Over the last few days, a great number of people have passed away. If you believe twitter, then Farrah Fawcett, Michael Jackson, Jeff Goldblum and many other big name stars have left this earth.
However, only the first two on the above list have been confirmed as deceased by official sources. And by official sources, I mean actual medical institutions who have the above persons’ liveless bodies in their possession.
According to many a news outlet, a unnamed website tried to start rumours of other star’s deaths, including Goldblum, in order to generate traffic to their website. Overall the entire traffic over the internet peaked over the past weekend, so there were a lot of users that could have been directed to that site. More traffic means more ad impressions and, hopefully, more ad clicks. Therefore, more profit. Ergo, more traffic, more profit. Simple.
But not as simple as that. You can’t just make up stories to direct people to your site. Only The Onion can do that. And sometimes even they fail.
Then again they have enough money for a fake news crew, so they must be doing something right.