He liked showing how easily fake news spreads, and making $ while doing so

Denver Guardian/Public Domain

Case study: Jestin Coler
CEO of Disinfomedia and founder of ~25 domains, including The Denver Guardian, a blog (2016 - 2018),  NationalReport.net (a satirical website) and others

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Incentives: The game of showing how easily fake news spreads, and the income from the ads on his websites
Excerpts from Laura Sydell's NPR article about Mr. Coler, November 23, 2016

• "The whole idea from the start was to build a site that could kind of infiltrate the echo chambers of the alt-right, publish blatantly or fictional stories and then be able to publicly denounce those stories and point out the fact that they were fiction," Coler says.
• He was amazed at how quickly fake news could spread and how easily people believe it.
• And as the stories spread, Coler makes money from the ads on his websites. He wouldn't give exact figures, but he says stories about other fake-news proprietors making between $10,000 and $30,000 a month apply to him.
• "It was just anybody with a blog can get on there and find a big, huge Facebook group of kind of rabid Trump supporters just waiting to eat up this red meat that they're about to get served," Coler says.
  
• Coler says his writers have tried to write fake news for liberals — but they just never take the bait.

After retiring from the fake news industry, Jestin was interviewed by NewsWhip, May 24, 2017 . Excerpts:

• "A lot of the things that contributed to our success wouldn’t translate that well to a reputable publication. We did more guerrilla techniques, building Facebook users that were fake, infiltrating groups that were susceptible to the content we were going to spread around."
• "The confirmation bias is what you’re going for. You don’t need a story that’s over the top or clickbait. As long as your site looks legitimate and you have these fictional stories that people want to be true, they’ll spread it all around. You’re just fitting into the mentality that a lot of people already have."
  
• We talk a lot about anger and politics, are there other emotional trends that work?
  "The things that make people happy always safe bets. Videos of cute dogs, soldiers returning home—those feel-good type stories that no matter what party you’re from, you’ll enjoy. Humor and satire, in my experience, doesn’t sell nearly as well as stories that invoke anger or fear. The only thing that sells better than sex is fear."