Browsing LinkedIn last July, Amber Warnock-Estrada saw a call for "gaming writers" who could "create news content for a well-established website". The call did not state what “well-established website” the writing would be for, but the 21-year-old from Arizona applied, having recently fallen in love with games journalism after a stint as Features Writer at Game Rant.
After a couple of emails, Warnock-Estrada landed an interview with the man who had written the LinkedIn post, Lee Astley. She recalls the interview as being fairly normal: The pair spoke via Zoom in a conversation that lasted about half an hour. Astley said she could start, on a one-week trial, right away. The website she'd be working for, she quickly found out, was called GamesHub. Warnock-Estrada had barely heard of it, but keen to establish herself in a shrinking games writing scene, she jumped at the chance.
Almost immediately, things seemed off. She never saw a contract. Every day before she could start work, she needed to ask an IT person in Slack for a new password to log in to Wordpress, the site's content management system. She was expected to perform all editorial duties: Write the story, find the imagery to accompany it, come up with a headline, then hit publish. There were no secondary checks. Once published, she would put a link to the story in an Excel spreadsheet, as directed by Astley.
Astley told Warnock-Estrada that she'd be required to produce about six stories across an eight hour shift and would be paid $135. (The rate, she says, was better than what she had been paid for previous games writing jobs.) Her articles first appeared on GamesHub on July 22, 2025. In the 72 hours after starting, she wrote 15 pieces for the site, covering everything from the NSFW games debacle to patch notes for Marvel Rivals.
But her suspicions about the company behind GamesHub grew quickly. She noticed the site seemed to be "deeply entrenched in gambling and crypto stuff"; GamesHub's homepage directed readers to various online casinos, though this aspect of the website didn't come up in her interviews with Astley. She also felt isolated and was not introduced to any coworkers during her trial period. Most of all, there seemed to be secrecy around GamesHub's owners.
While GamesHub might not be a household name, in the games media desert that is Australia — where you can count the full-time writing jobs on one hand — it was one of the few oases. It was spun up by media network Creative Hubs Group in 2021, quickly establishing itself as a leading voice by covering everything from Aussie indie gems to industry disputes and Indigenous representation, snagging a couple of local awards along the way. On May 30 2025, Creative Hubs Group announced it had sold the site. "Under its new ownership, it will belong to an organisation that is not a digital media publisher", the press release stated. It did not detail the new owners. For a month, the website was dormant.
When the site sputtered back to life in mid-July, it had changed. Sprinkled in amongst the usual gaming news were lists covering the best online casinos and crypto gambling websites. The menu bar had its own tab for gambling. An editorial policies page appeared, emphasising expertise in "online casinos, sports betting, and poker" and lacking any discussion of video games.
The editorial shift was similar to the one that occurred at AdventureGamers.com, a beloved, 27-year-old genre-specific games website sold under similar circumstances in February 2025. Kotaku reported in June 2025 that the company behind that purchase was known as “Clickout Media”.
Aftermath has confirmed via multiple sources that Clickout Media purchased GamesHub in May 2025. But the Australian outlet is just one of many linked to Clickout Media, which has recently found itself at the centre of the gaming world's attention after another site it owns, venerable UK outlet Videogamer.com, was alleged to have generated a review for Resident Evil Requiem with AI.
The company, which bills itself as a “marketing agency specializing in web3, financing, and tech" is behind a raft of legacy games media sites pivoting to crypto and gambling content over the last year. According to a talk by Dom Needler, a senior manager of analytics, reporting and operations at Clickout Media, the company both partners with, and owns and operates, a suite of websites. Sometimes the distinction between the two is not explicitly known, even to staff. Little public information is available about the sites it owns, and typically former owners do not publicly disclose who purchased their sites.
Over the course of an eight-months long investigation, Aftermath spoke with more than two dozen employees, current and former, associated with Clickout Media, many of whom wished to remain anonymous. We have been able to verify Clickout Media is linked to famed outlets such as The Escapist and Esports Insider, according to former employees. Aftermath has also been able to verify it owns esports-focused sites Esports News UK and Esports.net. It also owns two Dutch gaming websites, pu.nl and PlaySense, which were purchased by Clickout Media in early 2026. We have also uncovered evidence of AI-generated profile images and AI agents used for generation of content at Clickout Media-owned websites.
Clickout Media's empire is sprawling, making it hard to define its boundaries. Publicly available information of employees links them to both "Clickout" and “Clickout Media”. During the course of our investigation, the website Clickout.com was rebranded to “RevenuePass”, though the Wayback Machine shows the old brand up until October 2025. The Wayback Machine shows clickoutmedia.com also featured that same logo up until April 2025. We will refer to the entity operating video games websites as “Clickout Media” throughout this piece for clarity and consistency.
Aftermath approached Clickout Media numerous times for comment about whether and when it purchased GamesHub, as well as whether it owns The Escapist, Esports.net, and Esports Insider. Aftermath also asked about gambling and casino content on these sites, and whether the company is aware of practices that contravene Google's Site Reputation Abuse policies.
Aftermath also asked whether Clickout Media advises writers not to speak of its sites’ connections to Clickout Media, and any potential use of AI-generated author images that came up in the course of our reporting. Aftermath contacted Clickout Media through its website and put questions to seven editors and managers via email or LinkedIn, including the Head of News, the former Managing Editor of Gaming at The Escapist, the Gambling Head Analyst, the Head of Analytics & Automation Operations, a Managing Editor of Esports.net, a Senior Social Media Manager, and an SEO content editor and Senior Editor publicly listed as Clickout Media employees on LinkedIn.
We have not received a response.
Fully Gamblomatic
The 'gamblification' of video game and esports websites takes advantage of a practice known as "Parasite SEO", which is a way to "leverage the authority of an established website to rank for competitive keywords" on Google, according to marketing and SEO agency ahrefs. In short, a company purchases or partners with high-ranking, trustworthy domains that Google surfaces in prominent spots of its search rankings. It begins adding lists and articles of the company's choosing; in the case of GamesHub and other sites associated with Clickout Media, lists of gambling and crypto casinos.
The original website — the host — provides all of the benefits of high authority on Google, and the parasite gets a free ride. What that means is, depending on where you are in the world, when searching for "crypto casino", you might find GamesHub on the first page of results, despite it having been a video games focused website for five years.
Parasite SEO is essentially a shortcut, one that might get your content ranking at the top of Google in a few weeks, but it can contravene the rules outlined in Google's "site reputation abuse" policies. Those policies prohibit the use of third-party content that attempts to take advantage of a host site's "ranking signals". For example, Google says that "a medical site hosting a third-party advertising page about ‘best casinos’” would violate the policy.
However, things get a little murkier if the company owns the website, according to Lars Lofgren, an online marketer who has also investigated parasitic SEO practices. "[In] the SEO industry, not everyone has the same exact definition for Parasite SEO", he says. If a company purchases a website and wholesale changes the content it's publishing, it may not be a classic case of parasite SEO. Another SEO expert, based in Malta and who wished to remain anonymous, suggested Clickout Media is "definitively the biggest and the most successful parasite SEO affiliate network in igaming".
Clickout Media has been publicly linked to igaming and tech websites over the past two years, but has recently turned its attention to highly authoritative video game websites. On GamesHub and other gaming sites, Clickout Media maintains some of the legacy content the sites were known for while beginning to populate them with crypto casino and gambling pages and backlinks. For instance, GamesHub still produces video game news, but also includes pages on the "Best Online Casinos Australia 2026" and "Best Online Casinos in Ireland 2026". Similarly, Videogamer includes pages for "Best Skrill Casinos in the UK in 2026" and "Best Betting Sites Not on Gamstop UK 2026". (Gamstop is a UK-based company that helps people get their gambling under control by letting them block their access to gambling sites.)
Lofgren says GamesHub was "ranking better than it ever has in at least the past two years" in August 2025, just two months after it added gambling and casino content. His examination of the site, using ahrefs, shows that traffic flowed to it through keywords related to gambling. "The bulk of the traffic increase is coming from casino related pages that are solely designed to make money via affiliate offers", he wrote to Aftermath.
In August 2025, Lofgren noted that if the new owners became too focused on revenue-generating keywords, they could run afoul of Google, which could lead to severe penalties. "If [Google] catches it, I'd expect them to issue a manual penalty and remove the domain from Google's index", he said.
In response to questions about GamesHub on September 10, a Google spokesperson told Aftermath, “While we aren’t able to comment on a specific site’s ranking on Search, our policies prohibit publishing content at scale for the primary purpose of manipulating search rankings”. An analysis of data on ahrefs by Lofgren showed that by September 23rd, GamesHub's organic traffic had plummeted by 50 percent, but has remained stable since.
Whether considered parasitic SEO or not, Clickout Media's strategy has seen great gains in traffic at GamesHub, according to ahrefs analysis. That's a flaw Lofgren sees with Google's policies.
"Should anybody be able to just buy a gaming website and then start ranking pretty easily for online gambling and casino related keywords?" asks Lofgren, before answering his own question, "Like, no, absolutely not. That should not be easy to do."
Become Human
There's no need to belabour the fact the gaming press has been in freefall. Many popular sites have seen search rankings demolished by Google algorithm updates that decimated organic traffic. Layoffs have hit the likes of Polygon, IGN, Eurogamer, and many, many more sites. Games writing jobs barely exist. In such an environment, it's no surprise to see owners of sites like GamesHub or The Escapist exit. These factors create the perfect conditions for parasites - and for the potential for exploitation of games writers who are inexperienced, desperate or looking for work.
Warnock-Estrada was not the only writer to respond to the initial call at GamesHub. Max Moeller, a freelance writer from Chicago, and John Hansen, creator of independent video games site GamesSandwich, were also among the first writers to onboard after GamesHub came back to life. Moeller and Hansen produced more than a dozen articles each in a few days but, like Warnock-Estrada, became suspicious of how GamesHub was being run.
Suspicions were raised further when Warnock-Estrada was asked to fill out her author profile on the site. As she uploaded an image of herself, she stumbled upon a gallery of portraits, all of which she believed were AI-generated headshots. "My guess is they might be creating fake profiles", she told Aftermath in July 2025. Several of the headshots found by Warnock-Estrada featured on the "Meet the Team" page at GamesHub, which lists the site's contributors.
One writer, Maelis Hartley, has published more than 100 articles on GamesHub since July 22, 2025, all in the gambling and online casino space. The X account linked to her profile was created in July 2025 and first started posting that same day. Her bio suggests she is a "seasoned writer with 10+ years in games, tech, and interactive media". Aftermath could not locate LinkedIn profiles, personal websites or other accounts for Hartley online, an anomaly for a real human writer with ten years of experience.
The only response to Hartley's first X post, "a deep dive into the Best Online Casinos USA 2025", comes from an account under the name Ella Wren. "Nice one, Maelis! Really solid roundup", the account replies. Wren's profile lists them as an editor at GamesHub; the X account was also opened on July 25 and, like Hartley’s, its first post is a GamesHub story about casinos. Wren's image appears in the gallery of portraits discovered by Warnock-Estrada.
Since beginning this investigation in July 2025, Maelis Hartley's profile photos have changed. At first, she was a brunette woman with a particularly long neck. By August, Hartley's headshot featured a woman with different facial features, such as a larger nose and different eyes, as well as short cropped hair.
Left: An image of Maelis Hartley as it appeared in July 2025 on GamesHub.com (via the Wayback Machine). Right: An image of Maelis Hartley that appeared on GamesHub from August 2025 onward.
This profile transformation also occurred with GamesHub writer Isla Hamilton, her mouth and eyes changing shape. There is no clear indication as to whether AI was used in the creation of the articles themselves. These authors do not appear in screenshots provided to Aftermath of the Clickout Media Slack channels for GamesHub.
Isla Hamilton's Twitter profile. Left: July 2025. Middle: October 2025. Right: Current.
At Videogamer, another Clickout Media site, author profiles have similar characteristics: They were created in late October 2025 and link out to generic, mostly empty Twitter profiles. For instance, Benny Carter claims to be "a veteran gaming journalist with 10+ years' experience", with an "MA in Media and Communications" from Oxford University. In November, a member of the Information Compliance Team at the University told Aftermath they were "unable to find any record of the individual on its systems". They separately confirmed that the University does not offer any Master of Arts (MA) courses, and "is not aware of any BA, MSt, MSc, or MPhil course named 'Media and Communications' currently or historically offered by the University".
Behind the scenes at GamesHub, in the company Slack channels, Moeller and Hansen were asking questions of Astley, but he didn't respond. This, combined with their lingering suspicions around AI authors, spurred the writers into action. On July 29, all of the stories on the front page of GamesHub were edited to deliver the same headline: "this site is a scam". Several other articles on the site were edited, including one to say "GamesHub is run by AI accounts and is scamming writers".
On July 16, Aftermath asked Aleksha McLoughlin, listed as Clickout Media's Managing Editor of Gaming, if she would detail plans for the site. We asked again for comment on July 30, after the website was defaced. We also asked Lee Astley, Head of News, and Neil Roarty, the Marketing and US Gaming Editor, for comment on Clickout Media's plans for GamesHub in July and November 2025. We asked again in February 2026. We did not receive a response.
The act of defiance was brief. Within about an hour, the site had been reverted and all the articles had been restored. Moeller, Hansen and Warnock-Estrada stopped publishing with Clickout Media from that day forward. Moeller took credit for altering the site in a Youtube video posted on July 31 featuring all three authors.
Moeller told Aftermath he has held positions at both crypto and gaming sites. He said that writers at GamesHub were likely paid for their work but added the position "raised so many red flags" because it lacked the organisation and leadership he'd been familiar with at other outlets.
"[At those sites] there were style guides, various editors, people with passion who were excited to talk to you and explain how things worked. There was always someone around to answer questions, to look over your writing", he said.
Moeller was not paid after abruptly quitting. According to documents seen by Aftermath, Astley suggested Clickout Media would pay the writers who made the video what they were owed and, in turn, asked for "any public-facing content relating to GamesHub that may be misleading or inaccurate" to be removed. The email specifically references the YouTube video posted on July 31, 2025. The writers never accepted those terms and were not paid for their work.
Speaking to writers affiliated with Clickout Media websites, a constant sentiment is that the conditions, and pay, were better than they'd received working at gaming sites operated by competitors, such as Valnet and Gamurs. And while multiple freelancers expressed discontent at the addition of gambling content, some opposing it on moral grounds, they said they've had positive experiences with editorial teams at Clickout Media's gaming sites because it provided stable work and always paid on time. However, one former employee said that Clickout Media "don't care about gaming journalism". "They are in the business of making money and they are really good at that", they said.
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Altered Beast
Those who have not written for GamesHub for years have also been impacted by the sale. Almost all of the legacy news articles the site had written before being sold to Clickout Media were edited to include links to the site's gambling and casino articles.
Chris Button, an Australian tech journalist and former contributor, wasn't pleased to see his old profile alongside the AI authors. All of his former articles were edited to include closing sections pointing to casino and betting guides. He attempted to have his author profile removed by emailing the new management of GamesHub, but he never received a response. However, he no longer appears on the Meet the Team page. Button is disappointed with what the site has become. "Seeing GamesHub transformed into a site promoting gambling is devastating, not just for those who wrote for the site, but for the industry the publication championed", he said.
Another Australian journalist, Meghann O'Neill, had her bylines removed from GamesHub articles after Clickout Media's acquisition. On March 18, 2024, the Wayback Machine shows O'Neill's story on Planet of Lana with her byline. But the byline was changed to another writer, Peter Morgan, by December 2025. Morgan's profile shows he started writing for GamesHub in August 2025, but his stories include pieces from years earlier. One former GamesHub editor confirmed they never commissioned Morgan for stories in 2023 or 2024. (Peter Morgan did not respond to a request for comment.)
After Aftermath raised questions about the author profiles with former GamesHub owner Creative Hubs Group in August 2025, we were told "all current and former employees have been removed from the site, at our insistence" by the Chief Operating Officer Mimi Curran. However, subsequent to Curran's comments, Clickout Media added additional writers to the Meet the Team page, including journalists once employed as freelancers by GamesHub but no longer working at the site, including Alice Clarke, Alessando Fillari, Courtney Smith and Jam Walker. These writers remain listed as contributors though they have not written for the site since its sale.
One of those freelancers, Fillari, was annoyed with the changes. "Being a freelance writer and finding stability in this line of work is incredibly challenging, and having a reputation for delivering honest and reliable work is everything", he told Aftermath. "It's very frustrating to see the new owners of GamesHub, a once-promising games media site, deface my older work to include gateways to exploitative and toxic content that I do not wish to be associated with".
Clickout Media staff asked contributors not to publicly link personal profiles, like LinkedIn, with GamesHub and other properties. Warnock-Estrada told Aftermath she was "encouraged to not reference any connection between Clickout Media and GamesHub, even when I have not expressed any intent on doing so". In screenshots of Clickout Media's Slack obtained by Aftermath, when one GamesHub contributor posted a screenshot of this author's LinkedIn message requesting comment, Neil Roarty responded with the advice to "Ignore" and "Don't ever reply to anyone asking about any sites". Roarty did not respond to requests for comment.
There are recent signs Clickout Media may be changing its strategy, shifting away from freelance work and increasing its reliance on AI. In February, it began a major round of layoffs, according to multiple staff familiar with the situation and reported on by Insider Gaming and others. Cat Bussell, the Features Editor at Videogamer, told Aftermath she was offered a role as an "AI editor", though Clickout Media did not provide any specifics about the role; Insider Gaming suggests “the company is making a heavy pivot to AI content”. She, like many other journalists at Clickout Media, refused to take the offer. "It's unethical in the extreme," said Bussell, "AI is incapable of criticism or meaningful analysis. Its use by media companies denigrates us all".
At GamesHub, the only stories published since February 13 have been by Tanaka Haruto, an author whose profile photo filename contains the phrase "cropped-Gemini_Generated_Image". Videogamer's news feed also contains a coterie of authors, such as Benny Carter, and others, such as Shooter Orson and Caroline Wilson, with what appear to be AI-generated profile photos. Brian Merrygold, another author at Videogamer, has a profile image url titled "ChatGPT-Image-Oct-20-2025-11_57_34-AM-300×300". The timing of creation, based on the timestamp, lines up with when Clickout Media began running Videogamer.
In addition, Aftermath can confirm Clickout Media sites have access to bespoke AI agents that can "emulate the style" of key personnel at its gaming websites, according to multiple sources. Aftermath was provided access to one agent, created for use at one of its major gaming websites. Though we could ask the agent about why it was created – and its generated responses suggest it was instructed to create articles related to casino news and game release coverage – we could not verify who created it.
Aftermath has also viewed and verified screenshots of Clickout Media's work management platform, Monday, which shows a 'traffic light' system for determining how much AI is included in a specific article, from green "AI Minor", to yellow "AI Standard", to red "AI Significant". Several game guides appearing on The Escapist are flagged as “AI Significant”, while game news around topics such as Sony's decision to close Bluepoint are labelled “Human Dominant”.
Aftermath understands The Escapist continues to host a majority of "Human Dominant" content, according to screenshots seen by Aftermath; however, AI has begun to creep into its workflow. We asked Oliver Ring, listed as Managing Editor of Esports.net, about the use of AI agents at Clickout Media. He did not respond to a request for comment.
On February 26, after discovering a Videogamer review for Resident Evil Requiem was AI-generated, Metacritic removed the website from its database.
The death of GamesHub — and it is a death, despite the gaming news it still publishes — is another loss in the ongoing collapse of global games media. Same goes for sites like Videogamer. But the reasons for that collapse can't be pinned on a single entity. Yes, a relatively-unknown, secretive-yet-massive affiliate marketing company has certainly altered the landscape, taking control of beloved sites and filling them with crypto casino links and gambling stories. But there's also Google, whose search engine monopoly has shaped journalism for more than a decade, negatively impacting traditional revenue streams for global games media.
Then there's the media companies, outside of Clickout Media, that must also bear some responsibility for what becomes of games media. Creative Hubs Group, the company that sold the GamesHub brand and all of its assets, maintains the sale was right for its future. Curran, the CHG COO, told Aftermath, "we remain confident that divestment of the GamesHub brand was the right decision for the continued growth of our business".
GamesHub, then, becomes another casualty in the ongoing contraction of games media. That line about growth? That's the same thing Jim Bankoff, Vox CEO, said when Vox sold off Polygon, minus most of its staff, to Valnet: "This transaction will enable us to focus our energies and investment resources in other priority areas of growth across our portfolio". And it's what Gamurs Group said when it sold off The Escapist and Dot Esports, too: "These sales mark a pivotal moment in the company’s evolution and long-term growth strategy". Growth is a company mindset, one that doesn't seem to align with growth for staff – the games journalists who find themselves in ever more precarious situations with every sale – nor with readers, which are slowly seeing reputable, quality video games outlets disappear, devoured and replaced with crypto casino best lists, gambling coverage, and AI authors.
