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Friday 9th February: Confessions of an AI Clickbait Kingpin
Good morning! Today’s newsletter is brought to you by Chris.
I was going to include this as a NIB, but the more I read the more fascinating it became. Nebojša Vujinović Vujo is an interesting character — a man aware that what he’s doing is verging on the immoral side of publishing, but equally aware that if he wasn’t doing it any number of other people and publishers would be doing it instead.
In essence, this profile explores how the DJ-turned-entrepreneur (currently working on a song called ‘Fat Lady’) went from buying up domains to squat on them to eventually using ChatGPT to create a media business based on gaming SEO. This bit is especially relevant for us given that it illustrates the game of cat-and-mouse between AI and Google, but I really recommend you read the entire article:
“Vujo says The Frisky creates revenue of between $30,000 and $50,000 a year. Perhaps it will stabilize at that level, but to score another soaring success, he has to keep hunting for other distressed media properties with lapsed domains. ‘It’s like a drug,’ Vujo says of the adrenaline rush of scouting potential squatting sites. ‘You never know what’s waiting’.”
There’s an ugly truth to local news funding — that you have to be a certain size to begin with to qualify for the amount of funding that would be genuinely transformative. That truth is brought to light in this article from Sophie Culpepper — but so too is the potential solution: The Alliance of Nonprofit News Outlets (ANNO), which sees small outlets band together to speak to potential funders as a group.
Axios’ Sara Fischer has an exclusive here with Dow Jones’ CEO Almar Latour following its extremely positive results. As you’d expect given the success it effectively boils down to “we’re not going to change horses mid-stream”, although Latour’s allusion to the NYT is indicative of just how dominant that paper is in the minds of subscription-based businesses.
Know a good sales freelancer with a bit of capacity? Singletrack World is looking. More details on our (fledgling) recruitment board in our community forum.
I’m sure it wasn’t actually like this, but read the first two questions posed to Medium’s CEO here and tell me it doesn’t come across as a very antagonist interview. Anyway, Medium appears on track to turn a profit — but is facing the same challenges as the rest of the industry when it comes to the proliferation of AI-generated content.
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