The first article about Donald Trump that Boris ever published described how, during a campaign rally in North Carolina, the candidate slapped a man in the audience for disagreeing with him. This never happened, of course. Boris had found the article somewhere online, and he needed to feed his website, Daily Interesting Things, so he appropriated the text, down to its last misbegotten comma. He posted the link on Facebook, seeding it within various groups devoted to American politics; to his astonishment, it was shared around 800 times. That month—February 2016—Boris made more than $150 off the Google ads on his website. Considering this to be the best possible use of his time, he stopped going to high school.
Boris isn’t his real name. He prefers the anonymity because he doesn’t want to break ranks with the other people in his town of Veles, in the Balkan nation of Macedonia. Nobody here wants to dwell on Trump anymore. Veles has the feel of a small community clamming up out of a suspicion that it’s being talked about for all the wrong reasons.
In the final weeks of the US presidential election, Veles attained a weird infamy in the most powerful nation on earth; stories in The Guardian and on BuzzFeed revealed that the Macedonian town of 55,000 was the registered home of at least 100 pro-Trump websites, many of them filled with sensationalist, utterly fake news. (The imminent criminal indictment of Hillary Clinton was a popular theme; another was the pope’s approval of Trump.) The sites’ ample traffic was rewarded handsomely by automated advertising engines, like Google’s AdSense. An article in The New Yorker described how President Barack Obama himself spent a day in the final week of the campaign talking “almost obsessively” about Veles and its “digital gold rush.”
Within Veles itself, the young entrepreneurs behind these websites became subjects of tantalizing intrigue. Between August and November, Boris earned nearly $16,000 off his two pro-Trump websites. The average monthly salary in Macedonia is $371.
Boris is 18 years old, a lean, slouching youth with gray eyes, hair mowed close to his skull, and the rudiments of a beard. When he isn’t smoking a cigarette, he’s lighting one. He listens to a lot of gangsta rap: the Notorious B.I.G., Puff Daddy, Wu-Tang Clan; after watching Notorious, the 2009 biopic of B.I.G., he decided he would like to visit Brooklyn, a New York City borough he imagines overrun more by gangsters than hipsters. He is an affable raconteur, with a droll sense of humor and a clear-eyed view of himself and his town. Someday he wants to leave Veles, because of how little there is to do. You can live with your parents and have them pay for your evenings in a bar, or you can bus tables in a café. If you’re a gym rat, you might work security. A few factories on the outskirts of town still offer regular employment, but nothing lavish. “We can’t make money here with a real job,” Boris says. “This Google AdSense work is not a real job.”
At best, Boris’ English is halting and fractured—certainly not good enough to turn out five to 10 articles about Trump and Clinton every day for weeks on end. Fortunately for him, the election summoned forth the energies of countless alt-right websites in the US, which manufactured white-label falsehoods disguised as news on an industrial scale. Across the spectrum of right-wing media—from Trump’s own concise lies on Twitter to the organized prevarication of Breitbart News and NationalReport.net—ideology beat back the truth. What Veles produced, though, was something more extreme still: an enterprise of cool, pure amorality, free not only of ideology but of any concern or feeling about the substance of the election. These Macedonians on Facebook didn’t care if Trump won or lost the White House. They only wanted pocket money to pay for things—a car, watches, better cell phones, more drinks at the bar. This is the arrhythmic, disturbing heart of the affair: that the internet made it so simple for these young men to finance their material whims and that their actions helped deliver such momentous consequences.
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Veles lies plumb in the center of Macedonia, on either side of the Vardar River, and its red-shingle-roofed buildings appear to be climbing the slopes of low knuckled hills. It was once a town of modest glory, turning out revolutionaries and intellectuals and alive with industry. One of its largest factories, a ceramic works named Porcelanka, employed 4,000 people. For a time, its residents recall with perverse pride, Veles was the second-most polluted town in the former Yugoslavia.
After Macedonia became independent in 1991, though, Veles began to decline. The factories closed; the jobs evaporated. The local soccer team, FK Borec, won so infrequently that it was dropped from the first division to the third. The town’s only movie theater folded a decade and a half ago. Its downtown withered. Briefly, in the mid-2000s, the economy shook itself awake when a few men splashed around money they’d made selling heroin in Germany and Austria, but the police soon broke up that drug ring and Veles returned to its state of morose dilapidation.
For Boris, growing up here, Veles didn’t have much to offer. His father worked for the town as a plumber. Like other kids, Boris wandered around up near the old Ottoman clock tower or down by the river, loitering in one coffee bar after another. He played soccer but later discovered that he was more proficient at the videogame version of the sport. He joined a Counter-Strike club: nine or 10 teenagers gathered in a room, sitting behind their laptops and shooting each other up.
The Central Market in Veles. The town’s economy declined throughout the 1990s after Macedonia gained its independence.
An office at a local TV station, which broadcasts basketball and handball games.
Men gather in a garden shed for moonshine and winter caroling. Holding the mic is a resident who profited from political websites.
The same man shows the ad revenue he earns from his websites, which churn out (sometimes fake) content.
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In Macedonia, wringing money out of web advertising is a game that long predated Trump’s bid for the presidency—and will probably outlast it as well, despite Google’s and Facebook’s postelection attempts to crack down. Mirko Ceselkoski began to play in the early 2000s. He built seven or eight websites—about muscle cars or celebrities or superyachts, all oriented toward the American reader, because an American reader is roughly three times more valuable than a non-American one. For five or six hours of daily toil, Ceselkoski says, you can earn approximately $1,000 a month. Many Macedonians can spare the time; the unemployment rate is around 24 percent.
Ceselkoski turned to coaching in 2011—first with a six-week classroom course in the Macedonian capital of Skopje, where he lives, and now online, in dense three-week modules. For around $425, his students learn how to prepare, populate, and promote their websites. A full third of the syllabus is dedicated to the mastery of Facebook. The Healthy Brothers once took Ceselkoski’s course. So did, in early 2016, a few members of the Veles squad who went on to operate pro-Trump sites. They surprised him. “I never instructed my students to write fake stories,” he says. “Maybe they discovered they could get away with this kind of practice and increase their virality.” He sounded like a delighted physics professor talking about how a pupil had stumbled upon a brand-new law of thermodynamics. After the election some of Ceselkoski’s students called him, panicking because Google had yanked its advertising without paying them all the money they had already earned. One young man, Ceselkoski says, believed he was owed more than $60,000.
Ceselkoski was visiting Las Vegas around the time of the election, and Trump’s victory stunned him. He thought about the website operators in Veles. “It’s possible, maybe, they changed a few percentages.”
Here’s how advertisers follow you around the web—and how their money flows to fake news sites. —Davey Alba
Brands
Companies used to designate exactly where they wanted their ads to appear. Now they increasingly rely on automated advertising—a system that matches ads to anonymized profiles of consumers, based on data like what they have searched for.
Ad Tech Companies
These outfits track consumers as they browse the internet, serving ads on any site they visit—provided it hasn’t been blacklisted.
Websites
Sites that traffic in hardcore violence, hate speech, or pornography tend to get blacklisted, but those with content that is less clearly objectionable are often fair game. Which is why even sites publishing fake news can profit by hosting ads based on your browsing history.