Dogged By ‘AI’ ClickBait Scandals, CNET (Once Valued At $1.8 Billion) Sold For $100 Million

It hasn’t been a fun few years for once-respected tech news outfit CNET. After being purchased by private equity backed marketing firm Red Ventures in 2020, the company has been in a downward spiral due to brunchlord mismanagement, facing scandal after scandal surrounding everything from softening its coverage to please advertisers, to using fake “AI” generated journalists to craft lazy clickbait.

In what might hopefully be some sort of turnaround for the once respected brand, The New York Times reports that CNET was just sold for $100 million to Ziff Davis (whose reputation similarly isn’t quite what it used to be). It’s a steep fall for CNET, which back in 2008 was valued at $1.8 billion, thanks, ironically, to CNET’s earlier, 2000 acquisition of… ZDNET (which was created by Ziff Davis) for $1.6 billion.

CNET has always had a bit of a history with scandal, thanks to managers and owners that routinely blurred the firewall between editorial and marketing. Perhaps best exemplified by a 2013 scandal in which then parent company CBS forced CNET to retract a CES award for Dish’s ad-skipping DVR technology because CBS didn’t like Dish’s innovations on that particular front.

But things go so much dumber under private equity ownership.

Like so many fail-upward brunchlord types (who have absolutely no idea what they’re doing in the realm of tech journalism), Red Ventures quickly got to work trashing the CNET brand further. Ownership was quick to adopt fabulism-prone “AI” to generate fake journalists and lazy error-prone clickbait — without telling any of the outlet’s human employees any of this was happening.

In fact the AI generated so many mistakes and errors, it actually cost CNET more money in human editing manpower to correct the mistakes than they were saving on using AI in the first place. The sloppy automation CNET rushed to embrace also resulted in widespread plagiarism at the site. Things got so bad that Wikipedia recently had to downgrade CNET’s reliability score.

Red Ventures ownership of CNET was highly reflective of an era in tech journalism where ethics have become passé. An excellent Verge feature last year found that the private equity firm not only had little respect for its workers or audience, they routinely softened coverage and reviews to try and please advertisers and tech companies:

“Multiple former employees told The Verge of instances where CNET staff felt pressured to change stories and reviews due to Red Ventures’ business dealings with advertisers. The forceful pivot toward Red Ventures’ affiliate marketing-driven business model — which generates revenue when readers click links to sign up for credit cards or buy products — began clearly influencing editorial strategy, with former employees saying that revenue objectives have begun creeping into editorial conversations.“

This is all a pointed illustration of the vision these kinds of gentlemen have for journalism. Namely that they don’t care about journalism at all; they care about building an ethics-optional, badly automated engagement-chasing, clickbait advertising machine that effectively shits money.

A machine that has little to no meaningful respect for audience, employees, truth, or much of anybody else. Driven by owners and managers that don’t see AI as a way to ease the administrative burden of journalism or improve the lives of journalists, but as a way to lazily cut corners and undermine labor.

CNET/Red Ventures certainly aren’t alone. Vice, Sports Illustrated, Newsweek and countless other brands have been repurposed and reanimated as the worst sort of lazy clickbait mills. There’s now no shortage of companies filling the internet with automated garbage, in the process shifting a dwindling amount of ad revenues away from real, meaningful journalism.

You’d like to think that Ziff Davis might take CNET in a better direction. But reading the New York Times’ conversation with Ziff Davis’ Vivek Shah, you don’t really get any sense that Shah is thinking about things all that differently, because there’s no real financial incentive to think about things differently:

“Mr. Shah said he decided to acquire CNET partly because it is well-known industry brand, and its sizable audience will give Ziff Davis greater clout with advertisers looking to reach tech consumers.”

In short, while CNET might occasionally stumble into tech journalism by accident, its primary mission will be to please advertisers, which usually, sooner or later, undermines the act of journalism.

It’s a bad habit that’s increasingly driving readers to worker-owned independent news outlets and newsletters (which, contrary to industry narratives, can be profitable once you eliminate outsized executive compensation from the equation) if they’re looking for anything with even a fleeting foundational relationship with the actual truth.