The Arena Group — the media company which, in 2023, allowed a contractor called AdVon Commerce to publish AI-generated fake writers in the pages of Sports Illustrated and multiple other brands — has rebranded as an AI company.
The Arena Group, which owns brands including Parade, Men’s Health, and The Street, declared on Monday that it was changing its name to “Paradium.AI.” It also announced its acquisition of InfoSentience, a company that the Arena Group says will help it “scale data-driven content generation,” as well as the launch of a product called Cutter Studio, which is defined in a press release as a “proprietary, AI-driven video and article production and distribution platform.”
In other words: the Arena Group — sorry, Paradium — wants to generate and distribute a whole lot of AI content.
The rebrand was first reported this week by Business Insider, which obtained a leaked memo in which the publisher stated that the name change reflected its new identity as a “publicly traded AI company.”
“This is more than a name change; it is a commitment to our future as a tech-centric leader in media, data, and commerce,” Arena Group CEO Paul Edmondson said in the memo. “By integrating the acquisition of Info Sentience and the launch of Cutter Studio, we are building a unified, AI-powered ecosystem that empowers us to perform at the speed and scale of artificial intelligence.”
The surprise rebrand comes as the company continues to struggle with declining readership and a flagging stock price, giving the transformation strong echoes of BuzzFeed — another melting digital media company that’s made a sharp (and uniquely depressing) pivot to AI amid serious financial struggles.
In late 2023, Futurism reported that the Arena Group had been publishing low-quality product review content bylined by a roster of fabricated writers with AI-generated headshots in publications including Sports Illustrated and The Street. (Our continued reporting revealed that the third-party contractor who created that content, AdVon Commerce, had published fabricated authors at dozens of other publications throughout the media industry.)
After our reporting, the company fired multiple executives, including the company’s then-CEO. A few months later, when the company’s new and eccentric CEO declined to foot the bill for its Sports Illustrated licensing agreement, the Arena Group lost control of the magazine — at the time, its highest-profile brand — entirely. And that wasn’t even the Arena Group’s first AI scandal: the company started testing AI content as early as February 2023, months before the Sports Illustrated debacle, when it published AI-generated Men’s Health articles that we found to be riddled with misinformation.
But the Arena Group’s AI misadventures have always been less about AI as a technology, and much more about the many bad choices made by a media company at the expense of the publications in its stewardship as it spent years rebranding, floundering, and then rebranding again in a cursed rinse-and-repeat cycle. A confusing, all-in AI transformation, at a moment when readership and revenue are both low, seems like the Arena Group’s natural final form.
In the press release, the company was adamant that the transition wouldn’t lead to layoffs.
“I want to emphasize a critical point as we enter this new era: while we are supercharging with AI, our people remain at the absolute core of our business,” Edmondson said. “This technology is designed to elevate our partners and teams, not replace them. Our mission is to empower creators and entrepreneurs by blending the massive authority of our brands with the technology we’ve built.”
But it’s clear that company intends to produce more material.
“By seamlessly blending the authority of legacy media brands with automation, Arena believes it is uniquely positioned to empower modern creators and media entrepreneurs to scale at unprecedented speeds,” reads the release, “cementing an evolution far beyond traditional publishing.”
This, according to its CEO, is the “future” of the online media industry.
“Paradium.AI isn’t an iteration of past web models,” Edmonson told Adweek. Instead, he said, “it’s designed for the future of digital media.”
More on the Arena Group: Sports Illustrated Published Articles by Fake, AI-Generated Writer
