How spammy sites that rip off obituaries suck up ad dollars from major brands - Morning Brew

Nikolas “Niko” Carmello Sierra died on August 23, 2021. Though news coverage was minimal, if you google “Niko Sierra death,” you’ll find his actual obituary published twice—once on a Massachusetts funeral home’s website, and another on a news outlet’s obituary page.

You’ll also find one of the darker sides of the internet advertising economy: scraped and copied obituaries and tributes on sites like deaddeath.com and tragedyinfo.com.

Others have more obscure titles, like dailywebpoint.com and daily5techtips.com. They cover people who’ve passed away, sometimes by using reports from local newspapers, changing words here and there, and then republishing as content. Some even go as far as embedding social posts about the deceased written by loved ones.

These low-quality publishers suck up ad dollars via middle-men ad-tech vendors from brands like Nike, Nordstrom, Zola, Planned Parenthood, Burt’s Bees, and others, relying on search engines to direct people to them and get their clicks. These sites know someone, whether they’re a close loved one or a former middle school classmate, might search for info about the death of a person like Sierra.

“When you’re trying to elicit clicks from people, there’s only certain things people will click on,” Zach Edwards, founder of digital analytics firm Victory Medium, told Marketing Brew.

Advertisers, and anyone who’s ever spent more than five minutes online, know there is an infinite amount of junk on the internet—not counting...

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