Trivia / Snopes

• Creator Breakdown:
  • In May 2014, David and Barbara Mikkelson's marriage had a bitter breakdown after she accused him of infidelity. By 2016 (the year David remarried to Elyssa Young) Snopes had revenues of $200,000 per year, which made for acrimonious disputes amongst the two; in July, she sold her share to its advertiser broker, Proper Media (now Sovrn),^note also owner of This Very Wiki while he terminated its advertising contract and was forced to launch a GoFundMe to buy her former share (he was successful on that). So, Barbara, who, for a couple of years before this, had not written for the site, no longer has anything to do it. Meanwhile, people who hated Snopes (but especially the Daily Mail) delighted themselves on this.
  • Then, in 2021, BuzzFeed News discovered that, between 2015 and 2019, he plagiarized various articles under the "Jeff Zarronandia" pseudonym and the "Snopes staff" byline, and ordering his staff writers to do more plagiarism, all in order to drive traffic to Snopes, for which he was suspended from his duties at the website.