(These sites were vulnerable to acquisition in large part thanks to Google, whose dominance of ad-tech lets it cream 51 cents off every ad dollar and whose mobile monopoly lets it steal 30 cents off every in-app subscriber dollar):
Now, the spam on these sites didn't write itself. To the chagrin of the tech/finance bros who bought up Sports Illustrated and other news sites, they still needed to pay actual human writers to produce plausible wordsalads.