyper-partisan takes on events? It’s not just the stories they run, but also the way they use online technology that tracks readers and shows them ads, according to a new study by a web analytics firm.
This ‘fake news’ stuff is endlessly amusing. But this particular ‘attack the outsides who contest the news with the Real Rulers’ story has some very interesting twists and turns!
In particular, the study — from the New York-based startup Mezzobit — showed that such fringe news sites are relatively unsophisticated in the way they make money from online ads, perhaps because many are shoestring operations that can easily cover their costs.
OK: this is called ‘stating the obvious’ which is stupid. But I expect mainstream media stories to be very stupid, like they live on the Planet of the Stupids and can’t help it.
But this stupid story has one interesting factoid: the name of an organization tracking the internet to make money for advertisers that has a mine of information while they collect information about all of us. I don’t appear in their sphere of spying because, unlike most online news sites, I have ZERO advertising. All my money, what little there is, comes from wonderful, generous and kind readers.
Stories shown on fake or fringe news sites are anything but mainstream. They run from made-up articles to pieces that start with a grain of truth but exaggerate it to fit highly opinionated perspectives. But they use the same underlying ad technology, which serves up ads intended to appeal to every individual who visits, as their mainstream counterparts — just in different, and sometimes revealing, ways.
The continuous attacks on alternative news is amusing. ALL media run ‘made up articles’ often with zero proof like the deluge of lies about ‘Russia leaked the Hillary secrets’ crap being unloaded on us all by the Mainstream Media giants.
For starters, fringe sites typically aren’t as focused on using tools that maximize ad revenue by auctioning slots to the highest bidder, according to the Mezzobit study. Instead, they generally tap run-of-the-mill services from ad networks like those run by Google and Facebook.
The mainstream media would run ads for slave sales if they could make more money this way. They have zero morals when it come to selling their services to whoever beckons to them on street corners in Manhattan.
One reason? Mainstream sites need to make a lot of money. After all, it’s more expensive to fund actual journalism than to make things up from thin air. Fringe sites “can make money with just a small footprint,” said David Carroll, professor of media design at the Parsons School of Design in New York. Carroll, who is not affiliated with Mezzobit, was given an overview of the report.
HAHAHA. Costs a lot to manufacture lies! And yes, us fringe people can make money with a very small foot print. Reminds me of the end of the book, ‘1984’: ‘The future is a boot stomping on your face…forever’. Yup. That is mainstream media giants in a nutshell.
“This is how propaganda operates,” Carroll said. “Propaganda is not a direct economic business — it’s politically motivated media practice.”
HAHAHA. Carroll, I am assuming, is a liberal and thinks everyone lies but he and his buddies in the mainstream media machine. This professor is stupid, of course. He probably thinks he is a genius which is proof, he is dumb.
You can bet, when this clown talks about ‘propaganda’ he doesn’t mean the main TV owners or the NYT or WP and other lie machines. No, it is the Little Guys who are liars. The article then mentions a business I didn’t know about: Mezzobit.
Mezzobit compared the underlying ad technology used at fringe and mainstream news sites the week of Dec. 5. It started with a list of fringe sites created by Jonathan Albright, a professor who studies data journalism at Elon University in North Carolina. Albright calls the fringe sites “hyper-biased” propaganda.
OK: now I want to punch these two clowns in the snouts. I did medieval fighting in full armor for many years and still can swing a good blow to the nose. Albright thinks that ‘fringe sites’ are ‘hyper biased’? HAHAHA. Mirrors are great tools to discover the warts on one’s own faces!
For a mainstream comparison, Mezzobit used a list from Amazon’s Alexa that tracks the top news sites on the web. The list is comparable with other ranking systems such as comScore’s.
To be sure, some of the differences in the ad-tech footprints of mainstream and fringe news sites are similar to what you’d expect to find from comparing any large companies to smaller rivals, said Joseph Galarneau, Mezzobit’s CEO and co-founder.
“A lot of the fringe sites looked a lot more sparse,” he said. They had fewer tracking cookies and fewer links to outside sites and content. As a result, they were also 8 percent faster to load than the mainstream sites.
I faithfully provide the links to the wretches running the mainstream media sites but if readers don’t click on the links, they are spared the crap dwelling within these links. Note that our sites load faster than the crappy mainstream sites.
Carroll said he was more troubled by the similarities between mainstream and fringe sites.
The study revealed that advertisers aren’t shunning fringe news sites the way they avoid placing ads on sites that feature porn or gambling. And major ad networks appear to be letting advertisers place ads on fringe sites.
I see the tentacles of the State here: the CIA and NSA and Congress want to destroy competition to the mainstream media and all especially the media owners, are conspiring to shut down much of the Internet. Will Trump allow this? A key question I can’t answer. He better not!
Although Google says it will prohibit its ads from being placed on “misrepresentative content,” it doesn’t explicitly single out “fake news” as part of this. Google also licenses its ad technology to advertisers it might not normally accept, indirectly profiting from such sites. Facebook has said that it bans fake news articles it knows about from its advertising network, but it doesn’t do so for entire sites.
They will try to wreck everything in order to stop anyone from talking about the Deep State and the Bilderberg gang. They hate the internet but need it at the same time. They just handed it over to ‘international groups’ which means alien dictators who hate us if we talk about reality. That is a huge no-no for dictators.
After reading this article, I decided to look up Mezzobit and see what is going on here!
Doesn’t look all that ‘big’. I was curious about it. Nearly no ‘net worth’, smallish advertising base, few visitors. User experience sucks air. Is ranked below a million other sites.
Time to visit Mezzobit.com! It really exists! It doesn’t do ‘text’ so I did screen shots instead:
OK. Now for the data site at this online business: for example, due to the ads, sites like mine which has no ads, downloads fast. Got that, everyone? Hooray for Culture of Life News!
Even sites that do take ads, the alternative news downloads faster. It is increasingly annoying to access any mainstream news online due to the ad clutter and mess and slow loads and crashes due to all this junk. So people should visit me and get real news and no ads!
Readers of Culture of Life News get NO cookies from me. Sorry about that. HAHAHA. I am a fairly secure site, if anyone makes it insecure, it is due to hostile outside actions not me screwing with everyone.
The vast majority of news online is the good old USA. But volume doesn’t equal good news. I do note that Russia has a lot of non-US media giant type news! They are FREE and OPEN news like I am which is why I use RT news, for example, or Sputnik news. They are fantastic news services.
Of course, this stupid business calls all of us truth tellers ‘opinionated news’ which is stupid, insane and a fine example of propaganda. All news is ‘opinionated’ that is, seen through the distorted looking glass of whoever is issuing this ‘news’. There is now ‘real news’, all is filtered by mere humans and humans struggle to explain ‘reality’ because ‘reality’ is a bitch who shifts and changes all the time in mysterious ways.
In separate press interviews, the two German politicians discussed concrete plans to create laws banning platforms like Facebook from spreading fabricated stories presented as real news, something both men saw as harmful to democracy.
“We need a systematic legal framework,” Maas told the “Bild am Sonntag” newspaper. His ruling Christian Democrats (CDU) and coalition partners the Social Democrats (SPD) have already announced their intention to craft new legislation to stop the dissemination of fake news in January.
Martin Schulz offered a more concrete plan, saying that to combat the subversion of democracy that occurs when foreign interests create fake viral stories, “not only a national, but a European” solution was necessary. To that end, Schulz suggested that laws should target outlets such as Facebook, where much of fake news is spread.
Thomas Oppermann, who leads the SPD in Germany’s parliament, the Bundestag, took the matter even further on Friday.
Oppermann said the goverment couldn’t be “thought police” but had to stop threats to personal liberty shoulder their share of the burden. He suggested a fine of 500,000 euros ($522,000) if websites such as Facebook didn’t remove harmful material within one day of being notified of it.
“Facebook has not effectively used the opportunity to handle complaints on its own,” Oppermann charged.
Much has been made of fake news after the election of Donald Trump in the United States. Accusations have been circulating from as high up as the CIA that Russian professionals were strategically creating false stories and publishing them on websites that mimic the design of news outlets, allegedly to swing the election for Trump.
They are all mad, I say, stark, raving mad. And are liars, schemers, cheaters, and conspire with foreign powers to control entire populations and enslave them…yup. The Fake News people are our Rulers. They need fake news because if people do figure out who they are and what they plan to do to us and how much they conspire with foreigners to do this…we would have an open revolt.
Culture of Life News 
Problem is a lot of American’s buy the MSN narrative hook line & sinker. I have a friend who would argue with me that the Syrian refugees pouring into Europe were majority women and children. He only watches MSN and reads the New York Times and WAPO.He shrugged off the Cologne sex attacks as mostly German men doing the assaults or that it has always happened?
More fake news from the Washington Post.
https://mishtalk.com/2016/12/31/more-bullsht-fake-news-from-washington-post/#more-43097
I worked for a water utility before retirement. All their plants and pump station were controlled by an independent network. It could not be accessed through the internet. This was done on purpose to prevent hackers. I would assume that all utilities have this set-up.
@KHS71: can’t speak for your utility but vulnerabilities are present in isolated systems with lax security policies, for example with PLCs if techs attach diagnostic devices that have been compromised such as occured with Stuxnet. So maybe not attacked directly through internet but deliberately hacked none the less.
You’re correct that with the right software, connections, and passwords, someone could gain entrance into the independent network. Only one person had the password in our area. Same with keys into the water plant. Only one key in our area. They kept a close watch on who could enter the system and the keys. I was in engineering. It was different for wastewater. I had a set of keys as did others. For some odd reason no one wanted to break into a wastewater treatment plant. You could smell the plant about 200 feet away and it was gunky. That smell and gunk were “green” to me. Job paid well. I retired and have a nice pension now.
Hooray for Culture of Life News!
HAPPY NEW YEAR
KHS71, I used to have an ox team, Chip and Dale. I could have used you to muck out their stalls! Rats.
Great that people like you do this sort of work for the rest of us.
“President Obama catches Netanyahu bribing republican congressmen to change their Iran votes”
In an explosive revelation, wiretaps uncovered by the Wall Street Journal reveal that Benjamin Netanyahu reached out to republican congressmen who had been considering voting in favor of the Iran peace deal, asking what they wanted in return for voting against the deal. In the end, not a single republican voted for the deal, meaning that Netanyahu’s bribes succeeded in swaying the ones who had been on the fence. That means that not only is Netanyahu actively working to undermine the sanctity of the United States government, the republican congressmen involved may have committed treason under the Espionage Act.
http://www.dailynewsbin.com/opinion/president-obama-catches-netanyahu-bribing-republican-congressmen-to-change-their-votes/23432/
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The WSJ has it’s own spin on the story calling Netanyahu an “ally” and painting Obama as evil for snooping on “private conversations”…. fnar
http://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-spy-net-on-israel-snares-congress-1451425210
Bribery is running rampant in DC. The DNC knows this all too well. And the GOP knows this, naturally. I have railed against this for years.
It is so pathetic, arrest everyone.
Elaine quote: “But I expect mainstream media stories to be very stupid, like they live on the Planet of the Stupids and can’t help it.”
Planet of the Stupids! Hilarious.
I use Firefox and Palemoon browsers. Both provide the add-on NoScript that blocks unwanted site intrusions. Elaine’s site has WordPress site access, Scorecardresarch.com, Google.com and Gravatar.com. Not sure why this site needs anything but WordPress site access: perhaps Elaine could explore this.
PS: With NoScript sites will load faster, but many sites not load at all until the site is authorized. If you do utilize the add-on you will be amazed when reviewed how many sites are authorized to access your computer when you think you are viewing a single site. Sometimes as many as 20!
PPS: I also use add-on Ghostery.
«Bribery is running rampant in DC. The DNC knows this all too well. And the GOP knows this, naturally.»
This has been known for a couple hundred years. “Mark Twain” wrote «There is no distinctly American criminal class – except Congress». Consider apex laws for example.
That USA politics be designed to be pay-per-play has been a “consensus” for a long time, so moralizing is not that helpful.
What is more worrying is that only certain sides are paying to get the plays they want: Wall Street, Likud, in particular. it used to be that the “little people” balanced them with their own pay-per-play funding, via the trade unions and the congresspeople “sponsored” by them. That has largely gone, and largely explains why neoliberalism and neoconnery are virtually unopposed in mainstream politics. The upper 5% of the income distribution provides most of the pay-per-play political donations.
The only tenuous opposition has come from B Sanders, crowd-funded, and D Trump, self-funded.
A lot of “moralizing” idiots want politicians to represent them for free, in a pay-per-play system. But realistic people know that if you want something funding it is the best way.
Trump spent less than half than Hillary and won. Sanders spent less than Hillary by a huge amount and he did lose but only because he started late in the game, once he realized Hillary was going to be picked Soviet-union style.
Okay, what did the 3 really spend?
«Trump spent less than half than Hillary and won. Sanders spent less than Hillary by a huge amount»
Very much agreed, and also that money does not determine results, but it helps to win, and after winning it helps to “influence” any winner who wants to be re-elected. In the Sanders and Trump cases the really important details is that a lot of the money they spent was not provided by Wall Street and the Adelson-style warmongers.
«what did the 3 really spend?»
IIRC overall Clinton 1 billion, Trump 500 millions and Sanders is not directly comparable because he did only primaries not the actual election.