"Clickout Media is a group that buys up gaming sites and then forces them to host endless unmarked advertorial content for gambling sites and casinos. Now the owner of The Escapist, Adventure Gamers, and Esports Insider is, according to reporting by Insider Gaming, going to "pivot to AI," and of course that means firing swathes of staff and demolishing the remains of all the sites it's ruined."
"ClickOut is a peculiarly shy company, describing itself as a "PR and marketing agency" despite its acquisition of gaming sites, and focus on crypto and web 3. It's so shy, in fact, that it keeps its company's name off the sites it buys, and goes out of its way to hide its ownership, as we discovered last year when the company bought the beloved Adventure Gamers and reduced it to shilling for online casinos."
""Sad to say that my role at that means a lot of things that I'm still not quite getting my head around." Coombes is just one of many people who are losing their jobs as a result of ClickOut's ridiculous folly. The Escapist is up for redundancy," wrote that site's contributing editor Lloyd Coombes on BlueSky. On LinkedIn he added, " Insider Gaming reports, "It was said that Clickout Media will be maintaining a skeleton crew of 'AI Editors.'""
ClickOut Media acquires independent gaming sites and converts them into platforms that host unmarked advertorial content promoting gambling sites and online casinos. The company is planning to "pivot to AI," leading to mass staff redundancies and replacement of human teams with a skeleton crew of 'AI Editors.' Contributing editors and long-time staff at sites such as The Escapist, Adventure Gamers, VideoGamer, and Esports Insider report sudden job losses and site abandonment. ClickOut publicly describes itself as a PR and marketing agency while obscuring its ownership of acquired sites. Adventure Gamers now shows only a few mid-2025 posts above slot machine "reviews."
Read at Kotaku
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