The Drudge Report Has Been Linking To This Armenian Guy’s Site Instead Of The New York Times

On Tuesday, New York Times columnist Kara Swisher revealed that a widower sent a personal letter to Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey asking him to delete tweets from President Donald Trump about the man’s late wife. Trump had falsely implied that MSNBC host Joe Scarborough was involved in the death of the woman, who worked in his office when he was a member of Congress.

The Drudge Report, the venerable website run by Matt Drudge, soon featured the story.

But Drudge didn’t link to the New York Times. Instead, the site sent visitors to a copy-pasted version of the story on dnyuz.com, an obscure site filled with content plagiarized from publishers, including the Times, the Atlantic, Bloomberg, and the Financial Times, among others.

Since November, the links on the Drudge Report have sent roughly 8 million pageviews to the site, according to data from analytics service SimilarWeb. This has likely earned significant revenue for its owner, who has taken steps to hide their identity. The success of dnyuz.com is yet another example of how Google, which provides the ads that make the site’s money, allows webpages that copy content from real publishers to reap ad dollars. At the same time, the news industry is hemorrhaging jobs and revenue.