What if I told you that Forbes Marketplace, the affiliate company operating on Forbes.com ALSO had agreements with CNN and USA Today?
And that Forbes Marketplace was stuffing those sites full of affiliate content just like it is with Forbes?
And what if Forbes Marketplace went to extreme efforts to hide everything?
Would this be considered parasite SEO?
I believe all this to be true.
If you haven’t been following the Forbes Marketplace story, read my first post here. For the rest of this post, I’ll refer to this company as just Marketplace.
Once more, down the rabbit hole we go.
The Hidden Website on CNN
Let’s start at the top. Go to the CNN homepage and if you scroll down a tad, you’ll find CNN Underscored:
I’ve known about this for a while, thought it was a Wirecutter copycat. Turns out there’s a lot more going on.
Now, if you poke around the majority of CNN Underscored, it looks like a standard affiliate site. And as far as I know, it’s run by CNN itself.
EXCEPT for one section that I know about.
That section is CNN Underscored Money.
The first clue I found was in the staff bios.
Here’s a normal CNN Underscore bio:
At the very bottom, this person has a cnn.com email address. Good sign that it’s a real employee of CNN.
But what if we look up a bio of someone working on the Money section of CNN Underscored?
In this case, the email is under wbdcontractor.com. I assume that Warner Bro Discovery (the owner of CNN) uses this domain for all contractor emails. So this person isn’t an actual employee, they’re a contractor.
Now this particular person I found is a Lead Editor, not just a freelance writer where a contract relationship would be expected. An editor has a lot of influence over the content, especially a Lead Editor. If it was me, I’d want all my editors as employees, especially for a brand like CNN.
Every bio I checked under CNN Underscored Money had an email at wbdcontractor.com. Maybe I missed one but I checked a bunch.
Also, all the Money “employees” are separated from the rest of the Editorial staff on the CNN Underscored About page. They’re under a separate list called “Money.” Curious.
Why oh why are ALL the CNN Underscored Money folks contractors?
Might it be because they’re working for a COMPLETELY different company? Hmm. We’ll see.
The CNN Underscored Money Website
Now let’s turn to the CNN Underscored navigation bar. Here’s the normal one:
And here’s the navigation bar for the Money section of CNN Underscored:
I took these screenshots with the same size browser window. And yet we see a LOT of differences.
- Money has a lot more categories.
- The “Sign In” button has slightly different styling.
- “More” has a little dropdown arrow in the main nav bar, it’s missing in the Money nav bar.
- For the affiliate disclaimer, the main nav is italicized while the Money nav is not. And the copy in the Money section is different.
Why would the navigation of CNN Underscored Money be different?
And why are there so many little details… off?
It’s almost like someone spent a LOT of time and effort to make the nav appear identical… when they’re not.
What is going on?
Easy: they’re DIFFERENT FUCKING websites.
Here’s the beginning of the source code for CNN Underscored:
And for CNN Underscored Money:
I’m not even a front-end dev and I can easily tell they’re very different.
Here’s a few differences I noticed:
- CNN Underscored Money has Google Tag Manager installed, I can’t find it on the normal CNN Underscored. It’s highly unusual to place GTM on just one category of a website in my experience. And if it is installed, I’d expect it to be installed in the same way.
- For Underscored Money, a bunch of the WordPress files are in /cnn-underscored/money/wp-content/ which means there’s a separate and unique version of WordPress installed in /cnn-underscored/money/. I believe the main Underscored site is using cms.cnn.com for all its stuff.
- CNN Underscored has Optimizely installed, CNN Underscored Money does not. Usually tools like this will run across an entire website.
I could understand CNN Underscored having its own CMS from the rest of cnn.com. That makes sense.
But having ANOTHER WordPress installed for just the Money category of CNN Underscored, that makes zero sense. Unless you wanted to cordon off another company into a restricted area of your site. THAT makes sense.
I believe someone installed a unique version of WordPress so they could operate the Money category independently.
Who oh who could it be?
My New Favorite Part of Every Website: Privacy Policies
In my original post on Marketplace, the privacy policy helped me figure out what was going on.
And for the rest of my career, every time I see a privacy policy, I will think to myself: “ahhh, privacy policies, the beacon of truth in a world drowning in bullshit.”
Just like the rest of CNN Underscored, there’s two of everything.
For the main CNN Underscored site, if you click on the privacy policy, you’ll end up here:
It’s the Privacy Center for Warner Bros Discovery. Makes sense. Looks legit.
Buuuuuut what about the privacy policy for CNN Underscored Money?
It’s a COMPLETELY different privacy policy on its own URL: www.cnn.com/cnn-underscored/money/privacy. That’s weird as hell.
And who’s Solutions Underscored LLC?
I’ve got a feeling that we’re on to something.
Who Is Solutions Underscored LLC?
Luckily, the organization running CNN Underscored Money included the address for their company Solutions Underscored LLC in the privacy policy. It’s based in Georgia.
So now we can look up the business registration of Solutions Underscored LLC.
You can do this with any business. But they’re rarely indexed by Google. You have to find the business registration website for that specific state, then search there. Since I have the address, I know what state to search instead of having to check every state.
If you search business registrations in Georgia, you will find one for Solutions Underscored LLC. Click around a bit and you’ll get the actual PDF of the business registration. The first page of the registration looks like this:
Pretty standard stuff.
If you check it yourself, I HIGHLY recommend looking at page 2:
The Manager and Authorizer of Solutions Underscored is listed as Thomas Callahan.
Where have I seen that name before?
IT’S THE CFO OF MARKETPLACE.
Or at least, someone with his exact same name. Maybe it’s a different Thomas Callahan. Or maybe it is the same guy and he has a COMPLETELY legitimate reason to be running a business that controls CNN Underscored Money. I doubt it. But it’s possible.
What I Believe Is Happening with CNN Underscored Money
Based on everything I’ve seen, here’s what I think happened:
- Marketplace wanted to expand. Running an affiliate program on Forbes wasn’t enough.
- They reached out to CNN and offered to run a section of their website.
- For some unfathomable reason, CNN agreed to a deal. What the fuck CNN? You’re CN fucking N. What in god’s name convinced you this was a good idea? And you already had a ramped up affiliate program. I say again: what the fuck CNN?
- Folks involved decided that CNN would install a completely unique site under cnn.com/cnn-underscored/money/ for Marketplace.
- Marketplace then went to absurd levels of effort to make that site look identical to the normal Underscored website. I believe this was intentional. It’s actually really easy to miss unless you’re looking for it. And there’s no way CNN didn’t realize what was going on.
- I believe Marketplace has since been running CNN Underscored Money with little, if any, oversight from the main CNN team. If CNN was interested in oversight, I don’t see why they’d let another company set up a completely unique website on their domain in the first place. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe editors employed by CNN are involved in day-to-day content operations. I hope I’m wrong. Please tell me if I’m wrong.
And for those of you that are curious about the success of this little endeavor, here’s the search traffic:
Got hit a bit in the Aug 2024 algo update but still doing over 600K search visits/month. And way up in the past few years.
Starting to rank for some real money terms too. At number 4 for me on “best mortgage lenders”:
Yeah, it’s not like mortgage lenders have any real impact on people’s lives.
Also number 2 for me on “best loan apps”:
The Same Thing is Going on With USA Today Blueprint
To me, it looks like the exact same thing is happening with USA Today Blueprint.
Here’s the normal USA Today navigation bar:
And the USA Today Blueprint navigation bar:
Tons of little differences:
- Spacing is off.
- Font is different or has a slightly different weight.
- The normal USA Today nav bar has a weather widget, a sign in button, and a CTA button for the USA Today subscription. USA Today Blueprint doesn’t have any of that stuff.
- USA Today Blueprint doesn’t have as many ads but I could understand that, I’d fight to remove display ads in any affiliate program. Even a legit one.
The sites look very different once you get under the hood too. Again, someone put in some real effort to make these sites look identical when they’re not.
But time for the smoking gun.
A few days ago, I grabbed this screenshot of a USA Blueprint bio:
In the bottom left, you’ll see the mouse-over for the email address tied to the email icon.
To make this easier, let’s ENHANCE:
The domain is marketplace.co. Yes, THAT marketplace.co. The same website for the company that runs the affiliate program on Forbes:
An Editor at USA Today Blueprint has an email address on the same domain as Marketplace. I’m going to assume that’s because the editor is an employee at Marketplace and NOT an employee of USA Today.
By the way, I just tried to get a better screenshot of that email address. Now the bios look like this:
Seems like the team is scrubbing info since my original post went viral. Feels like a rush job too. I wonder why?
The funny part: that marketplace.co email address is still listed on that email icon:
They missed scrubbing the best part!
As for the search traffic on USA Today Blueprint:
Took a sizable hit during the March 2024 algo update. Still doing over 800K search visits/month though.
Before we wrap for USA Today Blueprint, I’d like to point out a link added to the bottom of the About page for USA Today Blueprint:
See that link for Ethical Conduct For Newsrooms? It goes to the ethical conduct page used by all of USA Today.
On that page, there’s a section on maintaining independence.
What a load of horseshit.
