As someone who has been on the publication side of digital media: Never ascribe to propaganda what you can explain by greed.

News is fundamentally broken, all those sites linking to each other are probably doing it to increase the "trending" part of the news which will push all of them up the google rankings.

The reason why Russians, and Eastern Europeans in general, are more highly represented as owners of these places is because the cost of living is so low there. That you make $2,000 from add revenue in the US would mean you can afford to eat out a few more times a month. When you can do the same thing in a country where this is double the average wage you can spend all your time doing it and be better off than if you tried doing anything else.