Millions of dollars in public health advertising funds are going to websites flagged as having misinformation, raising urgent questions about how automated advertising systems are undermining trust in trustworthy health information.
Research: Advertising fees to news websites that publish health misinformation. Image credit: Shyntartanya/Shutterstock.com
recent JAMA network open The study estimated the amount and share of advertising spending by government and health organizations on news websites identified as disseminating health misinformation between 2021 and 2024.
The economics of health misinformation
Health misinformation, broadly defined as false or misleading content that is inconsistent with the best available evidence, is pervasive in the modern digital environment, spreading across social media platforms, online forums, and small media outlets. Efforts to address this problem have traditionally focused on demand-side interventions, such as media literacy programs and platform-level content moderation. More recently, the focus has shifted to the financial structures that maintain these websites.
Advertising revenue is a major economic driver of online misinformation. Previous analysis has documented that large commercial brands routinely place digital ads on websites with established records of publishing false or misleading content, often through automated programmatic ad buying systems that lack site-level transparency. However, the extent to which government agencies and health-focused organizations—those with a clear public health mandate—contribute to advertising revenue for such websites has not been systematically investigated.
Assessing public health advertising spending on health misinformation websites
In the current cross-sectional study, we integrated two commercial datasets to examine the flow of advertising revenue to health misinformation websites. Website credibility data comes from NewsGuard, a service that evaluates news websites against standardized journalistic standards and issues warnings to websites that repeatedly publish false or grossly misleading content.
Websites reported to have health misinformation as of August 2025 formed the analysis sample, along with each site’s topical focus area. Ad spend data was obtained from MediaRadar, a commercial advertising intelligence platform. Specifically, we used the MediaRadar360 database to extract the digital advertising spend associated with each identified website for the period 2021-2024 by digital media category.
Total annual advertising spend was aggregated across all identified websites and all digital media categories. We then stratified spend by eight predefined government and health agency advertiser categories and identified the top five advertisers within each category.
Governments and health agencies spent more than $35 million on health misinformation websites
NewsGuard has issued warnings to 1,229 news websites for spreading health misinformation. Of these, only 11 had ad spend data from MediaRadar360. Nevertheless, this small group exposed a striking pattern of ad spending on platforms known for publishing health misinformation.
Internet display and mobile web advertising data were available for all 11 websites, whereas online video data was accessible for only two websites and mobile application data for only one. Rather than confirming a systemic lack of transparency, these findings may reflect limited visibility into certain areas of digital advertising. The content on these sites was no accident, with political news and commentary dominating, followed by conspiracy theories and misinformation, health and medical information, and general news. Misinformation was not limited to health topics, but often appeared alongside political, conspiracy-related, and general news content.
A total of $336.4 million in advertising was spent on these 11 health misinformation websites from 2021 to 2024. Notably, $35.7 million of this, or approximately one in ten dollars, came directly from governments and health organizations. This has led to questions about how advertising is performed within automated ad buying systems.
Just two platforms, NewsMax and ZeroHedge, accounted for 65.2% of all ad spending and 67.3% of funding from governments and health organizations, suggesting the problem is not diffuse but concentrated in a small number of high-traffic, politically oriented news outlets. Median advertising spending from governments and health organizations was $1.39 million per website. This represents approximately 9.7% of each site’s total advertising revenue.
Healthy and Natural World stands out as a notable outlier, with government and health advertisers accounting for 25.7% of total ad spend. The breakdown by advertiser type was equally revealing, with spending ranging from $571,843 for medical and health insurance companies to $19.2 million for OTC and wellness product advertisers. It’s likely to target an audience interested in health-related content.
Encouragingly, advertising spending from governments and health organizations has fallen from $16.7 million in 2021 to $6.8 million in 2024, suggesting that awareness of the issue may be increasing despite continued heavy investment.
conclusion
Our research reveals that governments and health organizations may be inadvertently funding health misinformation through routine advertising. Although this study is limited in scope by the small number of websites analyzed and the lack of data on the rate of misinformation within each site, its implications are significant. Institutional advertising on misinformation sites risks giving credibility to false content and damaging society’s trust. Policymakers should consider tightening advertising regulations to prevent public health dollars from supporting the spread of misinformation.
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