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

In September 2024, Justin Brown released a YouTube video warning that AI could replace writers, revealing that his company, Brown Brothers Media (BBM), had recently downsized its staff and embraced AI-generated content. This trio of brothers had a history of buying legitimate news sites and transforming them into AI-driven content farms, attracting an estimated 50 million page views per month.

BBM's strategy involved purchasing online publications with unique types of journalism, then flooding their websites with massive amounts of AI-generated content, leading to a surge in traffic.

The media network's success has been verified by Similarweb, which estimated that BBM's publications attracted around 64.7 million visitors per month over the past year, making it one of the top 30 most trafficked English-language media enterprises on the web. Despite employing only a dozen employees, including the three founders, BBM has managed to operate this vast empire through AI-powered content creation.

The company has been accused of numerous dishonest practices, including creating fake personas for nonexistent writers and publishing content under their names without revealing that they were fictional. This has led to the publication of articles under the names of imaginary experts with impressive-sounding credentials, which do not exist in reality.

For example, Space Daily, one of BBM's most successful publications, featured articles written by fake scientists like Dr. Katherine Chen, a former NASA engineer with an implausible background. Furthermore, BBM has engaged in plagiarism and fraud, publishing articles attributed to fake journalists like Rachel Vaughn, an alleged psychologist with a non-existent biography and headshot.