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How Three Brothers Built an AI Slop Empire by Buying Legitimate News Sites and Turning Them Into Zombie Content Farms That They Say Get 50 Million Page Views per Month
Over the past few years, Brown Brothers Media 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.
A media organization like NPR or WaPo, though, employs hundreds or even thousands of journalists to gather and report news. BBM, as far as we can tell, has cut itself down to a skeleton crew of about a dozen employees, including its three founding brothers. To operate such a sprawling empire with such a tiny staff, former insiders told us, BBM uses AI to crank out content at a scale so immense that it’s difficult to comprehend.
Along the way, BBM has indulged in breathtaking acts of dishonesty — often in ways that seem specifically devised to manipulate platforms owned by Google, where Ahrefs data suggests that it sources the preponderance of its traffic. One of BBM’s many unscrupulous practices, insiders confirmed to us, is that it has often invented entire fake personas for nonexistent writers — we found more than 50 spread across its dozens of sites — and published content under their names without revealing to readers that they weren’t real people.
50+ million page per month created by a team of twelve across multiple news sites where you've laid off the meat people and replaced them with fake people that have complete bios and backstories is, at least, kinda new.
Generative AI slop content has become pervasive. Most of the stuff on you tube is fake generated AI content. The assembled videos on a wide range of subjects are littered with non-sequitur images having nothing to do with the subject. They are also hijacking/stealing/regenerating existing honest content.
theusualuser | 13 hours ago
AI is single-handedly creating the Dead Internet that some people have posited existed, and it's done it in about 3 years.
[OP] FuturismDotCom | 17 hours ago
Over the past few years, Brown Brothers Media 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.
A media organization like NPR or WaPo, though, employs hundreds or even thousands of journalists to gather and report news. BBM, as far as we can tell, has cut itself down to a skeleton crew of about a dozen employees, including its three founding brothers. To operate such a sprawling empire with such a tiny staff, former insiders told us, BBM uses AI to crank out content at a scale so immense that it’s difficult to comprehend.
Along the way, BBM has indulged in breathtaking acts of dishonesty — often in ways that seem specifically devised to manipulate platforms owned by Google, where Ahrefs data suggests that it sources the preponderance of its traffic. One of BBM’s many unscrupulous practices, insiders confirmed to us, is that it has often invented entire fake personas for nonexistent writers — we found more than 50 spread across its dozens of sites — and published content under their names without revealing to readers that they weren’t real people.
for2fly | 12 hours ago
And how many of those views are bot hits? AI has created autonomous bot swarms that are increasing traffic, but not real engagement.
I kind of hope the swarms eat the zombies.
nickinkorea | 14 hours ago
using AI to generate articles based on keywords has been a winning strategy since 2024. Not much news here.
tilario | 8 hours ago
50+ million page per month created by a team of twelve across multiple news sites where you've laid off the meat people and replaced them with fake people that have complete bios and backstories is, at least, kinda new.
mr_herz | 17 minutes ago
Fakes writers have been a thing for a while but the speed and scope of this is new.
gustoreddit51 | 2 hours ago
Generative AI slop content has become pervasive. Most of the stuff on you tube is fake generated AI content. The assembled videos on a wide range of subjects are littered with non-sequitur images having nothing to do with the subject. They are also hijacking/stealing/regenerating existing honest content.
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