Fake news is an age-old phenomenon, widely assumed to be associated with political propaganda published to sway public opinion. Yet, with the growth of social media, it has become a lucrative business for Web publishers. Despite many studies performed and countermeasures proposed, unreliable news sites have increased in the last years their share of engagement among the top performing news sources. Stifling fake news impact depends on our efforts in limiting the (economic) incentives of fake news producers. In this paper, we aim at enhancing the transparency around these exact incentives, and explore: Who supports the existence of fake news websites via paid ads, either as an advertiser or an ad seller? Who owns these websites and what other Web business are they into? We are the first to systematize the auditing process of fake news revenue flows. We identify the companies that advertise in fake news websites and the intermediary companies responsible for facilitating those ad revenues. We study more than 2,400 popular news websites and show that well-known ad networks, such as Google and IndexExchange, have a direct advertising relation with more than 40% of fake news websites. Using a graph clustering approach on 114.5K sites, we show that entities who own fake news sites, also operate other types of websites pointing to the fact that owning a fake news website is part of a broader business operation.

翻译：虚假新闻是一种由来已久的现象，通常被认为是为了影响舆论而发布的、与政治宣传相关的行为。然而，随着社交媒体的发展，它已成为网络出版商的一项暴利业务。尽管已有诸多研究并提出了各种应对措施，但近年来，不可靠新闻网站在前沿新闻来源中的用户参与占比仍在持续增长。遏制虚假新闻的影响，取决于我们限制虚假新闻生产者（经济）激励的努力。在本文中，我们旨在提升这些激励机制的透明度，并探讨以下问题：谁通过付费广告支持虚假新闻网站的存在——既包括作为广告主的一方，也包括作为广告销售方的一方？这些网站的所有者是谁，他们还涉足哪些其他网络业务？我们是首次系统化地审计虚假新闻收入流的过程。我们识别出在虚假新闻网站上投放广告的公司，以及负责促成这些广告收入的中介公司。我们对超过2400个热门新闻网站进行了研究，结果表明，像谷歌（Google）和IndexExchange这样的知名广告网络，与超过40%的虚假新闻网站存在直接的广告关系。通过对114.5万个网站采用图聚类方法，我们表明，虚假新闻网站的所有者同时也运营其他类型的网站，这指出拥有虚假新闻网站是其更广泛商业运作的一部分。