Internet mystery: what on earth is postherald.com?
November 9, 2014 2:04 PM Subscribe
post-herald.com looks sort of like a newspaper site but has only one story, about Mike Tyson. The same domain hosts thousands of thousands of stories like "Kathleen Herald misses out on Powerball prize." Change the numbers in the URL and you'll see different people's names and cities of residence. I assume these names and cities are scraped from a database somewhere. But why do this?
Wait, it gets weirder: primarypost.com mirrors the same front page. And also has tons of fake news articles populated with data scraped from public databases, this time campaign contribution reports: headlines of the form "FIRSTNAME LASTNAME pours money into Republican congressional campaign." The same site also has a section of fake articles based on lists of certified pilots.
I am completely baffled as to who made these sites, why they would do so, and what they're for. Please enlighten me, Internet detectives of Ask MetaFilter! It's driving me nuts.
Wait, it gets weirder: primarypost.com mirrors the same front page. And also has tons of fake news articles populated with data scraped from public databases, this time campaign contribution reports: headlines of the form "FIRSTNAME LASTNAME pours money into Republican congressional campaign." The same site also has a section of fake articles based on lists of certified pilots.
I am completely baffled as to who made these sites, why they would do so, and what they're for. Please enlighten me, Internet detectives of Ask MetaFilter! It's driving me nuts.
This is domain parking (there are a few US papers with the name Post-Herald), but with no takers. (The going rate for a domain name like this can be in the six figures range. It's all about how much a mark holder wants it.) The keyword-matching practice is sometimes dubbed domaineering. How it makes money.
The thing is, the owners of this site probably own many, many other sites as well, so it's not just this one making money -- it's their holdings in aggregate. They probably get decent coin in their monthly payouts.
posted by dhartung at 12:43 AM on November 10, 2014 [1 favorite]
The thing is, the owners of this site probably own many, many other sites as well, so it's not just this one making money -- it's their holdings in aggregate. They probably get decent coin in their monthly payouts.
posted by dhartung at 12:43 AM on November 10, 2014 [1 favorite]
It might be data mining. Some of those sites display ads in order to place a tracking cookie which can then be cross referenced and recollected and sold. I don't know very much about the details but this was explained to me by one of our technology staff and clearly I failed to totally understand it. Basically some of that crap is about following you around.
If that's the case your anonymized data is probably a big score because you're Clicky McGee now. (I don't think it's anything nefarious beyond what's described--'anonymized browsing habits for sale here!!!')
posted by A Terrible Llama at 2:39 AM on November 10, 2014
If that's the case your anonymized data is probably a big score because you're Clicky McGee now. (I don't think it's anything nefarious beyond what's described--'anonymized browsing habits for sale here!!!')
posted by A Terrible Llama at 2:39 AM on November 10, 2014
http://post-herald.com/includes [screenshot] indeed suggests that these pages are automatically cobbled together.
http://www.primarypost.com/twill is curious [source screenshot]; it appears to be an input for a Twilio robocall. (Found after checking out what was disallowed in robots.txt.)
posted by Westringia F. at 4:47 AM on November 11, 2014
http://www.primarypost.com/twill is curious [source screenshot]; it appears to be an input for a Twilio robocall. (Found after checking out what was disallowed in robots.txt.)
posted by Westringia F. at 4:47 AM on November 11, 2014
And while this probably doesn't help answer the question in any way, I just discovered that Jack Whittaker, whose misfortunes are described with chain-letter breathlessness on page two of the lottery stories, is real.
posted by Westringia F. at 5:19 AM on November 11, 2014 [1 favorite]
posted by Westringia F. at 5:19 AM on November 11, 2014 [1 favorite]
This thread is closed to new comments.
The idea being that they generate thousands of those pages, maybe a few show up in search results and get clicked on by a few people, and earn a few cents for the website creator. It's not much, but x1000 it can add up.
posted by mekily at 2:10 PM on November 9, 2014 [5 favorites]