What's up with these weird obituary sites?
March 27, 2020 6:44 PM Subscribe
I found out today that a student at the university where I teach died unexpectedly. Wishing to know more about them, I googled their name and obituary. The first three hits (link to screenshot) were very weird: they appear to contain stilted variations of a death notice, as if it had been run through a thesaurus, or translated into another language and then retranslated into English. What's up with that?
I clicked through to the first one, which, not surprisingly, was a Wordpress site by someone claiming to offer SEO optimization. I suspect the others are similar. But I'm curious about the phenomenon. Why would someone do this? What do they get out of it?
I clicked through to the first one, which, not surprisingly, was a Wordpress site by someone claiming to offer SEO optimization. I suspect the others are similar. But I'm curious about the phenomenon. Why would someone do this? What do they get out of it?
These sites are creepy, geez. Wish Google and other search engines would stop indexing them.
posted by shaademaan at 7:25 PM on March 27, 2020 [2 favorites]
posted by shaademaan at 7:25 PM on March 27, 2020 [2 favorites]
Apparently there are also (mainly Russian?) sites taking the data from publicly-available online court records (which in some places are not locked down) and reposting them on their own sites for adbucks. Not sure if they're actually going to the trouble of running the purloined text through a thesaurus, though.
A friend of mine didn't have the heart to tell his former SO that he saw her name (and related small claims case) come up on one of those sites. (She values her privacy, and would have flipped!)
posted by tenderly at 10:55 PM on March 27, 2020
A friend of mine didn't have the heart to tell his former SO that he saw her name (and related small claims case) come up on one of those sites. (She values her privacy, and would have flipped!)
posted by tenderly at 10:55 PM on March 27, 2020
Best answer: Advertising traffic. It got you on the site, didn't it?
This has been standard for obits for awhile. I used to have to check details for funerals and social connections for the church I worked for and if I searched funeral home name and name of deceased the first results inevitable would not be funeral home website with the official obituary, but two or three of these sites that had optimized to be higher in the search results. This was how I first realised that Google as a search engine was becoming more of a block to information on the internet than a help. There is no way that a search for a business by name should lead to its competitors but this is now the norm.
People who look at obits are considered high value traffic. Age, income, internet access but likely not high internet proficiency, so quite likely no add blockers. They would often be unique visitors on the funeral home site, as they are never going to be looking for results with that funeral home name again and they are often considering large expenditures on funeral services because the whole extremely expensive custom of social display funerals is important to them.
An enormous source of revenue from a death are the donations made to charities. It is not uncommon for the family to request donations to the Animal Rescue League in memory of the deceased because she so loved her rescue dog, and be taken aback when somehow all the donations get diverted to some other charity that spends 45% of their donations on the top four executive salaries and 60% on fund raising instead. There are a lot of people out there steely eyed determined to find a way to divert donations to somewhere profitable to them instead of to what the family wants.
Frequently these memorial sites do not do updates, so when funeral arrangements change people miss the funeral. I suspect funeral homes have been working to copyright the obits to prevent out of date updates being circulated, and the rewrites could be a result of this. But it could also be the result of the website you encountered having a set of basic obits templates that they use by plugging the data into them, or being a very cheaply staffed site oversees where there was no one who spoke English well enough to know that the obits their staff are producing are not of a high calibre. More likely they don't care, since you not only visited their site but read even further so it worked. It could also be Nigerian Scam English, with a useful function of winnowing out the discerning.
posted by Jane the Brown at 6:10 AM on March 28, 2020 [3 favorites]
This has been standard for obits for awhile. I used to have to check details for funerals and social connections for the church I worked for and if I searched funeral home name and name of deceased the first results inevitable would not be funeral home website with the official obituary, but two or three of these sites that had optimized to be higher in the search results. This was how I first realised that Google as a search engine was becoming more of a block to information on the internet than a help. There is no way that a search for a business by name should lead to its competitors but this is now the norm.
People who look at obits are considered high value traffic. Age, income, internet access but likely not high internet proficiency, so quite likely no add blockers. They would often be unique visitors on the funeral home site, as they are never going to be looking for results with that funeral home name again and they are often considering large expenditures on funeral services because the whole extremely expensive custom of social display funerals is important to them.
An enormous source of revenue from a death are the donations made to charities. It is not uncommon for the family to request donations to the Animal Rescue League in memory of the deceased because she so loved her rescue dog, and be taken aback when somehow all the donations get diverted to some other charity that spends 45% of their donations on the top four executive salaries and 60% on fund raising instead. There are a lot of people out there steely eyed determined to find a way to divert donations to somewhere profitable to them instead of to what the family wants.
Frequently these memorial sites do not do updates, so when funeral arrangements change people miss the funeral. I suspect funeral homes have been working to copyright the obits to prevent out of date updates being circulated, and the rewrites could be a result of this. But it could also be the result of the website you encountered having a set of basic obits templates that they use by plugging the data into them, or being a very cheaply staffed site oversees where there was no one who spoke English well enough to know that the obits their staff are producing are not of a high calibre. More likely they don't care, since you not only visited their site but read even further so it worked. It could also be Nigerian Scam English, with a useful function of winnowing out the discerning.
posted by Jane the Brown at 6:10 AM on March 28, 2020 [3 favorites]
This thread is closed to new comments.
posted by adamrice at 7:23 PM on March 27, 2020 [5 favorites]