Sex, Hindutva and Social Media partnerships – Secret to fake news site Insistpost’s astounding success

A picture of Bollywood Actress Alia Bhatt as a toddler sitting in Mahesh Bhatt’s lap is the featured image of an article on the home page of chaskatimes.com. The title of of the article is “सिनेमा जगत की इस महशूर अभिनेत्री ने खुद कबूला कि उसने अपनी वेर्गिनिटी खो दी थी वो भी अपने ही पिता के साथ (Translation: A famous actress confessed to having lost her virginity to her father)”. It is a 4 part article. The third part of the article has another image of Pooja Bhatt embracing a young Alia Bhatt.

The fourth part of the article finally reveals the name of the actress they were referring to all the while, Cara Delevingne. Usually, such stories create quite a storm leading to hundreds of copies across various media outlets, this one doesn’t have a single authentic source. The lone article which claims that the father-daughter duo had sex is on yet another ‘generate content for money’ portal India.com. Thus leading to the obvious conclusion that it is a cooked-up story.

The article on chaskatimes.com was designed to get tons of clicks by putting Alia Bhatt and Mahesh Bhatt’s picture as featured image. The 4 part ‘article’ has more advertisements than content in each of the parts. This pattern is followed by every single post on this website. Make sensational posts, many of them patently fake, and make tons of money out of it, seems to be the motto. Every page on chaskatimes.com carries a copyright notice, “© Copyright 2015 – Insist Post Media Enterprises“.

The main InsistPost website (InsistPost.com) is along the same lines as chaskatimes.com with lots of articles concentrated on the issue of sex, how to increase one’s longevity in bed, why women shut their eyes during sex, how Alia Bhatt has no IQ but is an expert in sex positions and more.

Other than InsistPost’s sincere efforts in advising its readers on issues of sex, the website also devotes a lot of time praising/defending BJP, RSS and PM Modi.

At the time of writing, InsistPost gets more traffic than FirstPost, FirstPost being one of the websites owned by the Network18 media group. According to Alexa.com which is a company that specializes in web analytics, InsistPost has a global rank of 1477, while FirstPost has a global rank of 2018, a good 541 notches below InsistPost. A website by one of the largest media groups of this country has been outranked by a website that is populated with sleaze stories.

Who runs this enterprise? According to LinkedIn and Instagram, a young man called Ankit Pandey is the brain behind this highly successful website.

Ankit Pandey’s Facebook Profile and Instagram Profile has several pictures of him along with senior leaders of BJP like Amit Shah and Smriti Irani and BJP IT Cell head Amit Malviya. In the picture below, the person in a blue-ish shirt whose face has been circled is Ankit Pandey whereas the guy next to him is Rudra Ravi Sharma who claims himself to be the Managing Director of InsistPost.

How does InsistPost manage to generate so much content that they can beat websites owned by top ranking media companies of India? InsistPost has a fully functioning office at E-58, Noida Sec 3, Block E, Sector 3, Gautam Buddha Nagar, Uttar Pradesh 201301 according to Google. Many pictures of the office are available on Google. We cross-checked the pictures available on Google with ones available on Ankit Pandey’s Facebook and Instagram profile and they do match.

While content is the king and political friendships are necessary, but one still needs to drive tons of traffic to the website. As it was seen in the Alt News exposé of Hindutva.info, InsistPost has managed to partner with Facebook Pages with huge followings and are also running multiple Facebook pages of their own. The main InsistPost Facebook page has a following of over 1.1 million at the time of writing. This page not only drives traffic to InsistPost.com but it also drives traffic to chaskatimes.com (Example 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6).

Besides its own Facebook page, two major Facebook Pages name ISupportNaMo and SanghParivar.org share InsistPost articles every single day. ISupportNamo has in excess of 13 million followers while SanghParivar.org has more than 1 million followers. Other than InsistPost, these pages also consistently share at least two other websites namely ViralInIndia.in and NewsRoomPost.com. These websites will be talked about in future posts on Alt News.

We also found a host of other Facebook Pages which share InsistPost and ChaskaTimes articles, some of them exclusively. For eg, the Beautiful Punjabi Models page alternates between sharing revealing pictures of women and InsistPost and ChaskaTimes articles. The strategy is to create a theme based on a celebrity or a famous subject, create a following by posting posts related to the subject and alternate it with articles from these websites.

There are many other pages like the ones above that send enormous amounts of web traffic to the InsistPost group of websites and have not been listed here for the sake of brevity. All these pages combined have a few million followers. That is how InsistPost has risen to become the 105th ranking website in India.

While the people behind InsistPost might follow a particular ideology, that is not the only driving factor. A greed to make quick money is also evident from the sort of content that is being put up on these websites. The photos of employees shared by Ankit Pandey on his personal social media profiles show that many of them are either still finishing their graduation or are fresh graduates. It is unfortunate that such a group of young people are wasting away their creative juices in such endeavours.