Welcome to the Webdumpster. Here I cover trashy and bullshit websites that I sometimes stumble upon.  
In our modern times of information overload, calling out bullshit is more important than ever. But more often than not, I can’t find anyone else pointing out even very obviously shady content. So why not do it myself?

We start with a journey into what looked at first like standard internet advertising. . . but soon revealed itself to be something much more bizarre.

Part 1: New York Weekly

There are a lot of people who want to market themselves on the Net. Maybe it’s a film student who directed their first short, someone hoping to drive traffic to their Bandcamp page or perhaps they offer “cutting edge consulting” in any number of topics. There are also people who go onto the internet and lie.  
I won’t name the individual^[1] who first led me to New York Weekly. I’ll only reveal that they were one of those artistic types with a very distinct lack of actual talent.

And yet, googling their name will lead you to an article on newyorkweekly.com that more or less praises them as the future of all entertainment in general. Good for them. But it made me ask what other unhinged views this outlet peddles.  
A click on the “Business” section in which the piece was published revealed a bunch of generic articles about even more generic topics: “Brooklyn Entering an Economy Boom in Real Estate,” “7 Chic Design Ideas to Elevate Your Condo’s Aesthetic,” “The Potential of Starting a Dessert Shop in New York City,” etc. Quite boring. A bit too boring, really. There was something wrong with this site, I wasn’t sure what it was, but it was there, like a splinter in my mind.

So I went back to the initial article. The hyperbolic tone and the casually inserted social media links made it very clear that this was a paid ad. And indeed, although the story claimed to be authored by “NY Weekly Staff” (with a blue check mark even) there was a note at the end reading, “This article features branded content from a third party. Opinions in this article do not reflect the opinions and beliefs of New York Weekly.” 

It was a paid promotion, but so what? We all know magazines do those, they even disclosed it!

If this had been a regular promotion on a normal news site, there would really not be much of a problem. But as we’ll see, there’s nothing normal about the New York Weekly. 

The main issue here isn’t fishy advertisements. . . but also everything around them.

A Front of Balance

I mentioned that the promotion was supposedly written by “NY Weekly Staff.” Well, all the general content is written by “NY Weekly Staff” too, but without the check mark and the “ambassador” tag. Clicking the author link brings us to a listing of posts and helpfully reveals that the account is actually called Contributor 2. The promotional account is Contributor 1, and these are the only two accounts posting on the site.

On the post list of Contributor 2, we find 17 pages worth of nothingburger articles such as “Augmented Reality: Propelling New York City into the Future”, “Unraveling the Enigma: The Mysterious Elephant Deaths in Zimbabwe”, “The Importance of Avoiding Gargling After Brushing Your Teeth” and my favorite: “The Great Divide: Why Cats and Dogs Don’t Always See Eye to Eye (or Paw to Paw)^[2]”.

All these posts have the share the same template, consisting of pointless listicles or paragraphs with suspiciously similar word counts sandwiched between uninspired headlines, with no images besides the header.^[3] You might have already guessed it but everything here, with its bland prose and even blander content smells of AI.

The publishing history is even more telling. The posts start in January 2024 (a red flag since the initial promotional story was from 2023) and after a few pages of weekly posts the website claims that around 200 out of the 334 articles in the list were written just today.  
Magazines written by humans usually don’t work like this.

At this point I was quite convinced that Contributor 2 only exists as a distraction from Contributor 1, the real focus of the site. But I wasn’t prepared for just how skewed the focus actually was.  
There were, at the time of writing, 764 pages of paid promotions from Contributor 1.

Here’s a sample of stuff New York Weekly wants you to buy: beach bags, beef liver supplements, chauffeur services, racing drone frames, Multi-Spindle Coil Winders, horse hair boxing gloves, Holographic Mylar Bags, the AI Animal Bloopers Coloring Book, Subwoofer cables, table saws, window blinds for small spaces, magnesium chloride, dental loupes, golf simulators, pre-owned Chanel handbags, liquid nitrogen ice cream experiences, fermentation tanks, topical reptide therapies and 660 liter 4-wheel plastic bins. 

There’s also a flood of random biographies, albums, seminars and AI tools and finally many articles by people who might not intend to sell you anything right now, but who just aim to make their opinions feel important by having them published in “the news.”

But the New York Weekly is not only a front for paid promotion masquerading as a newspaper through to AI filler, it also attempts to hide the fact that the advertisements outnumber their “news articles” by orders of magnitude.  
When you visit their homepage pretty much all you see are the “general” AI articles with perhaps a few promotional pieces propping up in the “Entrepreneur” section. The sub pages to the different categories like Science and Education pull the same trick.

The goal is an illusion of exclusivity. Every promotional article is designed to appear as a rare inclusion in an otherwise normal magazine when in reality there’s nothing but ads.  
That pissed me off, and if this post can prevent even one person from wasting their time on this piece of crap site, I’d already be happy.

But why stop there? The website may be bullshit, but who is behind it?

Matrix Global LLC

According to nyweekly.com’s privacy disclaimer, the site is owned by “Matrix Global LLC, a Cook Islands company.”

No individuals are identified, and the name itself tells us very little. In fact, it doesn’t even mean that Matrix Global LLC is operating from the Cook Islands.  
This is because Cook Islands is a tax haven with plenty of middlemen who offer to incorporate offshore companies there, all for the sake of “asset protection.” The service that the owner of Matrix Global LLC seems to have used is “Ora Partners,” evidenced by repeat references to Ora Fiduciary.

I could find no other information about the company itself.^[4] But what I did discover was that nyweekly.com is not the only “news” website operated by this organization.

A trademark search engine revealed not just that they have trademarked New York Weekly, but also San Francisco Post, Los Angeles Wire and US Reporter. A further search for the name and a few specific phrases in their disclaimer and policy pages brought up even more sites: Northern Magazine, Southern Magazine, Virginia Monthly, Tennessee Monthly, Dallas Wire and CEO Weekly.^[5]

All of these sites are basically New York Weekly, dressed up in different Wordpress themes. All use the same two account strategy of burying a flood of promotions under AI generated junk “news.” 

We’re not done yet. It turns out, the biggest breakthrough was not buried in the terms of conditions but in the footer on every page of New York Weekly: The cover of the magazine’s “November 2024 Issue.” There likely has never been and never will be a print edition of this junk. However anyone associated with it obviously has a reason to pretend there is.

A reverse image search of the cover came up with only two matches: The Instagram of the man featured on it... and the banner of a PR agency.

Part 2: As Seen in PR & Sitetrail

As Seen in PR is a small PR company, founded by Earl Waller and managed apparently entirely by his family. Their pitch is the usual underdog routine: Personal and passionate marketing that you wouldn’t get from any of the big established companies.  
And to be fair, not everything here seems fake, especially in the traditional sector. I found several of their interviews listed on sites and YouTube channels owned by actual news organizations and I’m not familiar enough with the landscape of TV promotions to evaluate how good of a deal it is to be featured on “LIVE! On the Bay,” “KETK East Texas Live,” “Great Day Colorado” and so on.^[6]

All I was interested in was how much advertising on fishy websites is going on here. So I went to their “Client Catalog” page… and hit the jackpot.

I want you to guess how many of these 31 national outlets are fake magazines operated by Matrix Global LLC. If you guessed literally all of them, then you are correct.  
There’s a fake magazine for every topic you can imagine. Many are clearly “inspired” by major newspapers or have suspiciously similar URLs to more credible publications. They have it all. Music, finance, influencers, travel, fashion, you name it.   
My personal favorite is blk, a “news site” focused on the black community, promising to be “your source for unfiltered news, culture, and community empowerment.”

And let’s just say the ads don’t always do the best job of blending in with the theme:

But As Seen in PR’s clients are not the only ones taking advantage of this offer. The company proudly markets itself as having been featured in New York Daily, Famous Times and Kivo Daily. 

Born Yesterday

Now that we have a better idea of the scale of this little enterprise, let’s talk about another distinctive feature on all these fake sites: The posting dates.  
I have mentioned before that over half of the articles on the New York Weekly page claim they were written yesterday. This is the case with all the Matrix LLC Fake magazines; Each one tells you that most of their articles are fresh from the printing press, so to speak. Naturally, the dates are bogus. Two days ago, all articles claimed to have been written earlier, and tomorrow they will claim to have been written today.

Why in the world the owners of these sites choose dates that are so unrealistic that they basically confirm that you are looking at fake articles is honestly beyond me.

To make this deception less obvious, the URLs of all active fake magazines have been purged from the Wayback Machine. But remember Northern Magazine and Southern Magazine? These two domains are not yet “in use” and because they don’t expect any traffic to them Matrix LLC also hasn’t bothered deleting them from the Internet Archive.

The captures have only saved the bare minimum but we can clearly see articles such as “Beyond the Punching Tickets: The Enigmatic World of the Train Conductor” somehow being published both on May 6 and July 17. Naughty.

However we can find such inconsistencies even without the Wayback Machine: The site might have faked the date of the article, but what did not change was the default Wordpress upload scheme. By hovering over an article’s header image, it’s often noticeable from folder names such as “/wp-content/uploads/2024/02” that the picture wasn’t uploaded yesterday but months before. And you can see that they were uploaded for the exact article because the image shares its name.

The Price 

But enough about how those sites work. How much does it cost to get featured in one?

According to the As Seen in PR Media Placement Service, that would be $250.^[7] To be fair, that’s cheaper than most print ads in a real magazine, but it’s still quite an investment for a deceptive service.  
Potentially even deceptive both ways. This is not only about consumers getting tricked regarding the nature of content they read, this is also about the clients themselves. What exactly do they know about those “publications”? Does As Seen in PR tell its customers that for their $250 they get to have their promotional article buried in an AI wasteland among thousands of similar adverts? 

I am sure that from a legal standpoint everything is precisely calculated to squeeze around any definitions of misinformation or fraud, but let’s not mince words: These sites are publications in name only. No one keeping up with what’s going on in New York reads the New York Weekly and no music fans are subscribed to Music Observer.^[8] The entire marketing aspect of reaching a new audience is nonexistent here, you pretty much have to google the name of a person or service directly to make any of these outlets show up in your search results.

Following the “Trail”

As Seen in PR is not the only PR company offering “content placements” on Matrix Global owned sites, they just happened to be the first I found and the one with the largest selection. But others are joining the fun too, such as PR to SKY, News Anchored and Royalty Reigns Management (this last one is charging an absurd $2,000 for a “guaranteed placement” in New York Weekly).

It is a lucrative enough business that there are middleman services which sell bulk access to sites like this to digital marketing firms. This is where we get to a company called “Sitetrail” that I found after reverse image searching some of the magazine logos.

This company offers a service called Newspass, which provides, among other perks, “access to publish unlimited news articles and press releases on various websites, many of which are Google News approved.”

And guess what you get access to in the “Platinum Access Plan” for $799 per month? All of the Matrix Global ad dump magazines.  
If we suppose that As Seen in PR uses this service, they would break even after just four sponsored articles per month.

There are a lot of other sites available too and going over them all would be beyond the scope of this post. Most of them are junk, but at the very least, many aren’t really hiding that they are just random blogs for promotional content, which is already a step up.  
Newspass also offers to “Supercharge your content with ChatGPT,” which I assume means using AI to paraphrase your article for each outlet in order not to flag any Google News spam algorithms.

Lastly, I feel it’s worth noting that Sitetrail attempts to somewhat temper their clients’ expectations as far as actual serious coverage is concerned. In their FAQ, for the question “Can My News Reach Journalists?” they make the salient point that “if this service is used to create blunt adverts that are overly promotional, expecting journalists to pay attention to it will be unrealistic.” True enough.

That about covers my overview of the fake magazine ecosystem. Fishy practices are a dime a dozen on the internet and if I followed all connections to every questionable service associated with people posting misleading ads, I would be here forever. I hope the information in this post will spread awareness and help combating low-quality content.

Part 3: Curiosities

I looked at a lot of very weird promotions while writing this post. Some of it was so baffling that it’s almost funny again. This is why, with all the analytical stuff out of the way, I want to take some time to mention some of the more notable ones. There was an interview with an “entrepreneur” who seemed to claim that money just manifests if you want it enough and dress in expensive clothes.^[9] Another interview hyped up a “debut at the 2024 Grammy awards” by someone who turned out to just be an attendee in the crowd.^[10]

There was also…

A LEGO Incident

In the Entertainment section of famoustimes.com, one of several celebrity-focused fake magazines, I came across the following promotion:

Besides being somewhat off-topic for the site, this article struck me as bizarre for several reasons: First the subject of Lego. Why would the largest toy company in the world stoop random promotions on a dump like this? Secondly, the header of the piece clearly shows Star Wars figurines. While strangely chosen photos are not rare for the AI junk articles, most promotional pieces do in fact feature a fitting image,^[11] so such an obvious flub is unexpected.

Written by “Holy Minoza” (a prolific publisher of ads across the Matrix Global repertoire), the post is just what one would expect: A glowing and not particularly well-written review of a Wicked Lego set. Except… the trusty link, randomly inserted in the middle of the article, which would normally point to the website of whoever paid for it doesn’t lead to any page owned by Lego (although the link’s text is “LEGO”). Instead it links to a review of the same set on another site. 

This site, popnewsweekly.com, isn’t owned by Matrix Global and the review, while much in the same tone, is slightly longer and more detailed, suggesting that the famous times version might be a condensed AI paraphrase.  
The header on Pop News Weekly also shows the right set, and the link to LEGO actually points to the Lego website’s real announcement.

I’m still struggling to think of a reason for why such a pointless article would be created.  
My only guess is that perhaps someone wanted to test if there’s any quality control, and it turns out that even if you publish a rip-off review while linking to the original, it’s mindlessly waved through anyway.

But surely a line has to be drawn somewhere. And I believe I found an example content that didn’t make the cut: Earlier this year conservative “CEO/Senior Pastor” Dr. Sarah Sun Liew ran for US Senate. As far as I can tell she lost, but that’s not the interesting part. That would be that, besides her website, her “campaign” appeared to mainly consists of exactly 100 “news articles” in the fake magazines discussed in this post. This includes Music Observer, Influencer Daily and various others that don’t even pretend to have anything to do with politics. Even more intriguing: A few of the articles seem to have mysteriously vanished.^[12] For example, an article about her views on abortion and immigration as well as her receiving a peace price from a strange religious organization.

I guess there are some controversial topics that even scummy marketing platforms don’t want to be associated with.

Addendum/Index

The following is a list of all Matrix Global owned publications I was able to find:

1. https://artistweekly.com
2. https://atlwire.com
3. https://blknews.com
4. https://cagazette.com
5. https://ceoweekly.com
6. https://celebritynews.com
7. https://economicinsider.com
8. https://emonthlynews.com
9. https://entertainmentpost.com
10. https://famoustimes.com
11. https://influencerdaily.com
12. https://kivodaily.com
13. https://lawire.com
14. https://marketdaily.com
15. https://miamiwire.com
16. https://musicobserver.com
17. https://texastoday.com
18. https://wallstreettimes.com
19. https://nyweekly.com
20. https://nywire.com
21. https://networth.us
22. https://realestatetoday.com
23. https://portlandnews.com
24. https://sanfranciscopost.com
25. https://thechicagojournal.com
26. https://usinsider.com
27. https://usreporter.com
28. https://usbusinessnews.com
29. https://voyageny.com
30. https://womensjournal.com
31. https://worldreporter.com
32. https://northernmagazine.com
33. https://southernmagazine.com
34. https://nevadamonthly.com
35. https://tennesseemonthly.com
36. https://virginiamonthly.com
37. https://theamericannews.com

Then there are a couple of documents, mostly on Google Docs, from SiteTrail and As Seen in PR (not everything here relates to fake sites, just general business operation stuff).

Sitetrail: Newspass spreadsheet with other sites besides Matrix Global ones, Sitetrail Online PR Strategic Content Marketing Guide (Slideshare)

As Seen in PR: $250 Specials (all Matrix Global), TSQ Billboard Placements, News Appearances (traditional TV), General Media PR