A few weeks ago in my Twitter feed I found somebody taking the piss of an news article, which described the proposed East West Link freeway as “replenish seductiveness”.

East West Link will "replenish seductiveness"

Even the most simple minded freeway advocate would never write something so nonsensical, so I dug deeper into the linked article:

East West link: Coalition will replenish seductiveness from $1bn in early funding May 27, 2014 The Abbott executive has signalled it’s going to get improved any passion warranted on a $1bn early cost it is creation to a Victorian govt for a 2d theatre of a East West couple project. Labor lifted questions about a choice to offer a $1bn by regulating 30 June, as officials certified a Victorian executive used to be though to yield Infrastructure Australia with a full trade box and work used to be not as a outcome of start solely late 2015. The East West couple is an 18km highway endeavour in Melbourne joining a eastern limited-access highway to a Western Ring highway. The sovereign Coalition betrothed progressing than a choosing to make a grant $1.5bn to theatre one, however Tony Abbott introduced final month a sovereign supervision would flow an additional $1.5bn into theatre two.

No help there - the content is just as meaningless as the headline!

However on further investigation of the website that posted the article, I found an answer in the “For sale” listing by the previous owner:

Automated news website listed for sale on Flippa

Turns out the website isn’t a “real” news source - it is just a giant spam factory that takes real news articles from elsewhere, runs every second word through a thesaurus to make the content look unique, and then crams the page full of advertisements to make money from anyone who stumbles upon the website via Google.

That led me into the spammer filled side of the internet, where I found dozens of advertisements touting similar websites as the road to riches.

Get your own automated news website

Some being more audacious with their spiel than others:

You Can Turn $19 Into Thousands with Your Own Automated News Websites Like Google or Yahoo News Looking for a website that has good earning potential and can operate on it's own because it's 100% automated? Well, a News website like Google News, The Drudge Report or Bing News is what you need. These websites receive lots of traffic and earnings because they have news and content from all over the internet. You can literally go to one place and find everything you need. DO YOU KNOW HOW MUCH MONEY SUCCESSFUL NEWS WEBSITES ARE MAKING THESE DAYS? YOU CAN TURN $19 INTO HUNDREDS OR EVEN THOUSANDS! The news is updated all the time and you can have a website with a broad range of category news topics or a specific niche. Once the traffic starts coming to these types of websites, you are going to be amazed how fast it grows.

Unfortunately for anyone out there thinking you can make money by filling the internet with automatically generated news articles, the engineers at Google are a few steps ahead of you - they’ve updated Google Search to prevent such crap from ranking high in search engine results.

As for me, my route to riches is based on the Underpants Gnome business plan:

  1. Spend ages writing about stuff
  2. ?
  3. Profit