I’m not excited about how meandering that hed is, but it sets the mood for a very long piece.
In September 2024, an entrepreneur named Justin Brown uploaded a YouTube video in which he argued that writers should be “scared right now” about the rise of AI.
“I think that one of the big dangers is that AI is going to take many people’s jobs,” Brown muses to the camera as he hikes through a national park in Australia. “This includes writers, by the way.”
What Justin didn’t mention in the video is that, along with his brothers Lachlan Brown and Brendan Brown, he runs a company called Brown Brothers Media — which, former insiders assure us, had just months earlier fired a stunning proportion of its own writers as it embraced generative AI.
Over the past few years, BBM has pioneered a remarkably cynical business model. First it buys online publications that have established themselves as offering a distinctive type of journalism, like coverage of space travel, parenting advice, or business news. Then it floods their websites with dizzying torrents of AI-generated content — many thousands of articles per month, by our count — in a bid to soak up as many readers as possible via Google and other platforms.
There are signs that this strategy has been extraordinarily successful, with BBM boasting in 2025 that its network of sites had surpassed 50 million page views per month. It’s difficult to verify a site’s traffic without access to its internal data, but the analytics service Similarweb corroborates the claim that BBM is pulling in vast audiences, estimating that over the past year its network of publications has attracted an average of 64.7 million visitors per month. According to a recent ranking, that would make it one of the 30 most trafficked English-language media enterprises on the web, with a total digital readership substantially higher than that of NPR, narrowly besting CBS News and Forbes, and just slightly behind the Washington Post.
There’s a special hell for these sorts.
Must be nice and pacifying to believe that.
I think they die of old age rich and powerful, and that’s the end of it, unless we make it otherwise now.
It’s a joke based on my username. Said by Shepard Book in the TV show Firefly.
Ah, my bad. I would have understood this form on the first try:
“There’s a special hell for these sorts.” – Shepard Book, FireflyFair cop.
“I think that one of the big dangers is that AI is going to take many people’s jobs,” Brown muses to the camera as he hikes through a national park in Australia. “This includes writers, by the way.”
Motherfucker, you did that!
This is depressing, thankfully I have never even heard of any of their listed publications.
They seem like niche publications, probably had dedicated readership. Pretty sad to see smaller publications falling like this. Valnet all over again, maybe worse somehow.
