Well-established tech sites are suddenly super-interested in crypto and gambling. They make brand-new pages that rank top three in months for hard keywords, outpacing sites that have ranked consistently for those keywords for years.
What’s going on?
Good question. That’s where I started. Here’s what I found out:
- There’s a network of tech sites, all running the same kind of content at the same time
- They share traffic via redirects, some of their core pages are literally identical, and they link out to the same casinos and crypto sites consistently
- They rely on parasite SEO tactics that explicitly contradict Google’s guidelines (and Google is beginning to catch them up)
- Could they all be owned by the same people?
I’ve found the connections between some of these sites, traced the tactics they use, and even tracked down the owners.
To learn how a company with its roots in the UK spread a successful parasite SEO operation all over the world, read on…
How do you get into the top three results on Google in less than a year?
Put that question another way.
How does a general tech site wind up ranking in the top five for gambling-related search terms all over the world? 
Tech sites ranking for gambling keywords.
(Including in places where online gambling is seriously illegal…)
Parasite SEO: stealing domain authority
The answer is called parasite SEO. If you’re an SEO, skip this part, you know it. But for everyone else, Google changed the way it ranks content recently. Domain authority, which is basically how much Google respects your domain, counts for a lot more now. Older sites that have been building a reputation for years have higher domain authority.
Parasite SEO is when you use a site with high domain authority to host content that has nothing to do with the site. Like writing pet insurance content on a business site. You’re parasitising on the domain authority to get the content to rank. (There’s a good general guide to parasite SEO here.)
It’s a growing problem because, well, it works better, cheaper and faster than conventional SEO.
Steve says it as well as anyone. Parasite SEO just cancels the rules of good SEO. (https://www.seroundtable.com/google-parasite-seo-steps-36526.html)
But some parasites go a lot further than just spamming a lower quality article on what used to be a good website.
Back in September this year Lars Lofgren published a post showing why the business website Forbes was ranking for searches about pet insurance, CBD gummies and a whole lot else that was unrelated to the brand.
My screenshot of my SERPs; why is Forbes being treated as an authority on cannabis edibles?
I recommend reading Lars’ post in full, but I’ll give a super quick overview. A company that wasn’t owned or controlled by Forbes was blowing up traffic to several sections of Forbes’ website, basically by doing parasite SEO at huge scale. They were making money stuffing the new material with affiliate ads:
These ads are a vital part of the process: this is where the content pays for itself.
Later, Lars showed that the same company, Forbes Marketplace, was pulling the same tricks at two other longstanding news and media sites.
When Lars wrote his post, Forbes ranked everywhere, at the top of every search results page, because Forbes Marketplace has been acting as a highly professionalized and very effective parasite SEO organization inside Forbes. (Lars found that they have been so successful that there’s reason to believe Forbes Marketplace was in talks to buy Forbes!) Since then, Google seems to be catching up to the biggest parasite players and imposing manual penalties sitewide, resulting in big drops in traffic; the Forbes Marketplace playbook may be played out as a result.
Google also just rolled out an update to its definition of site reputation abuse that perfectly describes parasite SEO practices:
Site reputation abuse is the practice of publishing third-party pages on a site in an attempt to abuse search rankings by taking advantage of the host site’s ranking signals.
https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2024/11/site-reputation-abuse
It’s fairly clear by reading their spam policies that Google is directly targeting operations like Finixio’s — let’s see what happens in the coming weeks.
But in the meantime, despite being caught and suffering penalties, the Forbes Marketplace case does show that parasite SEO can be even more successful when it’s fuelled by plenty of cash and the people doing it are centralized and have access to the domain they’re parasitizing off. Forbes Marketplace was well on the way metaphorically, and maybe literally, consuming Forbes as it once existed, in order to earn ad revenue for the clients who paid to have their content featured.
They’re far from the only parasite in the ecosystem created by Google’s algorithm. There’s a whole ecosystem out there built on violating Google’s own guidelines — and getting algorithmically rewarded for it, too.
Finixio/Clickout Media’s parasite SEO success story
Finixio is a London-based company that operates like a more freewheeling Forbes Marketplace.
We’ve found evidence to suggest that Finixio’s MO is to buy old, high-authority tech sites that aren’t as profitable as their owners might like.
Then, they leave the site structure and most of the original content up, and simply add new material that’s not relevant to the site’s original purpose.
A website that built a reputation on giving general tech advice will pivot to promoting online gambling and cryptocurrencies, for instance.
Or a website that used to offer analysis of emerging technology trends will suddenly pivot to… well, to promote online gambling and crypto.
They use parasite SEO to make this impressively successful in a short amount of time.
First, we should acknowledge: these people are good at what they do. Check out these changes in traffic and ranking, in the Swedish market:
Swedish market rankings for a website linked to Clickout Media, showing major, rapid changes in rankings.
These pages are ranking on some highly competitive difficult keywords, and they’ve gone from ranking 0 (meaning the page doesn’t exist or doesn’t rank at all) to top-three positions in just a few months.
Making changes like this in twelve months should be impossible on highly-competitive keywords, and with conventional SEO, it would be.
It’s the same in other countries, too:
The same website’s rankings in Australia, showing similar changes.
Pokies’ is Australian slang for slot machines; ‘online pokies’ is one of Australia’s most difficult-to-rank-for keywords, but this site is number one for ‘best online pokies Australia’ and ‘best pokies,’ with a brand new page. How?
Techopedia: quality collapses
Techopedia is a flagship Finixio/Clickout Media brand, and it shows the way they operate clearly. Let’s walk through the playbook.
Step 1: Buy a once-solid website
First, Clickout Media buys Techopedia. That happens in April-May 2023, according to one source; a staffer at Clickout Media has since confirmed that Clickout owns Techopedia.
Techopedia.com has been a fixture of the tech scene since 2000, so they have tons of domain authority.
Ahrefs’ domain checker tool showing Techopedia’s massive domain rating.
Currently, ‘The Techopedia mission is to help you better understand technology, and make better decisions in the fields of IT, Tech, and Crypto,’ according to their meta description. Which is interesting, because in 2021, when Bitcoin boomed to $68,000, Techopedia’s job description was to be ‘Your go-to source for professional IT insight, from defining complex tech jargon to exploring the latest tech trends.’ Seems like a big change.
(If ‘crypto’ jumped out at you a bit there, well, it should, and we will be coming back to that whole situation in a big way in the second post in this series.)
Inner pages on Techopedia get the kind of traffic that whole websites further down the food chain dream of: the whole site gets around 5 million views a month, and the site’s pages rank all over the world: number one in Japan for Ethereum future price, number five in France for Black Friday, or number one worldwide for Emma Navarro’s net worth. Techopedia is a heavy hitter everywhere.
Let’s take just one example.
The page on Magis TV, a SaaS platform for TV streaming that is hugely popular in South America, gets 89,000 visits all by itself:
SEMRush’s view on the traffic this one page gets.
https://ahrefs.com/website-authority-checker/?input=techopedia.com
Magis TV has been declared illegal, shut down in Argentina, and kicked off the Google Play Store.
But that’s not what interests us here. We’re looking for this
This is taken from the Magis TV page. It’s one of several casino ads on the page.
https://www.techopedia.com/es/descargar-magis-tv-legal
If you like watching sports on TV, why not gamble? (For interesting thoughts on who might own this casino, see Behind the curtain at the end of this post, where we show how this whole network of websites is basically owned by the same handful of people, as well as part two of this series where we show how they also control a network of gambling and crypto sites.)
Step 2: Fire everyone
Next, they fire the staff.
Techopedia had staff who had been with the publication for a decade, and who had established some authority themselves in the space.
We were lucky enough to speak to someone who used to work there, on condition of anonymity, and they told us how the process played out. We’ll call this person Andrea, because it’s not her real name.
In April to May 2023, Andrea recalls, Clickout Media acquired Techopedia. The changes started immediately.
“First, they fired all editors and got new ones, mostly very young people with very little or no experience.”
At this stage, the writing staff was intact and the outlook didn’t look so bad:
“These young people did a great job, and gave us writers lots of freedom, and lots of ideas for new articles. In September-October, they hired new editors, still very young, and things were just great.”
Initial signals were that editorial oversight might be reduced, but these weren’t inexperienced writers who needed a lot of hand-holding.
“Then on February 2024 they hired a new content manager, and we all got fired overnight. All of us. All the freelancer writers got laid off. Even the articles we were in the process of writing were canceled (but paid), and the writer roster was substituted with names with little or no resume.”
Younger, more inexperienced writers may be more biddable than established professionals from Europe and America. Maybe that explains the new content direction, required by Techopedia’s new parasite SEO strategy.
As Andrea recalls:
“The parasite SEO happened overnight, and you can see that by just checking what was published on December 2023 and January 2024 and comparing it to February, March and April 2024—it’s disgusting.”
Andrea notes that many of these writers are so underpaid and so prolific that they’re almost certainly — in her opinion — using AI to write the majority of their work. That would explain why the experience of reading it is much worse; it’s also very against Google’s guidelines.
Step 3: Start churning out content in gambling and crypto
We took Andrea’s advice and checked out what Techopedia’s content looked like since the takeover. It’s extremely clear: Since the takeover, it’s…
Mostly gambling and crypto (Netherlands):
Techopedia’s top ranking content in the Netherlands.
Nearly pure gambling and crypto (Sweden):
Techopedia’s rankings in Sweden.
Lots of gambling and crypto (Germany):
Techopedia’s top ranking content in Germany.
Majority gambling and crypto (Australia):
Australian rankings for recent content on Techopedia.
Mostly gambling and crypto (UK):
The top ranking material on Techopedia in the UK.
Basically just gambling and crypto (USA):
The same story in the United States.
The new writing staff is turning out posts aimed at crypto, gambling and a bit of gaming. That’s what the site’s about now. There are a few general tech articles stirred in, but you’re lucky if they account for one in 20 or 30 of the top-performing posts across multiple markets. This is rank, not traffic, so it can’t be explained by increased interest in these posts rather than more general tech posts.
What about the quality of the new articles compared to the older ones?
Here’s one from 2022, written by an editor who isn’t at the site anymore:
A post about technical aspects of AI, aimed at business people and published in 2022 on Techopedia. https://www.techopedia.com/rds-and-trust-aware-process-mining-keys-to-trustworthy-ai/2/34665
This is the first few paragraphs of RDS and Trust Aware Process Mining: Keys to Trustworthy AI? By Andrew Pery. Things to notice, from a purely content perspective:
- No wild claims or strongly emotive language
- Sources from major, respected institutions such as McKinsey, Pew, and the IDC
- Fact-rich, with arguments supported by data
- Quotes and comment from experts
- Asking a question about the broad impact of a new technology
Compare the style, approach and level of information, including sources for claims, to this piece:
A post about the prospects of the cryptocurrency industry, published to Techopedia in 2024. https://www.techopedia.com/news/over-250-pro-crypto-candidates-elected-what-it-means-for-regulations
Again, things to notice purely in the actual content itself:
- Clear partisanship: the author has a ‘side’ in this. Look at phrases like ‘more constructive regulatory policies,’ or the implication that money from the crypto sector directly influencing an election is something to celebrate
- Illogical argumentation: altcoin investors might benefit from this election, but the article doesn’t say why that might happen, it just asserts it
- Poor sourcing: links out lead to Politico, a Techopedia page of ‘top altcoins,’ another Techopedia page of post-election analysis of the crypto market, and… another Techopedia page on more or less the same subject. This is SEO, not reporting or journalism. These links don’t lead to support for the arguments being made in the same neutral, authoritative way as Pery’s links to Pew and the IDC
- One of the major sources is a screenshot from social media
- Right at the bottom, there’s this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gEYPy7rkzog That’s a 99Bitcoins video, and 99Bitcoins is also closely linked to Clickout Media; their content has changed since March too, becoming much more concerned with promoting memecoins.
This is qualitatively different, in the sense that it’s less neutral and factual than Techopedia’s former approach. And it’s symptomatic of what’s happening at Techopedia. The focus of the site has completely changed, and the content has changed with it.
Step 4: Make up some staff?
There’s a decent chance, too, that many of the writers on the site aren’t real.
Here’s Techopedia’s ‘best online casinos in the Netherlands’ page:
Techopedia’s list of the best casinos (or ‘casino’s’) in the Netherlands. https://www.techopedia.com/nl/casino/nieuwste-casinos-nederland
The author/editor listed here is Joren Verdoes, who writes for Bitcoin Magazine…
Jordan Verdoes’ author profile at Bitcoin magazine.
https://bitcoinmagazine.nl/author/joren-verdoes
…also owned by Finixio:
A Tweet advertising for a Head of Content for ‘our Bitcoin Magazine,’ by Finixio.
https://x.com/FinixioHQ/status/1710611137350214066
Joren’s LinkedIn is basically empty, and there is only one photo of him on the internet; he doesn’t appear to have any other social accounts or bylines on any property not owned by Finixio/Clickout.
Margaret Rouse is the author of a huge number of pages on Techopedia. This is her:
Margaret’s author bio on Techopedia. A reverse image search didn’t turn anything up either.
https://www.techopedia.com/contributors/margaret-rouse
Her LinkedIn page says her work has been cited by a slew of well-regarded publications:
Margaret’s LinkedIn profile.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/margaretrouse/
I’m not saying they never cited her, but…
My SERPs, from a US server.
They never used her name.
This is just my SERPs on Google.
Nor did Time.
And Rouse doesn’t show up anywhere but Finixio/Clickout Media properties either.
Does this conclusively prove that Finixio are inventing staff members when they’re really using a shifting staff of freelancers? No, of course not.
But it does raise the question of where these people, and their long lists of citations, are, if that’s not the case.
And in the job ads we found (see What do Clickout say…?), skills at using freelancers to assemble content rapidly are specifically listed.
A similar story plays out at ReadWrite.
Readwrite: a hard pivot to crypto and gambling
ReadWrite is another Finixio/Clickout Media acquisition, according to a now-deleted blog post by the site’s former owner. And it’s seen similar changes.
Finixio/Clickout assets and affiliates often have opaque chains of ownership, though the company can be quite explicit about what they own under certain circumstances, such as when they’re trying to recruit people.
When Finixio/Clickout Media buy a website, the changes are obvious pretty quickly. Here’s the Techopedia bottom-of-page navigation: 
Techopedia’s navigation.
And here’s ReadWrite’s:
ReadWrite’s navigation, looking very similar.
ReadWrite’s focus on crypto and gambling is even more blatant than Techopedia’s, perhaps because the site is smaller.
ReadWrite’s traffic at SEMRush, showing about 288,000 visits a month — compared to about 5 million for Techopedia.
https://www.semrush.com/analytics/overview/?q=readwrite.com&protocol=https&searchType=domain
Readwrite uses a similar approach to what we’ve seen before:
ReadWrite’s rankings for gambling and crypto content.
A mix of stuff directly about gambling and crypto, with game and general tech interest material stirred in. It’s all getting good traffic:
Organic keywords generating the vast majority of ReadWrite’s traffic, showing that front-page and especially top-position SERPs are driving the majority of traffic to the site.
https://www.semrush.com/analytics/organic/positions/?db=us&q=readwrite.com&searchType=domain
This page is characteristic of the content that’s not about crypto and gambling:
ReadWrite’s computer gaming coverage. The site still publishes material like this, in addition to a growing focus on crypto and gambling.
https://readwrite.com/final-fantasy-14-dawntrail-everything-you-need-to-know/
There are no ads for online casinos on the Final Fantasy: Dawntrail page shown above, but here’s the ‘Most popular tech stories’ section right below the article:
Stories 01 and 03 are crypto-focused. https://readwrite.com/final-fantasy-14-dawntrail-everything-you-need-to-know/
It’s 40% meme coin crypto.
The ‘Latest news’ section immediately below it is 100% crypto
Latest news, totally focused on memecoins, with presales and close-in analysis of the market. https://readwrite.com/final-fantasy-14-dawntrail-everything-you-need-to-know/
Popular topics is…
Popular topics includes crypto too. https://readwrite.com/final-fantasy-14-dawntrail-everything-you-need-to-know/
You get the idea. This feels like more highly-specialized crypto content than you’d expect to find under Final Fantasy coverage on a general tech site.
But ReadWrite target gambling too, and very directly. (Credit where it’s due: they’re pretty good at it!) Here’s them targeting ‘online pokies,’ the Australian term for slot machines:
ReadWrite’s ‘Online pokies’ ranking. This should not be possible with conventional SEO.
That page is up 98 places in SERPs compared to the previous week.
How come? Maybe it’s because Readwrite has massive, hulking domain authority.
Ahref’s Domain Rating tool, giving an idea of the value the domain alone brings to the ability to rank.
https://ahrefs.com/website-authority-checker/?input=readwrite.com
I think I might have found the secret sauce.
It’s certainly not an improvement in content quality. Like Techopedia, ReadWrite’s content changed radically when it was bought by Clickout Media, and everything more than about a year old seemes to have been scrubbed from the site.
We believe that Clickout Media bought ReadWrite, partly because Ric McManus, the site’s founder, wrote about it in April this year — only for the post to be scrubbed from his blog and from the Internet Archive too.
But not before screenshots could be taken and distributed: 
Ric McManus’ blogpost, showing Finixio’s recruiter trying to recruit him to work at ReadWrite.
https://x.com/Pamp_It_/status/1836404386819404143
Ric found out his old company had been sold when he got an email trying to recruit him to Finixio!
See part two of this series for more on the ownership structures Finixio/Clickout Media prefers.
What about when a website’s dead and gone, but the domain still has authority?
Redirects: stealing authority from defunct sites
Parasitizing on the domain authority of older, established tech and business websites isn’t the only way Clickout Media does SEO tactics that go against Google’s guidelines.
Let’s talk about redirects.
Redirects point people away from the URL they clicked on, and towards another URL.
So if I visit, say, archiveswales.org.uk, that’s what I should get. In 2023 it looked like this:
Archives Wales, back in the days when it was an archive site.
https://web.archive.org/web/20230307093403/https://archiveswales.org.uk/
But when I try it, I get redirected to https://www.techopedia.com/se/gambling/casino-utan-svensk-licens. Try it yourself:
There are multiple domains redirecting to this same Techopedia web page:
Redirects to Techopedia’s ‘casino without Swedish license’ page.
When you redirect like this, you transfer the domain authority and link juice from the redirecting site to the target site. The ones above all redirect to Techopedia’s /casino-utan-svensk-licens page. No wonder it started doing so well, so quickly.
These all redirect from Business2Community to a website called Spaceport Sweden:
Redirects to Spaceport Sweden.
They all lead here:
Spaceport Sweden’s main page, translated to English
https://www.spaceportsweden.com/
The page specially recommends four casinos: Lucky Block, Mega Dice, Instant Casino, and 24Slots. Lucky Block is intimately linked with Finixio — half the C suite are Finixio staff, and guess which company they hired to do promotions? I mean, by this point, you kind of already know, but yes, even though the CEO of Lucky Block is Head of Business Development at Finixio, they’re still working together.
Instant Casino being at the top of these lists isn’t strange, in and of itself. But it looks like it might be a part of the pattern. Could it be that Instant Casino is also a Finixio asset?
Though it’s often difficult to show who owns what (see Behind the curtain for more on that), we were able to find out some information. First, until recently goldennewscasino.com redirected to Instant Casino:
Golden Casino News using a 301 redirect to send traffic to Instant Casino.
And Golden Casino News was, previously, definitely owned by Finixio.
Golden Casino News’ ‘Company information and address’ section, with Finixio, identified as the owner, highlighted.
It’s since changed hands
The same page, taken on the day I posted this piece. The new owner is listed as Clickout Media!
https://goldencasinonews.com/about-us/
How likely do we think it is that Finixio is giving traffic away to an unrelated website? Not that likely. And here’s Liam Solomon, Finixio’s digital PR and growth manager (and Clickout Media’s head of sports PR) tweeting Instant Casino content:
https://x.com/liamsol_/status/1747956313269637242
You know, just sports PR. This isn’t conclusive proof by any means. But again, it seems to be part of a pattern.
Here’s another Business2Community, redirecting to the same website, SpaceportSweden.com:
Business2Community, eagerly sending hard-earned traffic to Spaceport Sweden. Why would you do this if they weren’t connected?
Some things, though, we can find the receipts for. We’ve seen Business2Community redirecting to SpaceportSweden.Could it be that Clickout Media owns Business2Community.com?
https://www.business2community.com/terms-of-use
Lucky guess.
Spaceport Sweden is a drop domain. It used to belong to a company that was working to establish a space program out of Kiruna:
Spaceport Sweden in 2020.
https://web.archive.org/web/20201021010407/http://www.spaceportsweden.com/
Now, the site’s navigation has just four pages:
Spaceport Sweden now, where the main areas of the site are totally focused on gambling.
https://www.spaceportsweden.com/
All dedicated to circumventing Swedish gambling laws.
But there are plenty more pages actually on the site, including tons of their original content — pages that don’t show up anywhere in the main navigation, but is present in the sitemap and is indexed in google.
This page is one of many legacy pages that have been pruned from the navigation menu but are still indexed and accessible.
https://www.spaceportsweden.com/id_7180/
Could the new owners just not be bothered to prune the site? Maybe. Or maybe they’re parasitising on the site’s reputation, to fly under the radar about their gambling business. There are some impressive links pointing to those old pages.
It’s working, too. Look at how rapidly SpaceportSweden has climbed the rankings:
Rapid increases in ranking over time can be seen in this image of the changes between May and November 2024.
‘Casino utan svensk licens’ has climbed from not ranking at all in the SERPs, to third position in Sweden, since May this year. These aren’t new, easy keywords; just like with Finixio’s other parasite successes, this shouldn’t be possible in this amount of time, and it isn’t with conventional SEO.
Spaceportsweden’s toplist looks like this:
Check out the wording, layout, and which casinos are recommended… https://www.spaceportsweden.com/
Which is interesting, because here’s Techopedia’s:
…and compare it to this page. https://www.techopedia.com/se/gambling/casino-utan-svensk-licens
You see the difference right away, right?
Me either. They’re word for word identical — compare them, seriously, check it yourself — and the design is nearly identical too, with only minor changes to things like button size and font.
Both point to a website called topcasinosites.eu, and here, in turn, is their sitemap:
Topcasinos.eu’s sitemap, showing a page dedicated to Spaceport Sweden.
https://topcasinosites.eu/page-sitemap.xml
That’s a webpage dedicated to Spaceport Sweden. It’s a 404, but there’s no way these things aren’t connected.
Other websites with near-identical toplists include unitisweden.com:
Once again, the toplist is identical. https://www.unitisweden.com/
Exactly who owns these sites is often impossible to discover; they’re drop domains that don’t identify their owners, list physical addresses, or even have privacy policies.
But then, ownership is only unclear until it’s time to speak plainly, like when you’re trying to recruit someone.
Behind the curtain: How Finixio/Clickout control and operate their business
But wait: how do we know Finixio owns ReadWrite? We don’t, because they don’t. It’s all a lot more complicated than that.
Adam Grunwerg and Samuel Miranda are two of Finxio’s three officers:
Official ownership records for Finixio at the UK’s Companies House website.
https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/11705811/officers
Adam Grunwerg is also one of the Involved Parties at another marketing company, Clickoutmedia:
Involved Parties records for Clickout Media at the Malta Business Registry.
https://register.mbr.mt/app/query/get_company_details?auto_load=true&uuid=676ff735-3e2b-51b4-99d5-159096f5d5d6
Who owns Clickout Media?
The Maltese Business Registry lists two shareholders, both other companies, both registered in the UK:
Ownership records for Clickout Media at the Malta Business Registry.
https://register.mbr.mt/app/query/get_company_details?auto_load=true&uuid=676ff735-3e2b-51b4-99d5-159096f5d5d6
One of these two holding companies, SBM Holding Group Ltd, has two officers, of whom one is Samuel Broadbent Miranda:
SBM Holding’s official ownership records at Companies House.
https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/14155578/officers
The other has just one officer, Adam Robert Grunwerg…
ARG Media Limited’s ownership records at Companies House.
https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/08242192/officers
The companies aren’t related but the people are the same. Finixio doesn’t own Clickout Media; the same people own both companies. Some might call that a distinction without a difference, though I’m guessing none of those people would be lawyers.
What about their relationships with the websites they own? Why do we believe Clickout Media owns ReadWrite (apart from Ric McManus’ now-scrubbed blogpost)?
Maybe Pavel Pudakov knows. He’s employed to be Head of Content at ReadWrite, by…
Pavel Pudakov’s profile on B2B lead research site RocketReach.
https://rocketreach.co/pavel-pudakov-email_25933241
…Clickout Media. (You’ll be shocked to learn he also works at Finixio.)
What do Clickout Media/Finixio say about all this?
When Clickout Media want to, they can be refreshingly open about the ownership structure of their businesses.
Clickout Media’s Talent Acquisition Manager attempted to recruit me, and she plainly said that Finixio and Clickout Media are basically the same thing.
Clickout Media’s recruiter, giving me some really useful information.
In the recruiting note, the recruiter clearly identified Business2Community, techopedia, and crytptonews.com as Finixio/Clickout Media assets.
Three major tech sites are clearly identified by this recruiter as Clickout Media assets.
There is no reasonable doubt that the team behind Finixio and Clickout Media are violating Google’s guidelines, and they’re doing it with an ecosystem of once-reliable tech sites that they control.
And when they hire, they say this stuff quite openly. Here’s a job ad for a role at Clickout Media:
Screenshot of a Clickout Media ad for a head of SEO for crypto presales.
They’re open about having more than 200 assets.
Look at what the work will involve.
Repurposed domains, Youtube and forum spam… This ad for a crypto SEO still has a little bit of plausible deniability. It calls for expertise in repurposing domains, in parasite tactics, and in forum and Youtube spam. Further on in the same post, there’s a call for skills in cloaking and redirect chains, framed as ‘competitor analysis.’
The section of the ad that talks about cloaking and redirect chains.
This ad for a Head of SEO for the VPN and wallet niche calls for similar skills:
Note that the skills called for are very similar.
https://careers.clickoutmedia.com/jobs/5110579-head-of-seo-vpn-wallet
This job ad calls for almost exactly the same skills, with the same ‘competitor analysis’ framing.
But wait; there have been recent developments.
Google steps in, catching some and missing some
Since I started writing this post, Techopedia’s gambling pages have been hit hard, apparently by a change in the algorithm.
From ahrefs.
You can see here that their organic traffic has fallen off a cliff and they’ve lost over 700 keywords.
But in Sweden and Germany, there’s been no effect on their gambling material
In Sweden, traffic has gone up to Techopedia’s gambling section.
Here is one from Germany taken today, traffic seemes stable.
Could this be because Google, or whichever Google staffer applied a manual penalty, didn’t take into account different languages? It’s possible.
ReadWrite doesn’t rank for a lot of its gambling terms anymore either. Last week, ReadWrite’s gambling category disappeared from their website in the wake of a ~40% drop in ranking across the category.
Plummeting organic traffic and lost keywords at ReadWrite.
It appears that the site was hit by a penalty to their gambling assets, and I think it was possibly algorithmic in response to Google’s new, more stringent efforts against site reputation abuse.
The traffic to the gambling section of the site.
This is once-lucrative pages bottoming out at zero. You can see overall traffic to the gambling section of the site at the top.
A bunch of the once top-performing pages have disappeared completely. The change is so recent, internal links still lead to those pages, though they now return 404s.
The ‘pokies’ page that we saw doing so well further up this post.
https://readwrite.com/gambling/casino/australia/pokies/
They’ve been replaced by new pages containing near-identical content from the same authors. Sometimes it’s been done with textual changes toward the top of the page and the important material toward the bottom merely rearranged. Sometimes, even that hasn’t happened. Check out that high-flying ‘online pokies’ Australian page, which has moved from the now-defunct Casinos section of the site to the Gambling section.
Here’s the new one:
The top of the new ‘pokies’ page.
https://readwrite.com/gaming/online-pokies-australia/
Compare that with…
The old page, from October this year (before it was, probably, penalized).
https://web.archive.org/web/20241001123309/https://readwrite.com/gambling/casino/australia/pokies/
The casinos being recommended are the same, and the actual language used is literally identical. Here’s the new page:
The newly-created page showing a review for online casino Reel Rush.
https://readwrite.com/gaming/online-pokies-australia/
The old page, from October, reviewing the same casino.
https://web.archive.org/web/20241001123309/https://readwrite.com/gambling/casino/australia/pokies/
These aren’t similar. They’re the same. All that’s changed is the URL.
(This is the textbook response to being penalized for content that you want to keep.)
Perhaps ReadWrite will rank for ‘online pokies’ again in a couple of months?
Meanwhile, this is a massive network of affiliate marketing sites (over 200, remember, according to the company’s own job ads). They must be earning significant revenue from that.
So…
Where’s the money?
In the recruiting note, Clickout’s recruiter didn’t just clarify that Finixio/Clickout Media are basically the same entity, and tell me about some of their flagship assets. They also told me Finxio/Clickout Media made $40 million in net profit.
The note didn’t say over what period, but I know it can’t be the financial year that ended in September 2023 because Finixio actually made a loss that year:
Finixio’s strategic report for the year 2023, at Companies House in the UK. https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/11705811/filing-history
Last year, Finixio’s auditor, Haines Watts, resigned the role, citing a ‘breakdown in trust and confidence’:
Haines Watts, Finixio’s former auditor, resigns the role, citing a breakdown of trust and confidence.
That’s based on concerns about how marketing funds were spent, the company’s trading activities, and its business ethics.
Some transactions labelled marketing purposes appeared to be purchases of cryptocurrency and appeared to be mischaracterized.
Haines Watts’ representative also noted the company’s concerns about Finixio’s connection to a company called Profitoro OÜ, registered in Estonia:
Haines Watts expresses concerns about Finixio’s relationship with Profitoro.
It would be interesting to know more about Profitoro OÜ, particularly the ownership details, but…
Estonian Info Register’s listing for Profitoro. https://www.inforegister.ee/en/16024451-PROFITORO-OU/
Hmm.
Maybe there’s someone listed that might give us a clue who owned this business, before it was deleted?
Samuel Miranda, listed as the only key person in Profitoro OÜ by the Estonian Info Register.
https://ssb.ee/en/16024451-PROFITORO-OU/employees-salaries
That’s the ‘common ownership’ that Haines Watts referred to.
They’re coming to your area, too. Clickout Media is advertising jobs for everything from high-level SEOs to streamers, everywhere from Finland to China: https://careers.clickoutmedia.com/jobs
Unlike Forbes Marketplace, Finixio/Clickoutmedia seem to start by buying the properties they parasitise, according to our sources.
Google is making increasing efforts to address parasite SEO, though they’re being criticised as a band-aid. Major players like Forbes Marketplace, with links to a small number of very big websites, have been dealt with. Several of the websites we’ve identified here as belonging to Clickout/Finixio have already been affected by these efforts. But the size and complexity of the networks that have been allowed to flourish in this niche is massive and it’s growing.
There’s more to this story, which is already enormous, I know, and I will be coming back to it. For now, though, thanks for reading!