Case Study 10.2: InfoWars — The Business Model of Conspiracy Monetization

Supplement Sales, Media Empire, and Deplatforming Effects

Overview

On August 6, 2018, in a coordinated action that had been organized without prior public announcement, Apple removed InfoWars podcasts from its platform, Facebook banned Alex Jones and InfoWars pages, YouTube terminated the InfoWars channel, and Spotify removed InfoWars content. Twitter initially declined to follow, generating significant controversy, before eventually permanently banning Alex Jones in September 2018.

The simultaneous deplatforming of InfoWars was one of the most significant and controversial platform moderation events of the social media era. It raised profound questions about speech, private platform power, and the limits of content moderation. But from the perspective of Chapter 10's focus on the business model of outrage, the InfoWars case raises a different set of questions: What happens when an outrage media operation is deplatformed? Was the operation economically sustainable before deplatforming? How is its business model structured to resist platform pressure? And what does the InfoWars case reveal about the limits of platform-level interventions as tools for addressing misinformation?

This case study examines the InfoWars business model in detail, its evolution from fringe conspiracy operation to media empire, the mechanics of deplatforming and its effects, and the lessons for understanding how misinformation operations can be structured to be economically resilient.

Background: Alex Jones and InfoWars

Origins and Development

Alex Jones is an American media personality and conspiracy theorist who founded InfoWars.com (and its parent company Free Speech Systems LLC) in the late 1990s. Beginning as a local Austin, Texas public access television host with extremist political views, Jones expanded to internet-based radio and then to a YouTube channel and social media presence that by the mid-2010s had achieved remarkable scale.

By 2018, before deplatforming: - InfoWars was consistently among the top 5,000 websites globally by traffic - Alex Jones's YouTube channel had 2.4 million subscribers - InfoWars Facebook pages had 1.7 million followers - The daily Jones radio broadcast reached an estimated 3 million listeners - Jones claimed a combined audience reach of 70 million, though this figure likely reflected unique monthly visitors rather than regular daily audience

InfoWars produced a distinctive blend of political commentary, conspiracy theory, and survivalist fear content that positioned Jones as a truth-teller exposing the machinations of a globalist elite, corporate media, and various other shadowy conspirators. The specific claims varied — from 9/11 being an "inside job" to claims about chemtrails, water fluoridation, false flag mass shootings, and globalist depopulation agendas — but the consistent thread was that mainstream institutions could not be trusted and that InfoWars/Jones provided the real truth that mainstream media suppressed.

The Sandy Hook Defamation Litigation

The legal development that most significantly shaped InfoWars's subsequent history was the filing of defamation lawsuits by parents of Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting victims. For years after the December 2012 shooting that killed 20 children and 6 teachers, Jones repeatedly claimed on InfoWars that the shooting was staged — a "false flag" operation performed by crisis actors. He claimed that the parents of killed children were actors, that no children had actually died, and that the shooting was manufactured to justify gun control legislation.

This content caused direct, documented harm to the parents of murdered children, who faced years of harassment, death threats, and stalking by InfoWars audience members who believed Jones's claims.

Multiple defamation lawsuits were filed beginning in 2018. Jones lost the cases in 2022 with default judgments. In the damages phase, juries awarded approximately $1.5 billion in damages — the largest defamation damages in American legal history, though these awards are subject to ongoing legal proceedings and limitations.

The litigation process generated extensive discovery that produced the first detailed public examination of InfoWars's financial records and business model.

The Business Model: Supplements, Merchandise, and Media Integration

Revenue Structure

InfoWars's business model is distinctive among media operations because of the tight integration between its media content and its commercial operations. Unlike most media businesses in which advertising revenue is separate from content decisions, InfoWars's primary revenue stream is the direct sale of products to its audience — primarily dietary supplements and survivalist/preparedness merchandise — with the media content serving as the marketing vehicle.

Primary Revenue Streams (based on court discovery documents and reported figures):

Dietary Supplements (largest revenue category) The InfoWars Store and InfoWarsLife.com sell a range of dietary supplements including: - "Brain Force" (nootropic supplement) - "Super Male Vitality" (testosterone supplement) - "Survival Shield X-2" (potassium iodide supplement) - "Caveman True Paleo Formula" (protein supplement) - "DNA Force" (mitochondrial support supplement) - Dozens of additional supplement products

Discovery documents from the Sandy Hook litigation revealed that InfoWars's supplement operation generated approximately $80 million in revenue in a single year (reportedly $165 million at peak annual revenue across the broader business).

Merchandise InfoWars-branded merchandise (t-shirts, hats, water filters, gear) contributes additional revenue, though smaller than supplements.

Advertising Traditional display advertising contributed to revenue, though at rates below what premium publishers achieve due to InfoWars's controversial content.

Premium Subscriptions InfoWars offered a premium subscription tier providing access to additional content, generating subscription revenue.

Speaking Fees and Appearances Jones commanded significant speaking fees for appearances at political events and rallies.

How the Media-Commerce Integration Works

The integration of the media operation with the supplement business is both the business model's greatest strength and its most significant structural feature.

The mechanism operates as follows:

Fear-based content creates product demand. InfoWars's political content — warnings about economic collapse, toxic food supply, government population control programs, and societal threats — creates a specific emotional state in the audience: fear of institutional failure combined with distrust of mainstream products and medicine. This emotional state is then directly converted into product demand: if mainstream food is poisoned and mainstream medicine is corrupted, what do you use? InfoWars supplements and purified water.
Trust transfer from media personality to products. Alex Jones himself serves as the direct endorser of InfoWars products, appearing in advertisements that are seamlessly integrated with the political content. The trust Jones has built with his audience — by positioning himself as a truth-teller who exposes what mainstream sources hide — transfers directly to his product recommendations. Audience members who trust Jones on political conspiracies extend that trust to his supplement recommendations.
Community loyalty increases purchase conversion. InfoWars's audience is highly loyal and identity-affiliated — consuming InfoWars content and products is an expression of cultural and political identity for many followers. This loyalty-based purchasing is more resilient than transactional purchasing driven by product quality alone.
Products address the fears created by the content. There is a feedback loop between content and product: InfoWars content generates fears (about chemical poisoning, cognitive decline from fluoride, societal collapse); InfoWars products directly address those fears (supplements to counteract toxins, water filters to remove fluoride, preparedness gear for societal collapse). The content creates the market; the products capture it.

The Supplement Markup Structure

Court discovery documents revealed significant markups on InfoWars supplements. Internal documents showed that some supplement products were sold for 5-10 times their manufacturing cost. For example:

"Brain Force" nootropic capsules: manufacturing cost reported in discovery around $3-4 per bottle; retail price approximately $30-40
"Survival Shield X-2" (iodine drops): manufacturing cost approximately $2-3; retail price approximately $30

These markups are not unusual for the dietary supplement industry — a largely unregulated sector in the United States in which manufacturing costs bear little relationship to retail prices. But combined with InfoWars's media operation, the ability to sell directly to a highly loyal, fear-primed audience without advertising cost (the media content itself serves as advertising) generates exceptional margins.

The 2018 Deplatforming: What Happened and What Didn't

The Coordinated Action

The August 2018 deplatforming was distinctive for its scope and coordination. Apple, Facebook, YouTube, and Spotify acted within hours of each other, though representatives of each platform later denied explicit coordination. (Each independently concluded that Jones and InfoWars had violated their content policies around hate speech, harassment, and glorifying violence.)

At the time, InfoWars's Facebook pages had approximately 1.7 million followers, its YouTube channel had 2.4 million subscribers, and its podcasts were among the most listened-to political content on Apple Podcasts.

Immediate Effects

The immediate effects were substantial:

Traffic: Web traffic to InfoWars.com dropped significantly in the weeks following deplatforming. Estimates varied, but data from SimilarWeb and Alexa suggested monthly visits to InfoWars.com dropped by 50-70% in the month following the deplatforming compared to the preceding months.

YouTube: The termination of the InfoWars YouTube channel eliminated a significant distribution mechanism for video content. Jones subsequently moved video content to alternative platforms including Rumble, Brighteon, and the InfoWars website itself.

Podcast: Removal from Apple Podcasts reduced discovery of the Jones radio program. Jones and supporters promoted the Banned.Video platform as an alternative hosting solution.

Facebook: Loss of 1.7 million followers on Facebook eliminated a major organic distribution channel. Jones maintained a presence through supporters' pages and eventually through the cross-posting mechanisms of other affiliated accounts.

Long-Term Economic Effects: The Resilience of the Merchandise Model

Despite the dramatic reduction in platform reach, InfoWars's business did not collapse following deplatforming. Several factors contributed to its resilience:

Supplement revenue continued. The InfoWars Store and InfoWarsLife.com operate through InfoWars's own e-commerce infrastructure, not through social media platform integrations. Existing customers could continue to purchase directly. The loyal customer base that had already been converted to supplement purchasers continued to generate revenue with little dependence on social media platform access.

Existing audience retained loyalty. The hardcore InfoWars audience — those who had formed deep identity attachments to the operation — actively sought alternative platforms to continue following Jones. Alternative hosting on Rumble, Banned.Video, and similar platforms captured a substantial portion of the most engaged (and most commercially valuable) audience segment.

Free speech narrative converted deplatforming into marketing. Jones and supporters immediately framed the deplatforming as confirmation of the conspiracy theories Jones had been advancing — the globalist elite was silencing the truth-teller. This narrative reinforced audience loyalty and may have increased the emotional intensity of the remaining audience's identification with Jones, potentially increasing their purchase conversion rates.

Alternative social media found growth. Jones's presence on Parler, Gab, and other alternative platforms that positioned themselves as free-speech alternatives to mainstream social media provided new distribution channels with audiences predisposed to the InfoWars content.

Court discovery documents suggested that in the year or two following the 2018 deplatforming, InfoWars's revenues remained substantial — reportedly still in the tens of millions of dollars annually, though reduced from peak levels.

The Sandy Hook Damages and Subsequent Developments

Legal Accountability

The 2022 default judgments against Jones in the Sandy Hook cases, with ultimate damages totaling approximately $1.5 billion, represented the most significant legal accountability for misinformation content in American history. However, several important qualifications apply:

Collectability: The actual amount Jones and Free Speech Systems LLC would ultimately pay was subject to appeals, bankruptcy proceedings (Jones filed for personal bankruptcy shortly after the verdicts), and the practical limits of what he could pay. Legal analysts suggested the actual collected amount would be far less than the headline figure.

Scope: The damages were specifically for defamation of specific individuals (Sandy Hook parents), not for the general harms of misinformation. The legal framework for defamation requires specific identifiable victims; it cannot address the broader social harms of misinformation that damages society rather than specific individuals.

Deterrence effects: Whether the Jones damages would deter other misinformation operators was uncertain. Most misinformation operations do not make as specific and as clearly false claims about identifiable individuals as Jones did about Sandy Hook parents — limiting the direct applicability of defamation law.

Lessons for Understanding Misinformation Business Models

Lesson 1: Vertically Integrated Misinformation Operations Are More Resilient

InfoWars's business model, which integrates media with direct product sales, is significantly more resilient to platform deplatforming than operations that depend entirely on platform-based advertising revenue. Macedonian fake news operations, which depended on Google AdSense and Facebook distribution, were effectively destroyed by platform interventions. InfoWars, with its own e-commerce, its own content distribution, and a highly loyal paying customer base, survived substantial platform disruption.

This insight suggests that content moderation and platform deplatforming are most effective against operations that are fully dependent on platform infrastructure (advertising, distribution, discovery) and least effective against vertically integrated operations with direct customer relationships.

Lesson 2: Fear-Based Content and Product Sales Create Symbiotic Incentives

The InfoWars model demonstrates a particularly powerful incentive structure: the content that most increases product sales is the content that generates the most fear. This creates a direct financial incentive to escalate fearful content — not as a secondary byproduct but as the primary business driver. Most media businesses face a trade-off between engagement-optimized content and brand safety concerns from advertisers; InfoWars eliminates this constraint because the advertiser and the content producer are the same entity.

Lesson 3: Legal Liability for Harm to Specific Individuals Is Possible; Systemic Harm Is Harder

The Sandy Hook litigation demonstrated that legal accountability for specific, identifiable, demonstrably false claims that harm identifiable individuals is achievable through defamation law. But most of the social harm from misinformation operations is diffuse — it affects democratic discourse, public health, and institutional trust in ways that do not produce identifiable individual victims who can sue.

This suggests that legal frameworks focused on specific defamation claims are insufficient to address the systemic harms of large-scale misinformation operations.

Lesson 4: Platform Deplatforming Has Real Effects but Limited Reach

The InfoWars case shows that deplatforming is not ineffective — the loss of mainstream platform access did reduce reach, reduce discovery, and reduce the operation's ability to attract new audiences. But deplatforming is also not sufficient: it cannot address the economic infrastructure of operations with their own revenue streams, and it may galvanize existing audiences rather than reducing their loyalty.

Effective intervention against operations like InfoWars would require addressing both the content distribution channels (which platforms can affect through moderation) and the product revenue streams (which would require e-commerce, payment processor, and regulatory interventions of a different kind).

Discussion Questions

InfoWars's business model integrates political content with supplement and merchandise sales in a way that creates self-reinforcing incentives for fear-based content. Is this integration meaningfully different, ethically, from a traditional news outlet that carries advertising for products related to its editorial topics (e.g., outdoor magazines advertising camping gear)?
The Sandy Hook defamation verdicts against Jones represent the largest defamation damages in American history. Do you think these damages will deter other misinformation operators? What would deter you, if you were in Jones's position?
When Apple, Facebook, YouTube, and Spotify simultaneously deplatformed Jones in August 2018, critics raised concerns about private companies exercising quasi-governmental censorship power. Evaluate this concern. How should we balance concerns about platform power with concerns about misinformation harm?
The InfoWars model shows that misinformation operations can be made highly resistant to deplatforming by vertically integrating content with direct product sales. What interventions could address this structure? Consider: e-commerce platform terms of service, payment processor policies, domain registrar policies, and legal frameworks.
Jones has argued that his Sandy Hook content was protected political speech and that the defamation verdicts threaten First Amendment freedoms. Evaluate this argument. What principles should govern the boundary between protected false speech and actionable defamation?