Thanks to the rise of platforms like Facebook and Google, a growing amount of information being created for Americans is coming from overseas.

BuzzFeed News; Alamy

As ad dollars that used to fund journalism pour into the coffers of Facebook and Google, the information business is experiencing a trend familiar to other American industries: The product they produce is now competing with cheaper versions coming from overseas. Content farmers in the Philippines, Pakistan, Macedonia (of course), and beyond are launching websites and Facebook pages aimed at Americans in niches such as politics, mental health, marijuana, American muscle cars, and more. Based on Facebook engagement and other metrics, some of these overseas publishers are now beating their American counterparts. In the process they’re building an industry centered on producing and exporting cheap (and sometimes false) information targeted at the US. “This is like all of the basic stuff happening in economics and politics today,” said Tyson Barker, a political economist with the Aspen Institute Germany who specializes in international economic policy. “It's a globalization trend and you've seen it also in manufacturing and other industries.” Americans and others in the English-language world are used to buying clothing and other products with labels that say “Made in China” or “Made in Bangladesh.” Thanks to the rise of platforms like Facebook and Google, a growing amount of the information being served up in English is now coming from overseas, albeit without the same kind of labeling.

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Health is another niche attracting overseas publishers. According to domain ownership records from DomainTools, a man in Pakistan named “Kashif Shahzad” owns over 200 domain names, several of which focus on mental health and related topics, including MedicalHealthRecords.us, HealthTimes.info, and GeneralHealthcare.co. Another of his sites, GreatAmericans.world, focuses on fibromyalgia and is heavily promoted from a Facebook page called US Health Care. He also owns DailyMedicalNews.co, which is promoted by a Facebook page called Depression Awareness with close to half a million fans. BuzzFeed News contacted him at the email address listed in his domain registrations but did not receive a reply.

One way the (often plagiarized) content from this network of sites spreads is to have fake Facebook accounts share it in Facebook groups about health topics. Thompson pointed BuzzFeed News to several accounts that were part of a group of interconnected profiles that consistently share articles from the same health sites into Facebook groups. Some of the accounts are also administrators of these groups, which focus on mental health, fibromyalgia, addiction, and medical marijuana, among other topics. Along with the fake accounts, some groups, such as this one about marijuana, have administrators based in Pakistan. One suspicious account with the name Rabia Anwar is a member of seven Facebook groups about marijuana and five dedicated to fibromyalgia. The account’s profile features a photo of a woman, but earlier photos posted on its timeline clearly show it originally belonged to a man. (The account info is also set to male.) The profile also prominently presents the photo of a Pakistani actress and her family as if it depicts the person behind the account. Since August, the account’s public posting activity consists entirely of sharing new articles from the network of health sites run from Pakistan into Facebook groups.

Facebook

Thompson was most alarmed when she identified what she believes are fake Facebook accounts that are active in Facebook groups and present themselves as recovering drug addicts. These accounts repeatedly share content from overseas publishers. “The thought of these spamming bots infiltrating a support group of recovering addicts made me so mad,” she said. “Some clickbaiter thousands of miles away is violating the trust and privacy these communities afford to each other for mere pennies per click.” Along with the violation of trust, Thompson is concerned that many overseas publishers in the health vertical simply copy and paste whatever information will grab attention, which can often be false claims about new cures, or misleading health warnings. “They could be giving them bad information, distracting them from proven treatments with snake oil spam, eroding their trust in their doctor, or even giving them bad information that could harm them,” she said. “It's not a joke, it’s not harmless. The heroin epidemic in the Midwest where I live is really bad. Lots of people are dying.” Health is also a focus for Macedonian publishers. Wired magazine reported on Aleksandar and Borce Velkovski, two brothers who got rich from HealthyFoodHouse.com, a website filled with health tips and recipes. BuzzFeed News also found dozens of health-focused domain names registered to people in Macedonia. That country is in fact home to a cottage industry of websites focused on motorcycles, American muscle cars, horses, and other topics. The glut of English-language publishers in Macedonia is partly thanks to a man named Mirko Ceselkoski. More than a decade ago, he figured out how to make money by running websites about cars and other niche topics aimed at Americans. When he met with BuzzFeed News in July in Skopje, Ceselkoski provided a business card that described him as “The Man Who Helped Donald Trump Win US Elections (me and my students from Veles).” Ceselkoski claims credit for Trump’s win because many of the young publishers in Veles took a course he offers on how to make money with English-language websites. Ceselkoski charged $425, which is roughly equivalent to the average monthly salary in the country. “I was instructing my students that they should write news aimed at American people,” Ceselkoski said. He denies telling students to publish fake news, but does instruct them to copy a few paragraphs from a story that’s performing well on Facebook and create a new story from that. It's the content equivalent of an overseas factory pumping out knockoffs of the latest fashion trend.

ICTMN / The Indigenous American

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TheNativePeople.net, which is run from Kosovo, is just as likely to publish a list of "home remedies" to help with clogged arteries, which itself is an article copied from a health site run by a Macedonian, according to domain registration records.

But not all overseas publishers working in English operate at the lowest end of the value chain. Bored Panda publishes viral content about art, design, and other topics. It frequently works with the original artists to create stories. The company was founded in Lithuania, and that’s where the majority of its staff is based. Owner Tomas Banisauskas did not respond to interview requests from BuzzFeed News, but he did publish a post on Medium titled “How we built a global media business with $5/month.” The $5 in question is the cost of his initial web hosting bill. “I was laser-focused on profits from day one,” wrote Banisauskas, who studied business at Vilnius University. “The idea was to create content that people would share on social networks, which would bring free traffic back to my website. All this traffic then could be monetised with AdSense banners.” He said Bored Panda succeeded by focusing on publishing a smaller number of quality posts, rather than churning out a large number each day. This, and what he said was a decision to avoid using clickbait headlines, helped his site avoid a crash in traffic that hit viral sites such as Upworthy when Facebook changed its algorithm, according to Banisauskas.

Bored Panda

There are also some American and British companies taking advantage of the overseas information explosion by using relatively cheap labor in the Philippines or India to create content for their websites. BuzzFeed News recently revealed that the content for International Business Times Australia is actually produced by writers in the Philippines. Its parent company, Newsweek Media Group, which publishes the magazine of the same name, also employs writers in India to create content for its global IBT editions. One overseas writer for an IBT website told BuzzFeed News they are required to write five articles per day. There are also companies, like Tune Media, that are based in the Philippines and use local writers there to produce content for a range of English-language sites about topics such as gaming and news. The rise of overseas publishers is the result of basic internet economics. The most valuable audience for digital ads is English-language website visitors from countries such as the United States. “Because American traffic pays better, American themes are commonly exploited,” Thompson said. The growth of overseas publishers also reflects another, connected economic trend: Rates for digital display ads have been falling for years, which means a publisher earns less money per ad view. Part of the reason for falling digital ad rates is the massive amount of online content being produced, which results in an abundance of inventory for advertisers to choose from. This makes it more difficult for US publishers to earn sustainable revenue from digital advertising, as evidenced by the experience of Indian Country Today Media Network and many others. In response to declining display ad rates for text content, some publishers have been laying off writers in favor of producing video content, which attracts higher advertising rates. But the so-called pivot to video has yet to pay off for some publishers, and is causing them to lose traffic. The reality is that the same factors that create challenges for US publishers are an opportunity for people in countries with a much lower cost of living. A single viral article that generates ad revenue in dollars or euros can provide several months of living expenses for a family in Macedonia or Pakistan. It will barely cover a person’s rent for one month in New York. This is the result of a world where big platforms like Google and Facebook decide which content rises to the top and where anyone with an internet connection — and an understanding of platform dominance — can compete. Kint, who represents big publishers such as Vox Media, the New York Times, and WedMD (BuzzFeed is not a member), says anyone should be able to publish English-language content regardless of where they’re based. The issue is that platforms often don’t distinguish between a story from a well-established site and a copycat version stolen by another property in the same niche, according to Kint.

digitalcontentnext.org Jason Kint