“I’m not a fan of AI,” Nebojša Vujinović Vujo says. The admission surprises me: He has constructed a bustling enterprise by snapping up deserted information shops and different web sites and stuffing them filled with algorithmically generated articles. Though he accepts that his mannequin rankles writers and readers alike, he says he’s merely embracing an unstoppable new instrument—massive language fashions—in the identical approach individuals rationally swapped horse-drawn buggies for gas-powered autos. “I hate vehicles. They’re making my planet unhealthy,” he says. “However I’m not using a horse anymore, proper? I’m driving a automobile.”
I related with Vujo after digging into the unusual afterlife of indie ladies’s weblog The Hairpin, which shut down in 2018. Final month, its web site reawakened. Rather than the voicey, humorous weblog posts it was identified for, the positioning started churning out AI-generated, search-engine-optimized pablum about dream interpretations and painfully generic relationship recommendation like “efficient communication is important.”
Once I emailed an deal with listed on the zombie website’s About Us web page, Vujo responded, claiming that it was simply one among greater than 2,000 websites he operates, in an AI-content-fueled fiefdom constructed by buying once-popular domains fallen on arduous occasions. He’s the CEO of the digital advertising agency Shantel, which monetizes its AI-populated websites by way of programmatic advertisements, sponsored content material, and promoting the location of “backlinks” to web site house owners making an attempt to spice up their credibility with engines like google. He typically targets distressed media websites as a result of they’ve built-in audiences and a historical past of rating extremely in search outcomes.
The muse of that enterprise is a long-established observe often called area squatting—shopping for up net domains that after belonged to established manufacturers and profiting off their reputations with Google and different engines like google. Lily Ray, senior director of web optimization on the advertising company Ampsive, calls it “the underbelly of the web optimization trade.” However Vujo is a part of a wave of entrepreneurs giving this previous commerce a brand new twist by utilizing generative AI.
It’s nightfall the place I reside in Chicago once I speak by way of Zoom with Nebojša Vujinović Vujo. (Though that’s the title he offers me, he has generally passed by simply Nebojša Vujinović, together with on the registration info for a few of his domains.) It’s midnight in Belgrade, Serbia, the place he lives together with his girlfriend and their toddler, however he’s awake and chatty. Vujo attributes his erratic sleep schedule to years of late nights working as a DJ and nonetheless makes music—he likes to combine pop with Balkan folks and is engaged on a brand new tune referred to as “Fats Girl.” However proper now he’s keen to speak, human-to-human, about his AI-fueled hustle.
He will get why writers are sad that their work has been erased and changed by clickbait. (The Hairpin’s founding editor, Edith Zimmerman, calls his model of the positioning “grim.”) However he defends his selections, stating that his life has been harder than that of the typical American blogger. Though ethnically Serbian, Vujo was born in what’s now often called Bosnia and Herzegovina, and his household fled throughout the breakup of Yugoslavia. “I had two wars I escaped. I modified 9 elementary faculties as a result of we had been transferring. We had been migrants,” he says. “It was horrible to develop up on this a part of the world.” He says his financial choices have been restricted, and this was merely a path obtainable to him.
Vujo additionally insists that he does have editorial requirements; though the vast majority of the weblog posts he publishes are created with ChatGPT, he employs a workers of a few dozen human editors to verify its work to keep away from something outright offensive. “Perhaps it will be higher for you that I’m a nasty man,” he tells me. “Higher in your story. However I’m simply an abnormal man.”
Simple, Quick, and Insane
Vujo’s first large area squatting victory got here in 2017 when Italian chef Antonio Carluccio died, and it seems somebody forgot to resume one of many web sites related to him. Vujo nonetheless talks about his good luck in scooping up the area and turning it right into a cooking-themed content material mill. “It’s mine now,” he tells me cheerfully. “He virtually invented carbonara—he’s a giant celeb!” Vujo has since additionally picked up Pope2you.internet, previously an official Vatican web site meant to attach Pope Benedict XVI with youthful believers, and TrumpPlaza.com, named after residential towers in Jersey Metropolis, New Jersey, codeveloped by former President Trump.
Vujo says his most important—and constantly worthwhile—buy is ladies’s media outlet The Frisky, which he acquired not lengthy after he scored the Carluccio website. “It price loads—all the cash that I had—however that was my alternative,” he says. “It was life-changing.” (BuzzFeed Information reported on the acquisition in 2019.) Vujo says the positioning generated over $500,000 within the first 12 months he purchased the area. Along with wholesome earnings from advertisements and shoppers keen to pay for backlinks, the model was a magnet for corporations keen to pay for sponsored posts. As a result of the outlet had lengthy embraced risque matters, Vujo says intercourse toy corporations are desirous to do enterprise with him.
