McGorty junk news websites
The McGorty junk news websites are a network of fake news websites that were run by Matt McGorty. Buzzfeed News found over 100 sites from 2015 to 2020.

Typically the sites started with plagiarized news from other sites, with updated publish dates, to gain credibility. They would then add press releases and other sources. These would then be featured in Google News and be monetized with Google AdSense and other schemes. Content was typically locally oriented or related to finance.

McGorty worked for Thomson Reuters and Intrado, a subsidiary of NASDAQ. McGorty said he was unaware that the content provider was publishing copied content.

Google News terminated AdSense accounts used by the websites and tuned Google News to not show its content.

The links between the sites were discovered through shared whois records, advertising accounts, web tracking accounts, and other methods, which were linked to a Destin, Florida address. They were confirmed by MarketBeat, a company that paid McGorty for newsletter signups. Some sites had fake names for editors or claimed to be owned by a nonexistent person named Scott Gentry.
Q28549308
fake news
Concept
Q55715275
Buzzfeed News
MEDIA
Q164666
plagiarized
Concept
Q207184
press releases
Concept
Q12020
Google News
MEDIA
Q183480
Google AdSense
MEDIA
Q1141267
Thomson Reuters
ORG
Q7984882
Intrado
ORG
Q82059
NASDAQ
MISC
Q183480
AdSense
MEDIA
Q590967
whois
MEDIA
Q2156427
Destin, Florida
LOC
None
MarketBeat
UNK
Q85784565
McGorty junk news websites
UNK
2015-01-01T00:00:00Z^^http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#dateTime
2015
DATE
2020-01-01T00:00:00Z^^http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#dateTime
2020
DATE
stock exchange