DeNA's WELQ ran medical misinformation as SEO bait — 9 sites closed, ¥3.9B write-off

In late November 2016, doctors and readers began pointing out that WELQ — DeNA's medical and health information site, part of its curation-media push — was publishing articles with no medical basis, some of them presented as doctor-supervised without any real supervision. What was meant to be dependable health advice was, in effect, content-farm traffic bait.

The response escalated within days: on 29 November DeNA suspended all WELQ articles and apologized; on 1 December it closed WELQ and eight other curation sites at once, with president Isao Moriyasu apologizing and promising nothing would resume without proper medical review. The scandal became one of Japan's defining content-marketing failures — a reminder that SEO-driven publishing cannot be trusted with people's health.

The bill arrived in February 2017: DeNA booked a 3.859 billion yen impairment loss on the suspended curation business, after an operating loss of about 1.69 billion yen in the segment through December 2016. Its full-year operating profit forecast was cut from 22.3 billion yen to 18.6 billion yen.