The Clickbait Empire
(or, how Valnet turned fandom into a content mill)
Who is Hassan Youssef?
Hassan Youssef sought vast wealth by building a digital empire. His digital media career began in 2003 while he was a student training as a civil engineer. Along with a few teammates on his foosball team, he decided to get into the world of online – let’s keep it safe for work – adult entertainment, a venture that would prove to be hugely profitable. The team operated under the company name Mansef, with the company growing from 80 employees in 2007 to 250 by 2009.
Between the founders of Mansef, each individual emerged as either a business visionary, an expert in sales and analytics, or a wiz at Search Engine Optimisation, which helped their websites dominate search for adult keywords. See, it all circles back around to SEO (although maybe not adult keywords for AlphaQuad).
However, their dream became a nightmare in 2009 after a federal investigation uncovered over $9 million in wire transfers from Israel and other countries on financial fraud watch lists. In October 2009, the US Secret Service’s Organised Fraud Task Force seized $6.4 million from two Mansef bank accounts. £4.15 million would be returned by the government to the company, with $2.2 million being forfeited in a settlement filed with the court.
In March 2010, the founders collectively decided to get out of the adult entertainment industry and sold their collective assets for $140 million.
Thankfully for them, their expertise in SEO from their time at Mansef helped them establish what would come next.
Valnet and the Screen Portfolio
Valnet was co-founded by Hassan Youssef in 2012, with a mission of commitment to delivering critical content that enriches and entertains millions worldwide through a captivating and diverse portfolio of digital publications. Valnet’s acquisitions serve passionate fans of film, television, video games, and comic books while necessitating major traffic to make money from advertising.
Valnet categorises its acquisitions into distinct divisions, with their Screen portfolio including ScreenRant, Collider, MovieWeb and CBR. Through their Screen group, Valnet’s portfolio has amassed 223 million monthly visits and 266 million monthly page views. These statistics reflect data from Q4 2024.
Now, a little bit of background on each of these outlets.
ScreenRant
Launched in 2003, ScreenRant has grown into one of the largest and most respected sources of entertainment news. By 2024, it had reached over 600 million readers. The site goes beyond simple reporting, offering in-depth analysis and editorial insights that appeal to both casual viewers and die-hard fans alike. Covering TV, film, comics, and gaming, it spans articles, reviews, podcasts, and also a major YouTube presence – including the hugely popular Pitch Meeting series – with nearly 10 million subscribers across its channels.
Collider
Collider is a go-to source for film and television enthusiasts, offering everything from breaking news and reviews to exclusive interviews and streaming guides. Known for its editorial voice and insider access, Collider provides audiences with rich, behind-the-scenes perspectives on their favourite shows and films.
MovieWeb
Founded in 1995, MoveWeb is one of the earliest websites for movie news and insights. It offers up-to-date information on everything from casting announcements to trailers, interviews, and retrospective features. With a particular focus on American classics, blockbusters, and award-winning cinema, it serves fans looking to stay connected with the past, present, and future of film.
CBR
CBR (or Comic Book Resources) began as a dedicated hub for the comic book industry and has since grown into a leading voice in geek culture. Now covering comics, anime, TV, films, and gaming, it’s a one-stop destination for fans seeking franchise updates, product news, and deep-dive features.
Okay, so, if it sounds like these four outlets all do the same thing, it’s because they kind of do, but specifically on their websites. It is on their YouTube channels that the content starts to differ drastically. Collider focuses more on informative podcasts, reviews, and panel shows, while ScreenRant focuses more on lists and comedy skits. CBR focuses mostly on comic book and superhero adaptation content with lists and character profiles, while MovieWeb focuses on celebrity and filmmaker interviews.
With YouTube considered the world’s largest streaming platform, each outlet has a huge YouTube presence, focusing on releasing as much timely content as they can. The same can be said for their websites as well. And this is where we start to have a problem…
Exploitation is bad, actually
With each article and video that the outlets release, there is a huge focus on maximising consumer engagement with intentionally inflammatory or vague clickbait headlines and content, like:
- “8 Ways Disney’s Live-Action Snow White Is Worse Than The 1937 Original”
- “This 39-Year-Old Vietnam War Movie Is 1 of the Most Disturbing War Films Ever Made”
- “I Can’t Believe the New ‘Masters of the Universe’ Reboot Might Repeat the Same Mistake That Doomed the 1987 Flop”
- “This 5-Year-Old Horror Movie Is a Truly Terrifying Tearjerker”
There is nothing special about any of these headlines; they read AI-generated, but this is wholly intentional. Incite interest and draw traffic. The four exampled headlines are taken from each outlet (1 from each), and you would never know that they were from different sources.
Let me give you another example here. This time, it’s all about numbers.
66. 126. 158. 346.
What do you think these numbers have in common?
It’s the number of articles that each of the outlets published on Sunday, 23rd March 2025.
- MovieWeb published 66
- Collider published 126
- CBR published 158
- ScreenRant published an eye-watering 346
But why does any of this matter? Well, the current state of these outlets reflects the Valnet playbook to maximise clicks and revenue. It has been reported by TheWrap that once acquired, full-time employees were let go to be rehired as freelance contractors, but wait, there’s more. The rates for freelance contractors were reportedly dropped from around $150 per article to $40 per article.
It is the freelancers and contributors themselves who are referring to the current conditions under Valnet as exploitative. One former contributor for Collider claimed that the outlet is now “a content mill, borderline like almost sweatshop-level” where hundreds of writers are “constantly being pushed to write more, to do it quicker” while editors face “a pretty high level of quotas” despite being critically understaffed. Another former contributor has alleged a pattern of firing employees who questioned company practices.
It doesn’t stop there. In a legal complaint filed against Valnet, former MovieWeb writer Daniel Quintiliano claimed he was producing up to four articles per day, often six or seven days a week – spending two to three hours on each piece. Despite this workload, he alleges he was paid just $15 per article with no further compensation.
When more becomes less
Now, the exploitation of freelance writers aside (which is an unjustifiably bad thing), let’s look at how this kind of content churn actively undermines its own goals.
The theory is simple: more content = more clicks. But in practice, flooding the internet with hundreds of articles a day creates diminishing returns.
Firstly, there’s SEO cannibalisation. When a single site publishes dozens of articles on similar topics, these articles start competing against each other in Google search rankings. Instead of one strong, authoritative result, you end up with fragmented traffic spread thinly across multiple weaker pages – lowering the visibility of all of them.
Then, there’s the issue of user fatigue. Readers can’t – and won’t – keep up with that volume. It becomes harder for ano one piece to stand out, especially when titles and formats are nearly indistinguishable. When everything is breaking news, nothing is. When every headline is a list, a hot take, or a breathless reaction, users learn to tune it out.
There’s also algorithmic suppression to consider. Platforms like Google and YouTube are increasingly focused on engagement signals: click-through rate, time on page, bounce rate, and shares. If a flood of content performs poorly on these metrics – as low-effort, high-volume output often does – the algorithm starts to deprioritise future content from that source. In other words, too much low-performing content can hurt a publisher’s ranking overall.
And then there’s the question of brand trust. When readers repeatedly encounter recycled, shallow, or formulaic articles, it chips away at credibility. We all love a listicle from time to time, but over 100 articles a day with titles like “10 Perfect Plot Twists That Changed the Entire Movie” get old and stale very quickly, especially when those specific articles are regurgitated time after time to meet quotas. Even casual readers start to recognise patterns and begin to skip over links from sources they no longer trust to offer anything new or worthwhile.
In effect, this content overload becomes a snake eating its own tail. Quantity is mistaken for strategy. But when you prioritise volume over value, the long-term result is that everything drowns – sadly, even the good stuff.
So, where does it all go from here?
Valnet’s empire is built on a model that may have worked ten years ago – when clicks were king and content volume meant power. But today, audiences are more discerning, search algorithms are more sophisticated, and creators are speaking out about poor working conditions.
These revelations about Collider, ScreenRant, CBR, and MovieWeb under Valnet display a business model showing cracks, as well as an entire media philosophy reaching its breaking point. And if Valnet’s house of content cards starts to fall, it won’t be because people stopped caring about entertainment. It’ll be because they stopped believing that every movie needs six opinion pieces, four Easter egg lists, and a YouTube explainer within 24 hours of release.
223 million monthly visitors can’t all be wrong, but they can be mercilessly let down again and again…and again.
Maybe the next digital media empire won’t be built on scale for scale’s sake. Maybe it’ll be built on something slower. Smarter. Actually sustainable. One can dream.
