Ex-Brazzers Owners Now Pay Game Writers by the Click

Five dollars per thousand clicks, nothing if you fall short, and the company deciding all of this was founded by the guys who used to own Brazzers. That's the state of games media writing at TheGamer right now, after parent company Valnet issued new "Pay Per Session" contracts to its writers and editors on May 21.

As reported by Kotaku, the new contracts replace base pay with a pure performance model: $5 per 1,000 sessions for writers, $3 per 1,000 for editors, tracked only within the first 15 days of publication. If an article doesn't crack that 1,000-session floor, the writer gets paid absolutely nothing for it. According to former TheGamer junior editor Lex Luddy, almost everyone at the site is classified as a freelancer on permalance-style contracts, meaning this isn't a bonus structure layered on top of existing pay. It replaces it. Luddy described half the site's writers as being in "open revolt," with others calling the contracts a form of "soft-layoffs" designed to push people out without of firing them. Management apparently didn't flag the new terms to TheGamer's own editorial leads before sending them out, and they went into effect the very next day.

Valnet was founded in 2012 by Hassan and Sam Youssef, who were previously the owners of Canadian pornographic production company Brazzers and described as the "silent partners" of Pornhub. The company now controls Polygon, GameRant, OpenCritic, Collider, and over a dozen other sites. A former Collider employee described it to TheWrap in 2025 as "a content mill, borderline like almost sweatshop-level." Valnet has also been accused of copyright striking YouTube videos critical of the company and blacklisting writers who publicly complained about low pay. The corporate lineage here isn't just a weird footnote; it tells you everything about how Valnet views content. Writers aren't creators, they're traffic generators, and if the traffic doesn't come, the generator doesn't get fed.

I've freelanced in games media. I know what it's like to pitch, write, edit, and publish a piece that takes hours of work only to watch it land quietly because an algorithm decided it wasn't worth surfacing. Tying pay entirely to clicks in an environment where Google SEO changes can tank traffic overnight, something Luddy confirmed hit TheGamer hard, isn't a performance incentive. It's transferring all of the business risk onto the people with the least power to absorb it. Valnet's framing this as rewarding "strong-performing content," but what it actually rewards is headline manipulation and engagement bait, the exact things that have already eroded trust in outlets like TheGamer. The fact that a company with this specific history is the one pioneering this model makes it feel less like an industry evolution and more like exactly what it is: a content mill squeezing harder.