Posting AI Content Shuts Down Clickbait King

[T J Tutor]

I received the following email from Originality AI today. This is another verification of everything I have said abut using AI for your content creation. PAY ATTENTION!

This is copyrighted content owned and distributed by Originality AI and is placed here only as a teaching reference.
________________________________________________________________________________________

Maddie here from Originality.ai

Today I have a few items to chat with you about, including a juicy story that we’ve been following for a while, which aims to help the content creation community understand how Google and advertisers are treating AI generated content on your website.

AI Clickbait Kingpin gets punished by Google and Mediavine:

Back in February a publisher very publicly bragged about mass publishing AI clickabait content in this Wired.com article. His sites have since been completely crushed by the Google updates and most recently an account on Reddit - that appears to be him- complained about getting kicked off of his digital advertising provider platform Mediavine.

To backtrack...

The AI Clickbait Kingpin who’s real name is Nebojša Vujinović Vujo, grew his online business empire with a well known and simple process called domain squatting. He purchased websites that once had active and engaged audiences, such as The Frisky and The Hairpin them and then flooded them with AI- Generated SEO clickbait content.

While the practice is deemed by many as “unethical” and “bottom of the barrel SEO”, the results cannot be ignored. Vujo said that The Frisky generated over $500,000 in the first year he bought the domain, in addition to healthy income from ads by platforms like Mediavine.

However, in the March 2024 Google Algorithm updates, things took a turn for the worst for Vujo’s strategy…

His site that once averaged 30k visitors per month on Google very quickly went to zero:

Further, a Reddit account widely assumed to be associated with the website owner above posted this thread:

Unfortunately, Vujo isn’t the only victim of Google and Mediavine’s updates. Following the Google updates we conducted two studies to help gain clarity on how Google and Mediavine are treating AI generated content.

Study 1 - List of Websites That Had a Manual Action in March 2024

• 1,446 websites had a manual action applied to them out of 79k websites checked in March 2024.

Study 2 - Was AI Content Spam to Blame for the Manual Action?

• 100% of the websites had some posts that were AI-generated
• 50% of the sites had 90%-100% of their posts as AI-generate
  

Stories like Vujo’s and data from our studies above suggest that publishing AI-generated content is high risk and can lead to serious penalties by Google or Monetization platforms like Mediavine.

 

[azgold]

Guess he made hay while the sun was shining. Wonder if he feels it was worth it. For half a million dollars plus in just the first year, my guess would be yes. So, I further wonder if he'll re-strategize and try again.

Anybody who'd try that now, is nuts. Unless wasting time, money and effort is something they like to do.

 

[Graybeard]

For half a million dollars plus in just the first year, my guess would be yes. So, I further wonder if he'll re-strategize and try again.

Wash, rinse, repeat ...

These AI detectors give false readings all of the time for student reports, college essays or so they say.
Modern day Luddites.

 

[T J Tutor]

Well, the battle between AI content abuse and the SE's (et al) is more to the point. I keep repeating the risks when using AI as a content source and this in the end is what brought him down and it is marketers like him that make the SE's ramp up their actions against sites using AI as a primary content source.

 

[Graybeard]

Search Engines have been a treacherous source of traffic from day one. Nothing has really changes in that respect.
Same story new day

 

[T J Tutor]

Search Engines have been a treacherous source of traffic from day one. Nothing has really changes in that respect.
Same story new day

Yeah, no argument from me on that! However, we have to advise those here about what works and what hurts. Right now, over use and abuse of AI for content will typically result in poor and/or hurtful responses from the SE's.

 

[azgold]

Well, for one thing, I think this guy and others like him are not looking to build a real business. They're looking to get rich as fast as possible.

I imagine it could become like a gambling addiction too, to see if you can 'rig' the system and win. It was probably fun until it wasn't. Just speculation and musing on my part, of course.