It looks as if News3Insider.com may have topped out at just over 10 million unique visitors/month around 10/2009 still making it one of the most popular fake news sites in recent history from a pure “unique visitor” standpoint.
News3Insider.com at Compete.com
And although it’s quite doubtful that the visitors to news3insider.com were well-targeted beyond a very broad demographic level, it’s also probably true that the person or comany running the site along with the affiliate network(s) and vendors involved made a boatload of money through the deception.
If you aren’t familiar with the phenomenon of fake news sites you can read about them here:
Are Fake News Sites The Next Gold Rush?
Just to get some perspective on the popularity of News3Insider I compared it against a couple of other real news sites as well as the Better Business Bureau and Federal Trade Commission in Alexa:
News3Insider et al on Alexa
According to Alexa, for a brief time News3Insider was more popular than The Washington Post. Admittedly, Alexa’s traffic data is notoriously unreliable compared to other traffic measurement tools such as Compete, but it’s short-term trending information is fairly reliable and it looks like News3Insider.com is on the upswing now ready to take on more of America and maybe even the world’s most popular newspapers.
Since Google has been banning sites like News3Insider from advertising via Adwords I thought it would be interesting to see where all of News3Insider.com’s traffic was coming from:
News3Insider Upstream
According to the above chart a full 26.31% of traffic to News3Insider.com is being driven through the VAlueClick advertising network – which might be a good thing for them as it looks like they could use the money:
ValueClick 3 Month Stock Trend
You may want to visit the the current ValueClick stock price chart here to see if they are faring any better at the time you read this.
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