Hmm, and strangely enough they are all left-leaning websites.....intriguing....

I make over $400 a week posting on sites like Consumerist, Gizmodo, and Lifehacker! How? Become the IT guy at a company and know the password to the server.

Maybe I should start The New York Tines and see if I can make some money selling movie reviews.

The link goes directly to the scam "article" not to Wired's story, which is here - [www.wired.com]

@StruckBySmoothCriminal_GitEmSteveDave: I knew there had to be a reason you posted so much other than you witty witty banter!

@Jeremy82465: Becoming indispensable has it's privileges.

yeah I've seriously lost a lot of respect for the site lately, especially some of the medical "miracles" which were presented as articles.

So HuffPo is now selling article space, Drudge has a bias to the point of being comical. What are some good alternatives for news?

@Dan Grossmann: Here we go...finding more asinine things to blame the liberals about. Whats next, are you going to blame President Obama directly for those ads. I don't see why you don't, since you and your right-wingers want to blame the left for everything from A to Z.

What I find most annoying about your comment is that in a post you made on June 8, 2009 you said;

"Keep your political beliefs out of the consumerist, chris. It's hard enough as I right-winger like me to read the Consumerist without having to deal with all the left wing crap that is sometimes intertwined with some of your guyses posts."

Now I say to you, keep your right-wing crap out of Consumerist Dan!

@larrymac: Make that "the link within the article", which by context one would expect to hit Wired. I see now that the Wired link is at the end.

@Dan Grossmann: Which means they have no business experience in which to recognize a scam.

@Dan Grossmann: Like all non-fox media, amirite?

@lpranal: www.reuters.com

@larrymac: That's the link in the article that goes to the actual scam. The link after the article is OK.

I also noticed if you change the scam URL to go to it's main page, you get nothing.

The scam page has an actual disclaimer at the bottom that should have made it apparent to other sites looking for new references that it isn't real new, and is actually some kind of offer. That section begins with "TERMS AND CONDITIONS CAREFULLY READ AND AGREE TO PURCHASE TERMS BELOW BEFORE ORDERING:"

See for yourself at the SCAM PAGE: [news5alert.com]

@lpranal: The Guardian.

Hmm i never noticed. Maybe Adblock plus filters them out?

@Dan Grossmann: Damn you, this was in the super secret "Agenda." Now the world knows.

What's amusing is that fully "legitimate" news sites carry exactly the same sort of content and ads that this news5alert site does. Fake news has been the name of the game for years if not decades, online and offline.

@Dan Grossmann: Hmmm Dan Grossmann.. and strangely enough you appear to be a ten year old girl... intriguing...

@Dan Grossmann: Two words: Drudge Report.

This has been going on as long as I remember, even in print. I think print magazines should reject ads that try to look too much like articles. Putting "Advertisement" at the top of the page doesn't change the fact that the intent is to deceive.

I see the same sort of ads on Google Finance all the time. They use fonts and styles to mimic the look of Google's own text.

Only a fool would fall for these ads... unfortunately there are a lot of fools.

@undefined: @Dan Grossmann: Yes, because only liberals are lazy or dishonest in their reporting.

[mediamatters.org]

@lpranal: I tend to mix something like www.instapundit.com with www.nytimes.com and it tends to balance out.

@Philly Falcon: @Philly Falcon: You really kept a comment from an internet commenter? Really? So...when do you move out of mom's basement?

[www.holytaco.com]

my local paper does this (i buy the sunday edition). usually its on the back of the last page of one of the Sections, a full size ad, and the top half of the page has 2 or 3 fake articles about the price of gold, health insurance, weight loss drug, etc, with a small add or 2 on the lower right of the top half of the page, and the bottom half is a large ad. the only way you know its fake is that the type print is slightly different then the rest of the paper, there is a very thin black border around the entire page, and at the very very very top of the page above the black border in very tiny print "this is an ad from X and not arcles from newspaper Y".

@Dan Grossmann: Since last time I was stuck in a room with Fox News on the TV I saw a whole bunch of commercials for Crazyfox, I don't think either end of the political spectrum is immune to ads like this. (I bet TV commercials, even on Fox News, cost more than web ads though; that makes me wonder who's making more money at this....)

@Galactica: Maybe, just maybe he clicked on Dan's name and saw all 4 comments Dan has ever made, including the one he quoted.

equating Liberals and Democrats is like equating Fire and Ice....two seperate political groups. Just because the talking heads in the media cannot make that distinction doesn't mean it should bear repeating on websites that are someone pro-intelligence/pro-consumer.

Also, FYI - your friends on Facebook didn't actually take that IQ test

Bear in mind that the Consumerist is guilty of this as well. Consumerist posted "Try Consumer Reports Online Free" without marking it as an advertisement ([consumerist.com]). Yet, the post is obviously an advertisement, which is glaring because Consumerist fails to disclose its relationship with Consumer Reports and because the comments feature of this page appears to be disabled or not working.

The inability to post comments on this page makes it very clear that this blog "post" is not a blog at all, but rather that it is a one-way internet advertisement. This is a blatant ad (not a "free" post), especially given that the "trial offer" begins auto-billing after the trial period ends. Consumerist has decried this practice ad infinitum over the years. Also, Consumerist does not disclose its relationship with Consumer Reports, which I feel is a glaring ethical violation for a blog that holds itself to the ideals of consumer protections.

@Dan Grossmann:

Redneck white trash morons are poor.

A second time today I have to ask, "This is news?" Fake news is not news at all. It's very old.

Over the last few months here in CT the local stations have been airing ads for some kind of mortgage company. They tout their service as part of "the government bail-out plan" and present it as though it's news, not an ad (complete with an anchor at a desk, a ticker-scroll along the bottom of the screen, and cuts away to "pundits" elsewhere). One of these commercials even includes footage of Obama at a press conference, insinuating he's behind them.

OK, so they have little letters on the screen saying "advertisement," and at the end they flash "This is not a government program" ... but honestly, why would they structure the ad like a news presentation, or include footage of Obama, if they did not expect people to conclude otherwise? The disclaimers are transparent. Even if they make the ad "legal," they do not mean the ad is anything other than totally dishonest.

@MostlyHarmless: I'm on Huffpost every day (and Salon once a week) and have never noticed these. Maybe because the titles of the "articles" don't interest me? Or yeah...Maybe AdBlock filters them out, or NoScript does something too...

@veg-o-matic: Well, he is a Republican. If it's not a boy, it's a man. If it's not a man, it's a girl. If it's not a girl, it's a campaign staffer with a blackmailing husband. If it's not a campaign staffer with a blackmailing husband, it's a hot Argentinean.
(Give me two weeks and I'll surely be able to add another stanza to the above paragraph)

@joemono: Cuz, y'know, Philly Falcon figured that, before blurting something out, he'd take the three seconds to actually see if something was true before saying it was.
...Radical concept, huh? Checking independently whether something was true before asserting that it was.

@joemono: Thank you. That is just what I did.

Next thing you're going to tell me that lady didn't lose 50 pounds following one simple rule!

I remember seeing a television "program" quite a few years ago that may have been the first informerical. It was on an independent UHF station. The station was airing information about this show for over a week that, looking back, were really paid advertisements. I don't remember what the ads were about but they made it seem like it was going to be a great show. The ads were made to disguise the fact that it was going to be an hour long commercial.

When the show finally aired I was so ticked-off because all they were doing was trying to sell something. They next day I called the station to complain but it was obvious to me that they couldn't care less about the bogus program.

@Trai_Dep: I appreciate your defense of what I did.

@Dan Grossmann: We don't know if Wired visited the fringe websites on the other extreme of the spectrum to see if they had the same issue.

This was just covered at [www.cockeyed.com]

Of course, his article is really funny

@PsiCop:

I'm seeing those too, in Missouri. The first time I thought it actually was breaking news, until I watched for a few seconds. Then I went back to my book.

@arcman001: Uhhhhhhhhh, ever since Gawker sold off Consumerist to Consumer's Union it's been pretty common (And public) knowledge that Consumerist works for Consumer Reports now. I haven't seen any instances of covering up this fact either.