McGorty junk news websites
The McGorty junk news websites are a network of fake news websites that were run by Matt McGorty. Buzzfeed News found over 100 sites from 2015 to 2020. Typically the sites started with plagiarized news from other sites, with updated publish dates, to gain credibility. They would then add press releases and other sources. These would then be featured in Google News and be monetized with Google AdSense and other schemes. Content was typically locally oriented or related to finance. McGorty worked for Thomson Reuters and Intrado, a subsidiary of NASDAQ. McGorty said he was unaware  that the content provider was publishing copied content. Google News terminated AdSense accounts used by the websites and tuned Google News to not show its content. The links between the sites were discovered through shared whois records, advertising accounts, web tracking accounts, and other methods, which were linked to a Destin, Florida address. They were confirmed by MarketBeat, a company that paid McGorty for newsletter signups. Some sites had fake names for editors or claimed to be owned by a nonexistent person named Scott Gentry. Sites. Local-oriented sites include: Finance-oriented sites include: Unconfirmed sites include: MarketBeat. MarketBeat, a  financial media company owned by Matthew Paulson, paid the McGorty sites for newsletter signups as part of its affiliate program. Its spokesperson said the network of MarketBeat sites are unrelated to the McGorty sites, but operated in a similar manner and contained at least one story plagiarized from the Washington Post. MarketBeat sites include: