“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 retailers 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 software—giant language fashions—in the identical manner folks rationally swapped horse-drawn buggies for gas-powered autos. “I hate automobiles. They’re making my planet dangerous,” he says. “However I’m not using a horse anymore, proper? I’m driving a automobile.”
I related with Vujo after digging into the strange 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 location started churning out AI-generated, search-engine-optimized pablum about dream interpretations and painfully generic relationship recommendation like “efficient communication is significant.”
After I emailed an handle listed on the zombie web site’s About Us web page, Vujo responded, claiming that it was simply considered one of greater than 2,000 websites he operates, in an AI-content-fueled fiefdom constructed by buying once-popular domains fallen on exhausting instances. He’s the CEO of the digital advertising and marketing agency Shantel, which monetizes its AI-populated websites by programmatic advertisements, sponsored content material, and promoting the position of “backlinks” to web site house owners attempting to spice up their credibility with search engines like google and yahoo. 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 apply often known as area squatting—shopping for up internet domains that after belonged to established manufacturers and profiting off their reputations with Google and different search engines like google and yahoo. Lily Ray, senior director of search engine optimization on the advertising and marketing company Ampsive, calls it “the underbelly of the search engine optimization business.” However Vujo is a part of a wave of entrepreneurs giving this previous commerce a brand new twist through the use of generative AI.
It’s nightfall the place I stay in Chicago after I discuss by way of Zoom with Nebojša Vujinović Vujo. (Though that’s the identify he provides 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 unsleeping 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 location “grim.”) However he defends his decisions, stating that his life has been more durable than that of the common American blogger. Though ethnically Serbian, Vujo was born in what’s now often known as Bosnia and Herzegovina, and his household fled through the breakup of Yugoslavia. “I had two wars I escaped. I modified 9 elementary faculties as a result of we have been transferring. We have 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 out there to him.
Vujo additionally insists that he does have editorial requirements; though nearly all of the weblog posts he publishes are created with ChatGPT, he employs a workers of a few dozen human editors to examine its work to keep away from something outright offensive. “Possibly it could be higher for you that I’m a foul man,” he tells me. “Higher to your story. However I’m simply an bizarre man.”
Straightforward, Quick, and Insane
Vujo’s first huge 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 nearly invented carbonara—he’s a giant movie star!” Vujo has since additionally picked up Pope2you.web, 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 vital—and persistently worthwhile—buy is ladies’s media outlet The Frisky, which he acquired not lengthy after he scored the Carluccio web site. “It value lots—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 location generated over $500,000 within the first yr he purchased the area. Along with wholesome revenue from advertisements and purchasers prepared to pay for backlinks, the model was a magnet for firms prepared to pay for sponsored posts. As a result of the outlet had lengthy embraced risque subjects, Vujo says intercourse toy firms are wanting to do enterprise with him.
