But I’m sure they’ll still charge advertisers per impression sted conversion. Enshittification at its finest.
Valnet, the self-proclaimed “leading digital media investment company” behind the likes of Polygon, GameRant, OpenCritic, Collider, and over a dozen more gaming, technology, and lifestyle websites, isn’t known for paying its freelance writers well. But new “Pay Per Session” contracts issued to writers and editors at TheGamer on May 21 threaten to break new ground when it comes to click-mill-style exploitation.
According to details outlined in TheGamer’s Slack, these new terms, mandated by Valnet management, would “reward top-performing articles.” However, Kotaku last learned, based on the details outlined in the newly issued contracts, that the proposed “performance structure” would also result in writers not being paid at all if their articles do not exceed a minimum threshold of views.
Valnet was founded by Hassan Youssef and Sam Youssef, who were previously the owners of Canadian pornographic production company Brazzers and the “silent partners” of Pornhub, in 2012. The company has since earned a negative reputation over the years for the way it treats staff and freelance writers, with one former Collider employee describing it as “a content mill, borderline like almost sweatshop-level” during an interview with TheWrap in 2025 (I briefly freelanced for TheGamer from 2022 to 2023).
Apologies to the staff, but gaming websites are old world tabloids. They’ve been almost entirely supplanted by other media.
Do you consider that a valid reason to hire people and not pay them? To me it just sounds like an excuse for a company to abuse a lack of employee rights to get free labour.
It sounds like they want to move to a payment structure more in line with youtube and other platforms that have completely devoured their market share.
So you believe it’s okay to not pay the people you hire because Google doesn’t pay people who upload videos to Youtube?
Market share isn’t relevant here, if a company hires you to do something they pay you for your work. If they don’t recoup their costs from the work they hired you to do that’s a bad business decision on their part and not a valid reason to not pay you. This is why developed countries have employee rights laws.
“So you believe it’s okay to not pay the people you hire because Google doesn’t pay people who upload videos to Youtube?”
On an article about employees not getting paid someone commented with the excuse that they’re moving “more in line with youtube” where creators don’t get paid. Since you apparently disagree with the obvious meaning, how did you interpret that?
I’m saying it sounds like they want to use the payment structure their more successful competitors are using. My beliefs are irrelevant.
I dunno, mothership is pretty fuckin excellent