One Of The Worst Companies In Games Media Reveals New Plan To Only Pay Writers Per Click
Valnet, the parent company of TheGamer, has introduced a controversial new payment structure for its writers. Under the new 'Pay Per Session' contracts, writers will only receive payment if their articles meet a minimum viewership threshold. This change has sparked backlash among staff, who feel it may lead to 'soft-layoffs' and further exploitation in the industry.
- ▪Valnet has a history of negative treatment towards its freelance writers.
- ▪The new contracts require writers to achieve a minimum number of views to receive payment.
- ▪Many staff members are unhappy with the changes and believe it could lead to job losses.
2 outlets in our directory ran this story, first to last over 2 hours. All of the coverage we found sits in one bucket: centre. That one-sidedness is itself worth noticing.
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Story provenance
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Record
| Original publisher | Kotaku |
| Canonical URL | https://kotaku.com/one-of-the-worst-companies-in-games-media-reveals-new-plan-to-only-pay-writers-per-click-2000698959 |
| Publication time | Sat, 23 May 2026 19:43:48 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-23T20:07:27.621Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-23T20:07:27.621Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | BkICAil2fLWr · 2 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
One Of The Worst Companies In Games Media Reveals New Plan To Only Pay Writers Per Click Editors and writers at the Valnet-owned site TheGamer will now reportedly not be paid for their work if their articles do not accrue enough views Game JournalismGames MediaValent By Lewis Parker Published May 23, 2026 | Comments (2) | 𝕏 Copied! © Valnet Valnet, the self-proclaimed “leading digital media investment company” behind the likes of Polygon, GameRant, OpenCritic, Collider, and over a dozen more gaming, technology, and lifestyle websites, isn’t known for paying its freelance writers well. But new “Pay Per Session” contracts issued to writers and editors at TheGamer on May 21 threaten to break new ground when it comes to click-mill-style exploitation.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Kotaku.
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