Earlier this month, we published a months-long investigation into a little-known company called Brown Brothers Media. The venture is run by three brothers — Justin Brown, Lachlan Brown, and Brendan Brown — who buy struggling online publications and turn them into AI-powered slop farms that post thousands of articles to scoop up massive traffic from platforms like Google, pushing unwitting readers away from real journalism in the process.
The growth of the Brown brothers’ empire, we found, has been powered by extraordinary acts of dishonesty and manipulation. As it fired virtually all its writing staff after the release of ChatGPT, it created scores of fake reporters, subject matter experts, and relatable everyday characters, then used their bylines to pump out lazy AI articles that were often plagiarized from original journalism, based on completely made-up “personal experiences,” or so careless and flawed that it’s hard to believe anyone at the company even reads them before they’re published.
It appears that the operation has been a resounding success. According to data we reviewed, Brown Brothers Media’s network of sites is estimated to pull in somewhere around 64 million visits per month. That’s an astounding amount of traffic, putting the Brown brothers in a league with large media organizations like NPR or the Washington Post — and making them a stunted yet fascinating new type of media power player in the AI slop era.
After we ran the story, we were surprised to learn a further fact about the Brown brothers that casts their activities with AI and the media in a peculiar new light: a startup Justin Brown founded called Ideapod, which was later folded into Brown Brothers Media and is still operating today, had numerous connections to the orbit of deceased financier Jeffrey Epstein — and particularly his longtime associate Ghislaine Maxwell, who is currently serving 20 years in federal prison for a sex trafficking conviction stemming from her work procuring underage girls for the infamous predator.
