Games

Who reads written text over their favorite YouTube personality, or the SEO garbage that pops up first on their search, or first party articles/recs on steam, and so on?

Few layers to that.

SEO still heavily favors sites like IGN and Eurogamer. Most people aren't looking at the by-line to see who actually wrote the article.

The other much more insidious aspect? A lot of the legacy influencer outlets ARE still using contractors.

Remap (formerly Waypoint) is awesome and are generally well regarded for having great rates for both written and on-air content. They are also a very "lean" org consiting of three people but pay Janet Garcia to show up for a podcast every week and even a stream or two a month. Janet is ALSO a "cohort" on MinnMax where it is less clear who are contractors and who are core staff.

And, to clarify, I don't have a (significant) problem with that. It is how you get a broader range of voices out there. But it is still similar to having most of your writing team be contractors (... also, Remap contracts out a decent number of articles).'

But then you look at other outlets. Gamespot spent years HEAVILY dependent on "reaction" content. If you ever watched Jonathan Ferguson talk about guns in video games, that was Dave Jewitt's work. And... they fired Dave two-ish weeks ago. Haven't heard if Jonathan plans to still do reaction content for them but you can bet they can find other contractors (like the douche bag who rants about armor).

And... on the other side of the Fandom family you have Giant Bomb. Who have outright fired two core staff members (Voidburger and Jason Oestreicher) as well as a regular collaborator from Fandom proper (Bayley) all so they could repurpose that funding for contractors. And... at this point there are good arguments that Mike Miniotti is in more content than most of the core staff.

So the influencer based outlets are rapidly doing the same. Some of it is just the necessity of working in a dying industry where funding is mostly dependent on whether fans "vibe" with you. But it is only a matter of time until we have the same content farms. Hell, I want to say that is exactly what Fandom DID until they bought cnet gaming.