The more we learn about the ads linked variously to parties in Russia, the more they look like online, social media-based, for profit, fake news publishers:

The Facebook ads placed by a Russian troll farm and released on Wednesday by the U.S. Congress Intelligence Committee show that the Russian propaganda campaign of 2016 didn’t favor either Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton. Instead, it mocked and goaded America, holding up a distorted but, in the final analysis, remarkably accurate mirror.

….

The ads backed white nationalist as well as black causes. They often targeted Clinton before the election but switched to attacking Trump immediately afterwards. The ads against both were even visually similar.

….

Neither the trolls with their tiny budgets — at best, hundreds of thousands of dollars compared with the hundreds of millions spent by the candidates and their U.S. backers — nor Russian state media with their laughable reach compared with U.S. cable TV could have hoped to shape the election outcome.

Source: Facebook Ads Reveal the Real Russian Game – Bloomberg

If you click the “ads” link you can see some of the ads. They look very similar to the type of inflammatory, emotion hooking posts used by for profit fake news publishers.

There is not enough information released by Congress to tell if these ads linked back to ad supported pages. While links are shown in the metadata files, they go to FB pages that no longer exist.