Fact Check: 'Shocking Meghan Markle Announcement': Online Ad Makes Evidence-Free Claims About Royal Couple

Claim:

An online ad displayed in December 2023 accurately reported that Prince Harry was "humiliated" after Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, made a "shocking" announcement.

Rating:

In late December 2023, an advertisement was displayed online on an unknown number of websites that claimed, "Prince Harry Humiliated by Shocking Meghan Markle Announcement."

The ad showed an image with a photo of Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, looking confident and another photo of Harry looking upset, as if they were both reacting to this supposed "announcement."

The link in the ad led to an article on buzzday.info. On the website, the story was surrounded by hundreds of ads. Some of the ads were videos that all automatically began playing at the same time. The headline of the article read, "Prince Harry was greatly humiliated by Meghan Markle’s statement."

However, the article revealed no evidence that would confirm the Duchess had made a "shocking" announcement or statement that had "humiliated" Prince Harry. While it's certainly possible that he may have been "humiliated" by something that he heard about or witnessed in the years since he met her, the truth was that the rumor in the ad had simply been made up for something known as advertising arbitrage.

Advertising arbitrage is a strategy in which an advertiser hopes to make more money on ads displayed in a lengthy article than it would cost to display an initial clickbait ad meant to attract users to the article. In other words, instead of the ads being both attractive and potentially helpful to consumers, they instead mislead users from the start.

A page on buzzday.info says that the company associated with the website is at least partially managed from an office in Tbilisi, Georgia. We reached out to the website by email to ask about the misleading ad and article and will update this story if we receive a response.

The royal couple have long been the subjects of misleading online ads. In the past, we reported about false ads that made claims about the Duchess' net worth, relationship troubles, her car and Queen Elizabeth II.

Note: If readers would like to report any strange or misleading ads on Snopes, we invite you to contact us. Please include the full link of the website where the questionable ad led to so that we can attempt to investigate and potentially block any such ads.

Sources:

“Contacts.” Buzzday.info, https://buzzday.info/contacts/.

Liles, Jordan. “Did an Ad Reveal ‘The Car Meghan Markle Drives’?” Snopes, 23 Apr. 2021, https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/car-meghan-markle-drives/.

---. “Did Meghan Markle’s Net Worth Make the Queen ‘Cringe’?” Snopes, 12 Dec. 2020, https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/meghan-markle-net-worth/.

---. “Did Prince Harry ‘Admit’ Meghan Markle Might Not Be ‘The One’?” Snopes, 14 Dec. 2020, https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/harry-admits-meghan-markle/.

---. “Did the Queen Tell Meghan Markle To ‘Stop’?” Snopes, 17 Dec. 2020, https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/queen-meghan-markle-stop/.

---. “Snopes Tips: How To Avoid Ad Arbitrage Clickbait.” Snopes, 2 Jan. 2022, https://www.snopes.com/articles/387913/avoid-ad-arbitrage-clickbait/.

“Terms of Services.” Adskeeper, https://www.adskeeper.com/terms-of-services/.