“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 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 software—giant language fashions—in the identical manner individuals rationally swapped horse-drawn buggies for gas-powered automobiles. “I hate vehicles. They’re making my planet dangerous,” he says. “However I’m not using a horse anymore, proper? I’m driving a automobile.”
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 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.”
Once I emailed an tackle listed on the zombie web site’s About Us web page, Vujo responded, claiming that it was simply certainly one of greater than 2,000 websites he operates, in an AI-content-fueled fiefdom constructed by buying once-popular domains fallen on exhausting occasions. He’s the CEO of the digital advertising agency Shantel, which monetizes its AI-populated websites by programmatic adverts, sponsored content material, and promoting the position of “backlinks” to web site homeowners attempting to spice up their credibility with search engines like google. He usually targets distressed media websites as a result of they’ve built-in audiences and a historical past of rating extremely in search outcomes.
The inspiration of that enterprise is a long-established follow often called area squatting—shopping for up net domains that when belonged to established manufacturers and profiting off their reputations with Google and different search engines like google. Lily Ray, senior director of website positioning on the advertising company Ampsive, calls it “the underbelly of the website positioning 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 However Vujo is a part of a wave of entrepreneurs giving this outdated commerce a brand new twist by utilizing generative AI.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 dwell in Chicago after I speak by way of Zoom with Nebojša Vujinović Vujo. (Though that’s the title he provides 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 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 people and is engaged on a brand new music known 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 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 in the course of the breakup of Yugoslavia. “I had two wars I escaped. I modified 9 elementary faculties as a result of we had been shifting. 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 accessible 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 employees of a few dozen human editors to test its work to keep away from something outright offensive. “Perhaps it might be higher for you that I’m a foul man,” he tells me. “Higher on your story. However I’m simply an peculiar man.”
Simple, 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 virtually invented carbonara—he’s an enormous 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 vital—and constantly worthwhile—buy is girls’s media outlet The Frisky, which he acquired not lengthy after he scored the Carluccio web site. “It price rather a lot—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 adverts and purchasers prepared to pay for backlinks, the model was a magnet for corporations prepared to pay for sponsored posts. As a result of the outlet had lengthy embraced risque subjects, Vujo says intercourse toy corporations are wanting to do enterprise with him.
