OUTSIDE YOUR BUBBLE
Inside The Partisan Fight For Your News Feed
How ideologues, opportunists, and internet marketers built a massive new universe of partisan news on the web and on Facebook.
How ideologues, opportunists, and internet marketers built a massive new universe of partisan news on the web and on Facebook.
www.buzzfeednews.com
The most comprehensive study to date of the growing universe of partisan websites and Facebook pages about US politics reveals that in 2016 alone at least 187 new websites launched, and that the candidacy and election of Donald Trump has unleashed a golden age of aggressive, divisive political content that reaches a massive amount of people on Facebook.
BuzzFeed News
Thanks to a trinity of the internet, Facebook, and online advertising, partisan news websites and their associated Facebook pages are almost certainly making more money for more people and reaching more Americans than at any time in history. In some cases, publishers are generating hundreds of thousands of dollars a month in revenue, with small operations easily earning five figures thanks to one website and at least one associated Facebook page.
At its root, the analysis of 667 websites and 452 associated Facebook pages reveals the extent to which American online political discourse is powered by a mix of money and outrage.
The result is hundreds of partisan news websites being run not only by dedicated American conservatives and liberals, but also by the
now-famous Macedonian teens, by internet marketers, and by others who saw a business opportunity. As an example, BuzzFeed News’ analysis found that a conservative Facebook page being run by a 20-year-old Macedonian frequently outperforms some of the larger conservative pages operated by Americans.
The analysis also found that since Trump’s election, top liberal partisan Facebook pages and top-performing viral content from liberal websites are consistently generating more total engagement than their conservative counterparts.
BuzzFeed News
The extensive BuzzFeed News analysis shows just how deeply outrage and the revenue it generates are tied to divisive online discussions.
“Politics changes perspectives, but money
really changes people’s perspectives, so I’d really rather not say anything about that,” said Freddy Hernandez, who operates conservative news website YesImRight.com and its associated Facebook page with more than 1.4 million fans.
Hernandez doesn’t list his name anywhere on the site, and he’s primarily known online for his
YouTube videos about cars, as well as his occasional contributions to auto websites
such as Jalopnik. Hernandez told BuzzFeed News he watched Occupy Democrats and other Facebook pages generate huge engagement and traffic and wanted to see if he could do it too.
Another man who ran and worked on several conservative Facebook pages and websites told BuzzFeed News he got into the game because of his beliefs. But soon the money became his driving force.
“I thought I was in it for the cause,” he said in an interview conducted over Facebook Messenger. “Six months later and after [I bought] an Infiniti G35 and Corvette, I realize it was probably more about the profit.” (He asked not to be named because he has exited the business.)
BuzzFeed News
To fully understand and showcase the massive new world of online partisan news, BuzzFeed News spoke to more than a dozen liberal and conservative site owners and writers, obtained financial filings from the IRS, and created a database of 667 political news websites covering US politics on the left and the right.
BuzzFeed News gathered and analyzed the websites' domain name registration dates, who owns the websites, whether a website is connected to other sites on the list through a shared Google Analytics or AdSense code in its source code, and, when possible, whether the site appears to be run from a country other than the United States. We also examined linking patterns between sites and used data from Alexa to analyze the audiences. (Sites that have the same Analytics or AdSense code often share the same owner.)
This information was combined with Facebook data gathered from the 452 pages associated with the sites in the database. BuzzFeed News downloaded the more than 4 million posts and their associated number of shares, reactions, and comments published between Jan. 1, 2015, and March 31, 2017. (To read a detailed overview of how the data was collected and analyzed, see the bottom of this story. You can also access our full data set on GitHub
here. If you believe a site has been mistakenly included or classified, or if you’ve identified a different kind of error,
please contact us via this form.)
BuzzFeed News
The interviews and data reveal a large, often interconnected world where Facebook plays kingmaker as much as it crushes dreams, where anger and stoking partisan hatred are core strategies on the right and left, and where the biggest players are working to secure dominance by partnering with, or acquiring, competitors and launching new sites to flood the market so new players can’t gain a foothold.
Other key findings:
- There are at least five people or companies that operate both liberal and conservative partisan news sites. These publishers work both sides of the aisle in order to capture as much revenue as possible, and to hedge against one side or the other dropping off in terms of growth.
- The election marked a high point in Facebook engagement for partisan pages on the left and the right, making it a catalytic event that caused at least 187 new partisan news sites to launch, and that saw partisan news’ influence over the online political conversation reach new heights.
- Of the 667 websites in the database, 490 are conservative and 177 are liberal. While this data set does not include all partisan news sites that cover American politics, its size and comprehensiveness suggests that the partisan conservative universe is bigger and more established than its counterpart on the left.
- The number of people running partisan conservative news sites outside the US is significant. The now-famous cluster of mostly pro-Trump sites run from Macedonia is the largest international group in the database, with at least 77 sites and 51 Facebook pages as of early 2017. However, as this research was in progress, Facebook shut down roughly three dozen US politics pages run by Macedonians, and some of the websites associated with them stopped publishing. The number of Macedonian-run sites and Facebook pages is constantly in flux as sites and pages are killed and new ones are launched.
- Writers for many of the newer partisan sites are compensated for their articles by a share of the advertising revenue earned from their stories. Editors for these sites are often paid $5 or $10 per post. Data obtained by BuzzFeed News, for example, shows a writer for the liberal Addicting Info group of sites earned $20,026.63 in one month for a single article back in 2014. But now some sites are beginning to move away from the ad-share payment model. More established partisan sites do not use the revenue-sharing model.
- Liberal and conservative partisan news websites exist as parallel universes. An analysis of major traffic referrers among partisan sites revealed tight networks of interlinking within each ideological sphere — but hardly any referring from liberal to conservative websites, and vice versa.
- Publishers are obsessed with Facebook’s algorithm changes and with avoiding getting caught up in the social network’s stepped-up initiative to reduce clickbait and misinformation in the News Feed. Conservative publishers complain that posts and sometimes even entire pages are removed without warning, while comparatively few liberal page owners report the same challenges. Deep suspicion of Facebook runs through the conservative partisan news world.
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