Six years ago, Rebekah Wells Googled her name to see what turned up. The results horrified her: nude photos of herself taken by her ex-boyfriend, along with her name and address, on commercial porn sites such as ImageFlea, ImageEarn and PinkMeth.

She went to the police in her home town of Naples, Florida, and a sheriff’s deputy was assigned to her case. One year later she became romantically involved with the deputy, and after the relationship fizzled, Wells claims the police officer threatened to upload a new batch of her nudes.

She felt nauseated, embarrassed and angry. Wells managed to get her photos removed and filed suit against her ex and the sites, but the lawsuit fizzled. She also launched a site, Women Against Revenge Porn, to help other victims of abuse, though it is closed for now. But the sites that posted her photos weren’t just trying to satisfy her ex’s pathological desire for revenge – they were there to make money.

According to the Pew Research Center, four out of 10 people have been insulted, shamed, stalked, bullied or harassed online. Revenge porn is just one of the ways sites are profiting from internet abuse. And even sites that don’t profit directly may benefit in other ways from the attention online abuse can bring.

‘Cops don’t do this cyber stuff’

Revenge porn sites such as SeeMyGF or MyEx charge $100 a year to access private photos and videos of non-porn stars, almost invariably women, usually posted by spurned ex-lovers. But it doesn’t end there. As with every adult site, there’s an entire ecosystem supporting them – from domain registrars and web hosting services to upstream bandwidth providers and online payment systems. Everybody gets their cut.

Is this even legal? It depends. At present, 27 US states and the District of Columbia have laws barring nonconsensual (ie, revenge) porn, but penalties vary and prosecutions are rare. One problem is that most law enforcement agencies are ill-equipped to handle crimes of cyber exploitation, says attorney Bennet Kelley, founder of the Internet Law Center.

“I have had clients tell me the cops confessed to them they don’t do this cyber stuff,” he says. “Another barrier to prosecution is the ‘blame the victim’ mentality, which is still fairly prevalent.”

A handful of victims have also won high-profile civil lawsuits. Last December, a Texas court awarded Bindu Pariyar $7.25m after her ex-husband posted thousands of nude photos and videos of her online. (She also claims that he forced her to work in a strip club and as a prostitute.) But Pariyar told a Nepali news site she doesn’t expect to collect much from her ex, and the damage is probably irreparable: her nude photos have spread to mainstream porn sites.

Kevin Christopher Bollaert, 28, sits in court during his sentencing hearing in San Diego. Bollaert was sentenced to 18 years in prison for operating a ‘revenge porn’ website and charging victims to remove the images. Prosecutors said he earned about $30,000 from people who paid to remove the images. Photograph: Nelvin C. Cepeda/AP

Go directly to jail, pay $400

Kevin Bollaert thought up an even better money-making revenge porn scheme: extortion. First, the 28-year-old from San Diego published more than 10,000 nude photos on his site YouGotPosted and linked them to the women’s social media accounts. When victims demanded their photos be removed, Bollaert directed them toward another site he owned, ChangeMyReputation, where he charged $300 or more to have images expunged.

Last February, Bollaert was convicted on 27 felony counts of identity theft and extortion and sentenced to 18 years in prison. But the business model he helped foster continues in less illegal but no less unsavory forms.

Scores of businesses routinely scrape law enforcement sites for mugshots of recent arrestees, republish them, then charge $400 or more to remove them. A handful of US states now prohibit the release of mugshots to commercial sites or have outlawed the practice of charging to remove a mugshot; in most cases, though, the practice is perfectly legal because mugshots are considered part of the public record.

Then there are advertising-sponsored gossip sites such as TheDirty, as well as tell-all sites such as ShesAHomewrecker, DatingPsychos, DeadbeatDirectory and BadBoyReport, where readers share often defamatory material about others.

These sites are protected by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which immunizes them from legal responsibility for material posted by their users. (Reader comments on US sites are also protected under Section 230.) And because scandalous material drives readership, sites are usually loathe to remove anything unless it violates copyrights or involves a minor.

‘Future attack prevention’

This, in turn, has spawned a cottage industry of virtually identical services with names such as Reputation Stars, Remove My Name, and Online Defamation Defenders, which claim to expunge negative material from these sites for fees ranging from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars. Reputation Repair charges $1,459 for “expedited removal” from cheater sites and “future attack prevention”.

Another, IC Media Direct, advertises a $6,300 “reputation control” service that churns out positive press releases for its clients and claims to place them on well-trafficked sites in an attempt to push negative results farther down in a Google search.

The odds of actually getting these companies to remove negative content are low, however, and most of them don’t stick around for very long, says Michael Fertik, who founded Reputation Defender, now Reputation.com, in 2006. He adds that only a tiny fraction of his 2 million customers are worried about being harassed online.

“There’s a very limited market in fixing online harassment -– thank god,” Fertik says. “There are far more people interested in basic data privacy who want to be proactive about their online reputation, as well as enterprises who want to make sure they’re getting real reviews from real customers.”

Cesspools of abuse

The indirect benefits of online abuse are harder to measure. Message boards such as Reddit, social networks such as Twitter, and chat apps such as YikYak foster anonymous speech in all forms, including often unsettling amounts of harassment.

The most notorious recent example is Gamergate. Both Reddit and Twitter were epicenters of this phenomenon, where the ire of mostly male gamers was directed at a handful of female journalists whose only offense was to express their opinions in public. The result was months of harassment and death threats, as well as some limited but welcome changes to how Twitter responds to negative content.

Do these sites benefit from the traffic, attention, and virality that abuse often brings?

Definitely not, says a Twitter spokesperson, who asked that his name not be used but provided the following statement: “Our rules are designed to allow our users to create and share a wide variety of content in an environment that is safe and secure for our users.

“When content is reported to us that violates our rules, which include a ban on violent threats and targeted abuse, we suspend those accounts. We evaluate and refine our policies based on input from users, while working with outside safety organizations to ensure that we have industry best practices in place.”

YikYak, the anonymous social chat app popular on college campuses, was also forced to adopt stricter rules after it suffered a backlash from students using it to harass other undergraduates. YikYak did not respond to requests for interviews. Similarly, last May Reddit modified its policies to allow members to report offensive content to system moderators, in large part because it feared that harassment was turning new users away.

Overall, Gamergate had little impact on Reddit’s traffic, says data scientist Justin Bassett, who notes that Gamergate-related subreddits account for less than 1/10th of one percent of the site’s 8 billion monthly pageviews.

But even sites that enjoy a brief rise in traffic due to abuse are damaged in the long run, says Catherine Teitelbaum, chief trust and safety officer for ASKfm. Cyberbullying on the teen-oriented social network was linked to several teen suicides in 2012 and 2013.

Teitelbaum, who took on her role after IAC acquired ASKfm in August 2014, says cleaning up abuse was her top priority. Among other measures, the network increased the number of moderators by 40% and required all users to register for the site, allowing it to ban those who violated its terms of service.

“People pay attention to the negative,” she says. “In the short run you can see spikes in traffic, but as a long-term strategy, trying to incite that kind of negativity is not a viable business model. Escalating negativity doesn’t draw people for the long run, and advertisers don’t want to be associated with that content.”

The indirect benefits of online abuse are harder to measure. Some news organizations acknowledge that having readers fight in the comments can be beneficial for their bottom lines, says Natalie Stroud, associate professor of communication studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Despite that, some will attempt to remove the most abusive commenters; others lack the resources to moderate them.

“There is a tension between revenue potential and what is happening in that space,” says Stroud, director of the Engaging News Project, which studies how publications deal with engagement and negativity on their sites.

“Lots of organizations want to create a space for people to have a dialogue, which is admirable, and they’re disgusted by some of the things they see there. But they don’t know what to do about it. They’re in a tough spot.”

‘Doing it for the lulz’

For the vast majority of online harassers, however, the benefit is not monetary but psychological, says Danielle Citron, professor at the University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law and author of Hate Crimes in Cyberspace.

“You think of a site like 4chan, where people actually proclaim themselves trolls,” she says. “They derive pleasure from other people’s pain. They’re doing it for the lulz.”

Perversely, while the internet has given a voice to vast numbers of people who might not otherwise be heard, unfettered free speech can have a chilling effect, whether it’s Gamergaters ganging up on female writers or Donald Trump using Twitter to attack his enemies, notes Stephen Balkam, CEO and founder of the Family Online Safety Institute.

“I think the people who profit most from online harassment are those who use it to suppress other people’s thoughts, suggestions, comments, and criticisms,” he says. “We are often so focused on making sure governments don’t chill speech, and here are anonymous stalkers and harassers doing just that.”