There are moments, scrolling through your feed at three in the morning, when you stumble across a post claiming that the Pope has endorsed a presidential candidate, or that Bill Gates is microchipping vaccines, or that lizard people secretly run the Federal Reserve—and you think: who makes this stuff up? More to the point: who pays them to make this stuff up?
The answer is you. And me. And every advertiser whose brand accidentally appears next to an article claiming that drinking bleach cures cancer. We are all unwitting investors in the conspiracy economy—a sprawling business model where fabricating reality is more profitable than documenting it, where teenagers in North Macedonia can earn thousands monthly convincing Americans that Hillary Clinton funded ISIS, and where platforms pocket billions while claiming they’re merely neutral town squares. (They are not neutral. They are slot machines optimized for engagement.)
The conspiracy economy generates roughly $78 billion in global losses annually, according to research from the University of Baltimore and CHEQ. That’s approximately Ecuador’s GDP, or what Americans spend on pet care yearly. The difference is that your dog actually loves you. The conspiracy economy just wants your clicks.
What Is the Conspiracy Economy?
The conspiracy economy is what happens when you take the marketplace of ideas, strip it of any quality control mechanisms, and reward vendors based purely on how many people they can get through the door—regardless of whether they’re selling furniture or fantasies. It’s the monetization of mistrust. It’s the industrialization of lying.
More precisely: the conspiracy economy refers to the interconnected systems of platforms, advertisers, content creators, and intermediaries that profit from the creation and dissemination of misinformation. It operates on a simple principle that would make any con artist weep with admiration: fake news spreads 70% faster than true news on social media. The more outrageous the claim, the better it performs. Engagement favors emotional manipulation over factual accuracy. And engagement, dear reader, is what pays the bills.
This isn’t your grandfather’s conspiracy theory—some fringe pamphlet printed in a basement about fluoride turning people into communists. The modern conspiracy economy is industrial-scale, algorithmically optimized, and globally distributed. It has supply chains. It has quarterly earnings. It has affiliate marketing programs.
The business model is elegantly simple: create inflammatory content that triggers emotional responses; distribute it on platforms whose algorithms reward engagement; collect revenue through advertising, donations, merchandise sales, or affiliate commissions; repeat. It’s click arbitrage meets confirmation bias, lubricated with programmatic advertising and sealed with blockchain donations because apparently cryptocurrency wasn’t already sketchy enough.
How Misinformation Converts Views Into Cash
If you’ve ever wondered how a teenager in Veles, North Macedonia, can afford a BMW by copying conspiracy theories from American right-wing websites, congratulations—you’re about to receive an education in entrepreneurship that business schools should probably teach but won’t because it would make their donors uncomfortable.
Advertising Revenue & Programmatic Ad Networks
Let’s start with the obvious: advertising. The same mechanism that funds legitimate journalism also funds the claim that vaccines contain tracking microchips. Research examining over 2,400 news websites found that major ad networks including Google and IndexExchange maintain direct advertising relationships with more than 40% of fake news websites. These are not shady fly-by-night operations. These are Google and Facebook—companies with combined quarterly ad revenues exceeding $15 billion.
Here’s how it works: Fake news sites plaster their pages with ads through Google’s AdSense program or similar networks. When someone clicks on an article claiming that Nancy Pelosi was arrested for treason (she wasn’t), they’re served advertisements from legitimate companies—Toyota, Walmart, whoever’s buying space through automated programmatic advertising. The advertiser pays the ad network. The ad network keeps a cut and pays the website. Everybody wins. Except truth. And democracy. And your uncle’s grip on reality.
Websites repeatedly publishing fake news generated an estimated $2.6 billion in advertising revenue in 2021. That’s billion. With a B. For context: that’s more than the annual operating budget of the entire U.S. National Park Service.
The fake news producers understood something that traditional media was slow to grasp: the ad networks don’t care about content quality. They care about traffic. In Veles, North Macedonia, teenagers discovered that producing fake news developed into a genuine industry, where a single post could generate $15 in revenue on a good day through ad placement. Copying sensational misinformation from American conservative platforms and reposting it with provocative headlines generated clicks. Clicks generated ad revenue. The more the fake news spread, the more money was made. It’s the American Dream, except it’s happening in the Balkans and destroying American democracy, which strikes me as rather ironic but probably shouldn’t.
Paul Horner, a prolific fake-news writer focused on Facebook distribution, told The Washington Post he was making $10,000 monthly from AdSense alone. The most successful operators in the Macedonian fake news ecosystem were earning around $5,000 monthly during the 2016 U.S. presidential election—a fortune in a country where the average salary hovers around $400. One site, abcnews.com.co (a complete ripoff of the legitimate ABC News), pulled in over $500,000 through Google’s advertising network before getting shut down. (Or so they tell themselves. Sites like this tend to reappear under new domain names like mushrooms after rain.)
Subscription & Membership Models
But advertising is merely the gateway drug. The real money comes from subscriptions. Why settle for ad pennies when you can charge believers $9.99 monthly for “exclusive content”?
Alex Jones built an empire on this model. Despite being banned from major platforms in 2018, Jones testified that Infowars earned approximately $70 million annually. His GiveSendGo “Save Infowars Legal Defense Fund” has collected nearly $385,000, each donation accompanied by comments about “dark forces” and “criminal operations” trying to silence truth.
Subscription newsletters, Patreon accounts, exclusive Telegram channels—the conspiracy economy learned what newspapers knew: subscriptions are forever. Or at least until the credit card gets declined, which happens more often because many believe banks are part of a globalist plot.
E-commerce, Merch, and Affiliate Sales
Then there’s merchandise. Jones pioneered this with dietary supplements and survival gear. When your bankruptcy trustee liquidates your assets for owing $1.5 billion to Sandy Hook families, those assets include book royalties and even a video game called “Alex Jones NWO Wars.” Yes, there’s an Alex Jones video game.
The real alchemy happens through affiliate marketing. Research on Telegram conspiracy channels showed conspiracy theorists generate almost $66 million through e-commerce and affiliate links. They share Amazon links to conspiracy books—nearly 50% of links examined included affiliate tags. When someone buys that book claiming NASA and Elon Musk are lying about space, the channel gets a commission.
Amazon banned QAnon merchandise but not books: “As a bookseller, we believe that providing access to the written word is important, including content that may be considered objectionable.” Noble in principle, profitable in practice.
The Hidden Middlemen: Platforms, Advertisers, and Tech Giants
But focusing solely on the producers of misinformation is like blaming street-level drug dealers while ignoring the pharmaceutical companies and banks that make the whole operation possible. The conspiracy economy depends on infrastructure—platforms that host it, algorithms that amplify it, and payment processors that monetize it. These aren’t bystanders. They’re investors.
Social Media Platforms & Audience Engagement Metrics
Facebook. Instagram. YouTube. TikTok. X (formerly Twitter, before Elon Musk decided to rebrand it as his midlife crisis). These platforms insist they’re neutral. They are not neutral. Neutrality would require treating factual information and manufactured propaganda equivalently. What they actually do is optimize for engagement—a word that sounds harmless until you realize it means showing people content that makes them angry enough to click, share, and comment.
By creating algorithmic filter bubbles designed to increase engagement, platforms like Facebook profit from the proliferation of extremism, bullying, hate speech, disinformation, and conspiracy theory because inflammatory content achieves the greatest visibility. Engagement drives advertising revenue. More time on platform equals more ads served equals more money. The algorithm doesn’t care if you’re engaging with a thoughtful policy analysis or a claim that Democrats are harvesting children’s adrenal glands for adrenochrome. (They aren’t. That’s not how chemistry works. Also: what is wrong with people?)
The conspiracy economy exploits a fundamental design flaw in social media: these platforms were engineered to maximize attention, not truth. Meta’s own internal figures estimate they deliver 15 billion scam ads every single day, generating $7 billion in annual revenue. When the company’s automated systems flag fraudulent advertisers, Meta doesn’t terminate their accounts—it charges them higher fees as a “disincentive.” Translation: scam ads are more profitable than legitimate ads because the scammers pay premium rates to keep running.
Even better: if a user clicks on a scam, Meta’s automated ad-targeting system floods that user’s feed with more scams. The platform identifies vulnerable users—people susceptible to misinformation—and systematically exposes them to more misinformation. Because the vulnerable click more. Because clicking generates revenue. Because the machine optimizes for money, not morality.
Meta’s own internal research acknowledges that Facebook is involved in approximately one-third of all successful scams in the United States. In the UK, it’s 54% of payment-related scam losses—more than double all other social platforms combined. When your safety teams award a weekly “Scammiest Scammer” prize to the advertiser generating the most fraud complaints, and 40% of those scammers remain active on your platform six months later, you’re not fighting fraud. You’re hosting it.
Ad Buyers and Brand Funding Entanglements
Here’s where it gets cosmically absurd: major corporations are funding the conspiracy economy accidentally, through a system so convoluted that nobody’s entirely sure where their advertising dollars are going.
Programmatic advertising—the automated auction system that places ads in milliseconds across millions of websites—is a marvel of modern technology and a catastrophe of modern oversight. Brands set parameters (“show my ad to people interested in fitness equipment”), submit budgets, and trust the algorithms to handle the rest. The algorithms do handle it. They just don’t care if “fitness equipment” ads appear next to an article claiming that 5G towers cause COVID-19.
ProPublica’s investigation revealed that Google’s ad practices fund disinformation globally, with the company generating $257 billion in revenue in one year, $31 billion of which came from placing customers’ ads on more than 2 million websites. Google enforces its policies more strictly for English-language content than for content in other languages—not because non-English misinformation is less harmful, but because bad PR, regulatory scrutiny, and revenue concerns drive enforcement priorities, according to a former Google leader who worked on trust and safety.
Meanwhile, internal Meta documents showed the company generated approximately $18 billion in advertising revenue from China in 2024, with nearly one-fifth of that—around $3 billion—coming from ads tied to scams, illegal gambling, pornography, and other prohibited activity. Meta internally labeled China its top “scam exporting nation,” accounting for 25% of all scam and banned-product ads globally.
The company established a 95% confidence threshold before banning fraudulent advertisers. Below that threshold, suspect advertisers simply paid higher fees. Meta also set a $135 million “revenue guardrail”—the maximum amount the company would forfeit to crack down on suspicious ads, even though it was earning $3.5 billion every six months from ads deemed “higher legal risk.” When enforcement staff proposed shutting down fraudulent accounts, internal documents showed that Meta sought assurance that growth teams wouldn’t object “given the revenue impact.”
Translation: we’ll fight fraud, but only if it doesn’t hurt quarterly earnings.
This is not conspiracy. This is business. Which perhaps tells you something about the overlap between those categories.
Case Studies: Viral Misinformation That Made Money
Let’s get specific. Because general hand-wraving about “the system” is boring, and what’s more interesting is seeing exactly how individual humans turned lying into a lucrative career.
The Macedonian Teenager Gold Rush: During the 2016 election, at least 100 fake news websites were traced to Veles, North Macedonia—a town of 41,000. Teenagers with no investment in American politics created sites with names like USADailyPolitics.com, publishing false articles claiming Hillary Clinton was being indicted or the Pope endorsed Trump. Through Google’s AdSense, some pulled in $5,000 monthly—life-changing money where average wages are $400. All they had to do was lie to Americans, which turned out to be remarkably easy.
Meta’s $16 Billion Problem: Internal company documents revealed that Meta projected earning approximately 10% of its 2024 revenue—roughly $16 billion—from running advertisements for scams and banned goods across Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, with the platforms showing users an estimated 15 billion scam advertisements daily. The company’s automated systems identified these ads as fraudulent but didn’t remove them because doing so would exceed the revenue loss threshold Meta was willing to accept. Some “High Value Accounts”—big spenders on fraudulent ads—accumulated more than 500 policy strikes without being shut down. When safety teams gave out their weekly “Scammiest Scammer” award, many recipients continued operating for months. Because they were paying. Because money talks. Because the conspiracy economy and the legitimate economy are not separate ecosystems—they’re symbiotic.
The Infowars Empire: Alex Jones may be the most successful conspiracy entrepreneur in history. Even after being banned from major platforms in 2018, Jones generated $70 million to potentially $1 billion annually through dietary supplements, merchandise, books, crowdfunding, and cryptocurrency donations. Anonymous donors used crypto to funnel millions. Even a $1.5 billion lawsuit hasn’t stopped the money machine. Jones continues broadcasting, claiming he’s “literally on empty” while operating a media company requiring dozens of employees and significant infrastructure. The math doesn’t math. But then again, neither do most conspiracy theories.
These case studies illuminate a pattern: the conspiracy economy rewards the shameless, enriches the creative liars, and operates through the same infrastructure that funds legitimate business. It’s not a parallel economy. It’s the same economy, just with worse fact-checking.
The Real Stakes: Social, Economic & Democratic Costs
The global economy loses $78 billion annually to misinformation. That’s real money disappearing because people believed false information.
Stock markets are particularly vulnerable. In 2017, ABC News incorrectly reported that Michael Flynn was set to testify that Trump instructed him to contact Russian officials during his campaign, causing the S&P 500 to drop 38 points and inducing $341 billion in losses before correction brought it to $51 billion. One false story. Fifty-one billion dollars. Erased.
Healthcare misinformation kills. Anti-vaccination movements drive most of the $9 billion annual costs of health misinformation. Measles cases tripled in the UK because anti-vaxxers spread misinformation. In Congo, a quarter of respondents believed Ebola didn’t exist or was created in a lab—beliefs that contributed to its spread because people refused treatment.
Democracy suffers when citizens can’t agree on basic facts. When a third of Americans believe the 2020 election was stolen despite no evidence, how do you have productive discourse? When Facebook’s algorithms identify vulnerable users and feed them increasingly extreme content to maximize engagement, how do you maintain shared reality?
The conspiracy economy doesn’t just cost money. It costs trust. And trust can’t be printed by central banks.
What Can Be Done to Counter the Conspiracy Economy?
Now we arrive at the part where I’m supposed to offer solutions, except every solution faces the same fundamental problem: the conspiracy economy is profitable specifically because solving it would be expensive. Platforms could eliminate fraudulent ads tomorrow if they were willing to sacrifice billions in revenue. Advertisers could demand transparency about where their ads appear if they were willing to pay higher costs for human oversight. Governments could regulate these systems if they weren’t captured by the same tech giants they’re supposed to regulate.
But pessimism is boring, and I’m told readers prefer articles that at least gesture toward hope, so let’s pretend there are viable paths forward.
Regulatory and Platform Interventions
Governments could regulate platforms like other industries generating negative externalities. Section 230 could be reformed to create accountability without censorship. Platforms could prioritize accuracy over engagement. In Slovakia, coordinated pressure led advertisers to scrap over 17,000 campaigns on misinformation sites, proving civil society action can be effective.
The challenge: platforms maximize profit from engagement, and engagement flows from outrage. Asking Facebook to voluntarily reduce engagement is economic insanity. It’s like asking a casino to kill the lights and turn off the slot machines — it cuts straight into the very thing keeping the whole place alive. Regulatory intervention is necessary but faces fierce industry opposition that would likely water down any legislation before the ink dried.
Media Literacy & Public Awareness
Education advocates promote media literacy—teaching people to identify misinformation and think critically. This is the journalistic equivalent of thoughts and prayers. It sounds nice. It’s almost completely ineffective at scale.
The problem isn’t that media literacy doesn’t work. It’s that the conspiracy economy generates misinformation faster than educators can train people to recognize it. AI-generated deepfakes and algorithmically-optimized propaganda outpace human cognitive defenses. You can’t media-literacy your way out of a system designed by PhD engineers whose job is manipulating your attention.
That said: media literacy is better than nothing. A maybe is better than a definitely not.
Market Solutions
The fantasy: advertisers will realize they’re funding misinformation, pull their money, and the conspiracy economy will starve. Except this hasn’t happened. Major ad networks maintain relationships with more than 40% of fake news websites. Most advertisers don’t know where their ads appear because programmatic advertising is automated and opaque.
The realistic solution probably involves all three approaches: regulation creating consequences, education providing critical thinking tools, and market pressure demanding transparency. But this assumes coordination and political will that democracies struggle to demonstrate on far simpler problems than dismantling a multi-billion-dollar industry whose business model depends on making people confused and angry.
Frequently Asked Questions About the Conspiracy Economy
Who profits from viral misinformation?
Content creators earning through ads and affiliate links; tech platforms like Facebook and Google collecting billions from serving ads alongside misinformation; advertising networks taking commissions; conspiracy entrepreneurs selling merchandise and subscriptions; and fraudulent advertisers paying premium rates to reach vulnerable users. The only people who don’t profit are victims who believe the lies, lose money to scams, or suffer the erosion of democratic institutions.
How do advertisers contribute to the misinformation economy?
Mostly accidentally, through programmatic advertising that automatically places ads across millions of websites without human oversight. Brands submit budgets and targeting parameters, and algorithms find the cheapest inventory matching those criteria. If fake news sites offer cheap impressions, the algorithm buys placements there. The brand’s money flows through ad networks to fake news producers, funding more misinformation.
Why does fake news spread so fast?
Because humans evolved to detect threats, not evaluate statistical claims. Fake news triggers emotional responses—fear, anger, outrage—more effectively than accurate reporting. Social media algorithms amplify content generating emotional engagement, because engagement equals advertising revenue. Research shows false stories are 70% more likely to be retweeted than true ones, not because people are stupid but because lies can be crafted to be more emotionally compelling than truth.
Can misinformation be regulated without censorship?
Theoretically yes, practically difficult. You could regulate the business model rather than content—removing financial incentives by reforming advertising networks, improving platform transparency, and holding companies liable for fraud on their platforms. This focuses on money rather than speech, sidestepping censorship concerns. But it requires political will and resistance to lobbying from companies earning billions from the status quo.
What are the biggest costs of the misinformation economy?
The $78 billion annual global loss includes stock market losses, poor financial decisions, healthcare costs, and corporate reputation management. But the bigger cost is erosion of trust in institutions, experts, and democratic processes. When people receive algorithmically-curated realities and can’t agree on basic facts, governing becomes impossible. The $78 billion is measurable. The loss of democratic coherence is still being paid.
The conspiracy economy, it turns out, is not some shadowy underground operation run by mysterious elites in smoke-filled rooms. (Though some of the conspiracy theories it produces certainly claim that such rooms exist, which is rather meta.) It’s mostly legal. It’s mostly transparent, if you know where to look. It operates through the same mechanisms that fund journalism, entertainment, and e-commerce. The only difference is that instead of producing value, it produces doubt. And instead of building shared understanding, it fragments reality into algorithmically-optimized echo chambers where every user receives a custom-tailored version of truth designed to keep them clicking.
Who profits from viral misinformation? Tech giants earning billions from engagement. Advertisers accidentally funding propaganda. Conspiracy entrepreneurs selling supplements to the credulous. Foreign teenagers exploiting American gullibility. Platform executives who’ve decided that quarterly earnings matter more than democratic stability.
We created this system. We fund it every time we click on outrage bait, share without reading, or buy products from advertisers too lazy to verify where their ads appear. We’re all complicit. We’re all invested. We’re all stuck in this Crazy Machine, watching our pockets get picked by teenagers in the Balkans while Facebook whistles innocently and counts its billions.
The show must go on. And you’re holding a ticket you didn’t realize you purchased, funded by advertisers who don’t know they bought it for you, distributed through algorithms that don’t care whether you enjoy the performance or merely watch it in mounting horror.
The conspiracy economy isn’t a bug in the system. It is the system, working exactly as designed. And that might be the biggest conspiracy of all.
Or so they tell themselves.
Further Reading:
- Truth Decay — An Initial Exploration of the Diminishing Role of Facts and Analysis in American Public Life.
- Digital News Report 2025 — An accelerating shift towards consumption via social media and video platforms is supercharging a fragmented alternative media.
- Companies financing online misinformation through advertising — Study shows advertising revenue from major companies fuels online misinformation financing.
