AI Clickbait Kingpin Gets Punished by MediaVine and Google

/// Back in February a publisher very publicly bragged about mass publishing AI clickbait content in this Wired article. His sites have since been crushed by Google and most recently an account on Reddit that appears to be him complained about getting kicked off of his digital advertising providers platform MediaVine. ///

In response to Wired’s article, Confessions of an AI Clickbait Kingpin, we’re taking an in-depth look into how a publisher of mass-produced AI clickbait content was impacted by both Google and MediaVine’s AI policies.

This expands on our previous analysis and live dashboard monitoring the overall rise of AI content in Google Search Results. As of August 2024, we found that 13.08% of the top 20 search results on Google contain AI content.

Further, in our study reviewing Google’s penalties for AI content, we found that the risk of Google penalizing sites as a result of publishing AI content was high. Approximately 30% of the sites analyzed in our study (which Google had deindexed) contained 95%+ AI-generated content.

Discover how the AI Clickbait Kingpin found out the negative impact of publishing spammy AI SEO content first hand. Then, review a series of AI detection scans from Originality.ai that uncover the presence of AI content in the AI Clickbait Kingpin’s publications.

Key Takeaways

• Mass-producing AI-generated content is high risk.
• Google and MediaVine both penalize AI spam content.
• Following the release of Wired’s story on the AI Clickbait Kingpin, some of his publications saw monthly organic traffic drop to zero. 
• Mediavine has taken action to stop monetizing sites that publish low-quality AI content. 
• It’s suspected that the AI Clickbait Kingpin had his Mediavine account terminated. 

How the Empire of an AI Clickbait Kingpin Crumbled

At first, it seemed like the perfect business plan.

Buy abandoned websites with a dormant audience and churn out SEO-friendly content to rise through the rankings, leading to more clicks, improved ad revenue, and ultimately more profits.

Seems like the perfect plan, right? 

Especially when you factor in how easy Google’s recent updates have made it to game the system, not to mention the advancements in generative AI allowing you to reduce expenditure and increase production even further.

Well, now that very business model has come crashing down, with AI clickbait kingpin Nebojša Vujinović Vujo watching his spammy SEO empire disappear in a matter of days thanks to recent Google updates and MediaVine bans.

The Foundations of Vujo's SEO Empire

While the concept of generative AI in SEO is still in its relevant infancy, Vujo’s SEO strategy formed many years back. 

The process was simple. Look for websites that once had active and engaged audiences, such as The Frisky and The Hairpin, buy them from their owners, and flood them with SEO clickbait content. 

The focus was no longer on quality content but rather on taking advantage of the years of authority the brand had accrued with consumers and search engines alike, and taking advantage of that by producing low-quality content that is designed to generate ad revenue, paid backlinks, and sponsored posts in what can only be described as an SEO cesspool.

The practice is known as domain squatting, and while deemed by many as “unethical” and “bottom of the barrel SEO”, the results cannot be ignored.

In fact, Vujo has gone on record to claim that he has made as much as $500,000 from just one website in a single year.

Not to mention the incredibly low overheads, as Vujo relied heavily on writers from the gig economy, often leaning on talent from platforms like Fiverr.

Those overhead costs became even lower when Vujo decided to cut 90% of his editorial staff, relying solely on AI-generated content.

You’d be forgiven for thinking that Vujo would be a big fan of a tool that could help him cut costs so significantly, but that isn’t actually the case.

Vujo sees the introduction of LLM’s as similar to that of commercially viable cars. 

“I hate cars. They’re making my planet bad. But I’m not riding a horse anymore, right? I’m driving a car.”

Despite this viewpoint on the concept of AI, how much it has been used across his sites cannot be ignored.

In fact, of the first four articles we looked at, all four were flagged as AI-generated.

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The Big Crack Down

But Vujo’s SEO strategy was about to come crashing down.

It’s no secret that Google’s major algorithm updates over the last year or so have significantly shaken up the SEO industry.

At first glance, it would be easy to think that every single brand has been hit hard by the updates and is struggling to recover, but that isn’t quite true.

Yes, it’s true that most brands saw a significant hit to traffic at first, but many of the best sites have already started to see their traffic return.

The sites that are still struggling are those that have lost the user as their main focus and are replacing it with spammy SEO practices such as keyword-stuffed articles and generic, unhelpful content. But they’ll recover once they make some necessary rewrites and replan their strategy.

The brands that have really struggled and will likely never recover? Those that leaned fully into AI, spammy content.

Much like all of Vujo’s acquisitions.

Google’s major updates this summer have focused almost entirely on the eradication of AI-generated content, instead focusing on promoting content that is truly helpful to its users. Content that truly adds value and takes conversations forward has been championed, whereas rehashed conversations that are already available online have been punished.

Given that generative AI is only capable in scraping the web for it’s responses, rather than bringing new information to the fore, it should come as no surprise that this type of content has been hit the hardest by Google.

And one of the most impacted website owners was Vujo, with his website The Frisky acting as a prime example. In fact, just look at the traffic drop:

A site that once averaged 30k visitors per month is now sitting at zero.

MediaVine Cracks Down, too. 

But it wasn’t just Google that decided enough was enough in regards to spammy, AI-generated content. MediaVine has also recently been coming down hard on sites relying on AI-generated content, stating in a blog post earlier this year that they were “developing faster, automated tools to help us identify low-quality, mass-produced AI content across the web.”

This new approach was on full show after a Reddit account widely assumed to be associated with Vujo posted this thread:

In a matter of months, Vuja’s content factory had shifted from thousands in traffic and ad revenue to zero.

What Lessons Can We Learn From This?

So, what can we take from all this?

Well, one thing is sure beyond doubt. An over-reliance on AI for content production might seem tempting in the short term, but it is absolutely critical to keep user intent, quality, and authenticity at the heart of your content production.

Many content creators are under more pressure than ever to pump out as much content as possible in the search for short-term gains, but hopefully, examples such as Vujo’s will prevent you from doing so. At the very least, it can act as a case study that you can use to push back on the decision-maker's demands.

When generative AI burst onto the scene, it is no secret that Google’s immediate response was to slam the door closed, pushing traffic to a tiny amount of websites that it trusts.

Now, Google is slowly starting to reopen that door to more and more sites that it trusts. Site’s that provide users with high-quality content first and foremost. Sites that use AI to help with content strategy, but focus on writing great content that is legitimately helpful from there.

Ask yourself one question.

Will your site be part of that list?

Find out if your website contains AI-generated content with the Originality.ai Site Scan. Scan your entire website for AI content in 1 click.