“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 stuffed with algorithmically generated articles. Though he accepts that his mannequin rankles writers and readers alike, he says he’s merely embracing an unstoppable new device—giant language fashions—in the identical method folks rationally swapped horse-drawn buggies for gas-powered automobiles. “I hate automobiles. They’re making my planet unhealthy,” he says. “However I’m not driving a horse anymore, proper? I’m driving a automotive.”
I linked with Vujo after digging into the unusual afterlife of indie girls’s weblog The Hairpin, which shut down in 2018. Final month, its web site reawakened. Rather than the voicey, humorous weblog posts it was recognized 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.”
Once I emailed an deal with listed on the zombie website’s About Us web page, Vujo responded, claiming that it was simply one in every of greater than 2,000 websites he operates, in an AI-content-fueled fiefdom constructed by buying once-popular domains fallen on arduous instances. He’s the CEO of the digital advertising and marketing 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 apply often called area squatting—shopping for up internet domains that when 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 and marketing company Ampsive, calls it “the underbelly of the web optimization business.” However Vujo is a part of a wave of entrepreneurs giving this outdated commerce a brand new twist by utilizing generative AI.
It’s nightfall the place I stay in Chicago after 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 data for a few of his domains.) It’s midnight in Belgrade, Serbia, the place he lives along 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 music referred to as “Fats Woman.” 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 selections, declaring that his life has been more durable 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 through the breakup of Yugoslavia. “I had two wars I escaped. I modified 9 elementary colleges 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 test 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 on your story. However I’m simply an abnormal 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 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 girls’s media outlet The Frisky, which he acquired not lengthy after he scored the Carluccio website. “It value so much—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 12 months he purchased the area. Along with wholesome revenue from advertisements and purchasers 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.
