This dude is/was making $120k a year by just making shit up?
That can't be real.
it's not unheard of if your stuff is visited and shared by enough people. That's the facebook effect at work: everything that is successful is far more successful than it ought to be because people influence each other's consumer habits, including information consumption.
The bigger issue is that this hypocrisy of Google on who gets Adsense and why has been ancient at this point. Where its rules clearly specify original, self-made content (and thereby what you would expect obviously either explicit parody or true, but not without any statement to which. Google did not have a rule on that), the average place using it can be easily seen to be in violation of those rules. Video game streaming is of those (it's not your content), but better example are Tumblr pages of cat pics that just collect other people's pictures on the internet and put them on their site, commenting on other videos on youtube and calling it 'your own work', downright stealing and / or plagiarizing other works, and so on.
Like most Google's work the program is only human on the initial permission check for the Adsense account, some sampling (I presume), and flagged content. The rest seem automated or 'dont care' (to be fair, a human force would take forever to check on all that, so it's not as that's not necessary). But that leads to a lot of weird shenanigans, like that you can have a major messageboard, like say neogaf here, start replacing old posts deep in the system with porn images, and then report said images to Google for content violations meaning Evilore suddenly has to contest foul play. This is not a random example, because this scenario played out a few years ago on a major Dutch board. But then that board is basically near-4chan compared to neogaf's moderation. If you like posting here, you should probably not go all 'oh man, imma do that'.
But the point here is that Google's "rules" on Adsense seem to apply only as much as your traffic versus conversion is (conversion being traffic leading to actual sales, usually something like 1% or slightly more, but less than the roughly 10% you get in physical retail). Get lots of traffic and conversion on stolen content? It's gold, Jerry! Get lots of traffic but no conversion on original content? Get fucked, motherfucker!
So the idea that they would fuck up on allowing fake 'news' to run amok is unsurprising on how little overview on real rules Adsense has, thereby promoting people to take advantage of such an easy to game and profitable system. The wild growth of SEO Adsense sites has already led to Google having to adjust (again and again) it's ranking algorithm. The rise of 'Web search evaluators' (which is basically Google's program through other "crowdsource" platforms) is a part of that as they need human intelligence to decide whether the content is any good. The pay is laughable, so people don't invest more time in it than absolute necessary, so they will choose the first hit for a name anyway, leading to results like searching for Peyton List on Google giving you only the child actress/ singer and not the 30-year old actress currently on the show Frequency. Test it if you don't believe me.
edit: also real quality negation by our dumbass 'entrepreneur' here. "hey it's my income, I need that, despite my bullshit probably getting someone elected who's going to crash the economy and ruin everybody's life". See, this is the brand of 'new rich' in the vein of Timothy Ferris that I can't stand. The kind that will say their shit is not immoral when it's clear as daylight that it is.
/cdn0.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/7484977/sub_buzz_441_1479332078_1.png)
