Jestin Coler: Trump Fans Spread Fake News, Helped Him Make Up To $30,000 Monthly For ‘National Report’ And Hoax Websites

Jestin Coler is one rich man. And Coler admits that Trump supporters have helped to add to his up to $30,000 or so monthly income — but not in ways you would assume. Jestin was tracked down by NPR reporters, and Coler’s California lifestyle was revealed after Jestin initially turned down requests to be interviewed by the publication. Coler runs National Report, among other fake news websites.

Paul Horner is another man who admitted to making $10,000 per month from Google Adsense ads from writing fake news, as reported by the Inquisitr. In fact, Coler’s National Report website was initially on a list of 141 supposed fake, real, and satirical news websites that went viral on social media — before the actual list of websites was removed.

According to NPR, Coler’s website was banned from having Google Adsense ads run upon his sites after all the melee was made public about his site spreading false news — but Jestin told the publication that it didn’t stop tons of other advertisers from lining up in his email inbox, offering to replace their ad networks in place of his missing Google ads.

One of Coler’s most famous and debunked articles was titled “FBI Agent Suspected In Hillary Email Leaks Found Dead In Apparent Murder-Suicide,” which has been called fake by Snopes. That article was shared at least 500,000 times and forced the Denver Post to note that Jestin’s fake Denverguardian.com website was the one that came up with the fake story. Beyond all the social media shares, the single article (the only one on the Denver Guardian fake site) got 1.6 million views in only 10 days, reported Coler.

Besides NationalReport.net, Jestin likely ran USAToday.com.co, WashingtonPost.com.co — all sites linked to the same Amazon Web Services server.

Coler isn’t a Republican but a registered Democrat — a man who runs Disinfomedia.

Jestin admitted how surprised he was that Trump supporters would feed on his anti-Hillary stories like “red meat” and spread them around like wildfire. The 40-year-old has been in the fake news business since 2013.

Coler has about 20 to 25 writers who create fake stories for his websites across the country. Jestin reported that by targeting Trump supporters, he found financial success. Coler said that writing articles that targeted liberals did not work as well, because liberals tended not to buy the fake news reports as easily as Trump supporters believed and spread the fake stories. The right-wing conspiracy theories fit nicely into the belief-system already enjoyed by many Trump supporters, said Coler.

“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. It caused an explosion in the number of sites. I mean, my gosh, the number of just fake accounts on Facebook exploded during the Trump election.

“The people wanted to hear [the fake story about the FBI agent’s murder-suicide death.] So all it took was to write that story. Everything about it was fictional: the town, the people, the sheriff, the FBI guy. And then… our social media guys kind of go out and do a little dropping it throughout Trump groups and Trump forums and boy it spread like wildfire.

“There are many factors as to why Trump won that don’t involve fake news. As much as I like Hillary, she was a poor candidate. She brought in a lot of baggage.”

Jestin didn’t detail if he used Facebook ads to promote his fake news stories, but he did note that his writers would drop certain stories into pro-Trump supporting Twitter accounts. It’s those methods that helped push Jestin into the $30,000 per month realm of moneymaking.

“The folks in Long Beach that were doing just all right stuff. They were reporting $10,000 to $30,000 a month; I think that’s probably a relative ballpark.

“So you’re doing as well as those?

“Yes.”

[Featured Image by Mark Lennihan/AP Images]