A shadowy firm ripped off dozens of media websites to prop up NFT projects, Amazon hustlers, and a convicted tax cheat
Arantza Pena Popo/Business Insider
- NewsAnchored promised "GUARANTEED publishing services" without dealing with "grumpy journos."
- It runs a network of sites where clients can publish whatever they want for $1,500 a month.
- The company's site looked very similar to Rolling Stone, USA Today, and other brands until BI reached out for comment.
A company that sells guaranteed "news" coverage created knockoff versions of name-brand news websites, including Rolling Stone, MarketWatch, the New York Post, and even Business Insider, and populated the sites with hundreds of apparently AI-generated articles.
NewsAnchored, which doesn't reveal the full names of its owners or corporate leadership, markets its 30 "reputable" websites to by public-relations firms and search-engine optimization agencies to manufacture positive Google search results for their clients.
But the company's websites blatantly ripped off national news brands — and they appear to be full of AI-written garbage. Until BI reached out for this story on December 5, the website Music Observer was a clear knockoff of Rolling Stone. The green-and-black lettering of the MarketDaily logo looked a lot like that of MarketWatch. The New York Post's iconic italicized, all-caps type with drop shadows on a red background was crudely imitated by a site called the Entertainment Post. And the logo of US Reporter looks an awful lot like that of USA Today.
At least six of the sites were redesigned to remove the similarities to established media brands after BI contacted the company for this story.
"Whoever set up this website appears to think that if they don't use the name, they are free to do whatever they want. That's definitely not the case," said Eric Perrott, a trademark lawyer at Gerben Perrott.
For as long as there have been search engines, there have been website owners trying to game them, but generative AI appears to enable sites like the ones run by NewsAnchored to churn out a staggering amount of junk — five "authors" for Music Observer published 150 articles on December 11 alone. The authors appear to be fake, and all of the articles spot-checked by BI appeared to be AI-generated rewrites of pieces published by Billboard.
The services offered by NewsAnchored also aren't that valuable, one industry expert said. Eric Carrell, the CEO of the search engine optimization firm DoFollow, said the NewsAnchored sites he reviewed got little traffic and aren't highly trusted by search engines. The websites they link to include mom-and-pop businesses, like local cleaning services, that are probably getting taken for a ride by SEO vendors, Carrell said.
"These little brick-and-mortar businesses, I'm guessing they need SEO and they hire someone off of Fiverr," he said. "These people have no idea that the money they're spending has absolutely no effect."
A fake Insider feature
NewsAnchored markets itself to businesses that want publicity and struggle to get it.
"Instead of spending 20 hours a week pitching to grumpy journos," it says on its homepage, publicists can offer their clients "GUARANTEED publishing services" on its websites that, if you squint and don't actually read them, look sort of like news.
Ryan Croy, who runs the Los Angeles PR firm Public Haus Agency, said his mention on the NewsAnchored website Influencer Daily wasn't one he sought out for the content — his priority was getting backlinks to boost his firm's SEO.
"I didn't even know that this was a network of sites. I basically picked from a menu of different outlets — low cost, and solely to impact my SEO," he said. He summarized a conversation with an SEO advisor this way: "I said, 'OK, this site has a domain authority of 45.' They said, 'If you get two or three of those, that will help.'"
Some subjects of glowing NewsAnchored posts are small businesses that might struggle to get traditional news coverage. Others are more dodgy: BI found at least two NFT projects, including one linked to a businessman who had been sued by the Federal Trade Commission, that were spotlighted on NewsAnchored sites.
Another subject of NewsAnchored puff pieces is Lance Dion, a purported branding expert. Dion, whose full name is Lance Dion Ashley, was sentenced to a year in prison in 2022 for cheating on taxes and lying to the IRS. BI's efforts to reach Ashley through his lawyer, listed phone numbers, email, and social media weren't successful.
A Business Insider reporter first found NewsAnchored while reporting on Wealth Assistants, a company that claimed it could help investors get rich on Amazon. An archived version of Wealth Assistants' website said it was featured in "US Insider" — a website whose logo looked almost exactly like Business Insider's old logo.
US Insider changed its logo and website earlier this year to look less like BI's, archived versions show. But NewsAnchored hasn't backed down from ripping off other media outlets — in fact, it appears to have sped up.
In June, Music Observer's website looked nothing like Rolling Stone's, but it recently attempted to duplicate the much better-known brand's look and feel. Shortly before this article was published, Music Observer reverted to the logo it had been using in June.
Contacts at Rolling Stone, Dow Jones, and other publishers named in this story didn't respond to requests for comment. But Perrott, the trademark lawyer, said they would have a good case in court — though it would cost thousands of dollars in litigation fees, and there's no guarantee the companies would recover any money.
This is "a very cynical attempt to ride the coattails of a brand," he said.
Who is NewsAnchored?
While NewsAnchored lists 30 news brands on its website as part of its "Credibility Bar," those "reputable" brands reveal little about who publishes them. NewsAnchored's terms of service mention a company in Wyoming — where corporate officers aren't public — called NA Publishing Group LLC, which was incorporated on September 13.
At a glance, nearly all of the websites NewAnchored operates look like genuine news outlets. In press releases, NewsAnchored calls itself a "media conglomerate" focused on "impactful journalism." But there are no juicy scoops or hot takes, just a mixture of what appears to be articles rewritten by AI and insipid pablum about minor figures (published with plenty of links back).
The bylines on the site don't appear real, either. A bio for Entertainment Post's "Melanie Moore" — or "Contributor 4," as she's referred to in the URL — says she was born into a family of filmmakers and attended college, but it provides no specific, checkable biographical details, a common thread in the biographies of NewsAnchored "writers." No Melanie Moore fitting that description could be found via any method of search, and none of the headshots Business Insider conducted reverse-image searches for resulted in hits.
A clue to its business model could be found on a referral page linked to by Dillon Kino, NewsAnchored's chief marketing officer. The page offers "unlimited article placements," including "free access to Article Genie (AI writer tool)," for just $599 a month. The normal rate, according to Kino's referral page, is $1,500 a month.
Kino and others at NewsAnchored never responded to BI's inquiries. On December 13, shortly after BI emailed Kino a list of facts we intended to publish, at least six NewsAnchored websites changed their logos to look less like those of established media properties. Kino's referral page also vanished.
Carrell, the SEO expert, said many clients are still apprehensive — appropriately, in his view — about having backlinks in AI-generated content. G/O Media, which publishes the AV Club and Gizmodo, and Arena Group, the publisher of Sports Illustrated, have been embarrassed after publishing AI-generated content with factual errors and fake authors.
"The way that a lot of people see the industry going is that Google is going to want to see content that's written from firsthand experience," he said. "And that's just not something that AI is going to be able to do. So our clients don't use AI content that I'm aware of."
Kino was the only NewsAnchored executive to use his full name and actual photo on its website. The others use first names and last initials and sketches instead of photos.
The company's CEO is named in a press release as "Oliver T." and it lists just five employees on LinkedIn.
Even for Carell, the brazenness of the mimicry was unique. "I hadn't seen people just straight up trying to knock off other websites," he said. "I hadn't seen that before."
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