Late in May, I learned that I had apparently gone back to work for a company I had left in March. Five articles had appeared on the German edition of The Escapist under my name, two months after I had stopped working for its owner, ClickOut Media. I hadn’t written them.
I complained, the bylines were changed and Press Gazette picked up the story. ClickOut told the publication that it used AI-assisted content alongside human checking and editing. That would already have been a strange enough way to end a freelance job, but then I searched my name properly.
There were another 28 articles on the German edition of Esports Insider, also owned by ClickOut. These were about online casinos. Übermedien later checked the operators being promoted and found that none appeared on Germany’s official gambling whitelist, meaning they were not licensed to offer online gambling in Germany. Advertising unlicensed gambling is prohibited there.
The articles disappeared once the story grew. I checked again about a month later and found three of them back online, with my name on them again.
There was also Boyens Medien, a regional German publisher. Its website had run an advertorial calling me ‘our man’ for long-term casino tests and claiming I had personally tested more than 155 casinos, used 222 bonuses and spent 999 hours doing it. None of this had happened. Whoever settled on 999 at least knew when a number was getting silly.
Übermedien could not establish who supplied the Boyens material. The article directed readers towards Esports Insider. Five articles I hadn’t written could still have been a spectacularly bad mistake. Twenty-eight casino pieces, a fictional testing career and three articles returning under my name were harder to explain.
My name had become useful without requiring much participation from me.
A source in Italy then suggested I look at GiocoNews. The premise was simple enough: GiocoNews had spent years reporting on websites blocked by Italy’s gambling regulator. In August, the regulator blocked GiocoNews.
The block was easy to verify. Everything around it took longer.
Before ClickOut
GiocoNews started in 2009 and covered the Italian gambling industry for sixteen years. Its subjects were regulation, court cases, operators and the politics around all of that. It also published a monthly print magazine.
This was trade journalism for people working in the industry, not a casino-ranking site with a newsroom attached. By 2025, GiocoNews had something a new website cannot buy on launch day: years of links, recognition and access to the institutions it covered.
Then the ownership changed.
The print magazine stopped in July 2025. GN Media, which had published GiocoNews for sixteen years, now shows a holding page saying it is renewing its website and that a new site will be online soon.
The corporate route was slightly less picturesque. GN Media created a company called Italian Publisher at the end of May 2025 and transferred its publishing business into it in June. By the end of that month, company records listed ClickOut Media Limited as the sole owner of Italian Publisher.
A former GiocoNews employee did not need to read the registry to know something had changed. They had been working on GiocoNews for years and say staff were called to a meeting in Terni in early June, where they were told about Italian Publisher and ClickOut’s arrival.
A few weeks later they received a ‘Welcome on board’ email, followed by a call involving ClickOut. The former employee remembers Lesleigh Gennace dealing with personnel matters and Roberto Migliore being introduced as their main contact.
After that, Migliore became the person the Italian team dealt with most. Other ClickOut staff occasionally appeared on Slack for technical issues or security training, but the former employee says ordinary questions usually went through Migliore. Some took a while to come back: the former employee recalls Migliore saying he was new to the role and often had to ask people higher up in ClickOut before he could give them an answer.
The newsroom was changing faster than the answers arrived.
Six people, then three
The former employee says six people were working around GiocoNews before the sale. By December, two marketing staff had gone, one after a short attempt to move him into editorial work, leaving three people on the publication.
EsportsMag had been part of the same transaction. The former employee had helped set it up and coordinated three contributors there. Those contributors later worked as freelancers and also produced material for Esports Insider.
At the beginning of 2026, the former employee says seven people were working across GiocoNews and EsportsMag. For a while, that felt workable.
In March, Migliore posted a message on Slack saying that all five freelancers across the two sites would be dropped that day. ‘Within 15 minutes, everybody had been told,’ the former employee said.
The former employee and one colleague remained. They had employment contracts and asked what would happen to them. According to the former employee, Migliore told them their jobs would continue at least until the end of 2026.
They did not.
By June, their colleague was using accumulated holiday and the former employee sometimes found themselves running GiocoNews alone. They say nobody expected them to somehow produce the work of a full team by themselves; they were told to do what was possible, so they kept filing stories.
A registered letter
On the morning of 3 July, Migliore messaged the former employee asking for their June attendance figures. This was routine; Migliore asked for them every month. The employee sent the figures and went back to an article about Italian politics.
Later that morning, their doorbell rang. The postman had a registered letter. They went downstairs, signed for it and opened the envelope while walking back up.
It was from Italian Publisher, and it terminated their employment immediately.
They say nobody had called first and there had been no meeting. Their manager had asked for their monthly attendance sheet that morning as if nothing unusual was happening.
The June salary came on 13 July. The rest of what they say they were owed, including compensation for notice, severance and unused holiday, arrived on 21 August. When we spoke, they were looking for another job.
A regulator GiocoNews knew well
Italy’s gambling regulator is the Agenzia delle Dogane e dei Monopoli, usually shortened to ADM. Among other things, ADM deals with online gambling. Companies need an Italian licence to offer gambling legally to people in Italy, and when ADM decides a domain is operating outside that system, it can order internet providers to block it.
GiocoNews had written about these orders for years. On 26 May 2026, for example, the site reported that another 146 domains had been added to ADM’s blacklist, taking the total above 12,000. It was exactly the sort of regulatory story GiocoNews had been publishing for a long time.
On 5 August, ADM issued a new order containing a familiar domain: gioconews.it.
I asked the regulator why it had been included. ADM told Popkulturist that several pages on GiocoNews referred readers towards gambling operators that did not hold Italian licences.
That does not necessarily mean the operators were illegal everywhere. A company might be licensed in another country and still have no permission to take customers in Italy. ADM’s objection was the Italian part: it said GiocoNews was sending readers towards operators outside the Italian licensing system and ordered providers to block access to the domain.
The regulator also confirmed that its existing formal relationship was with GN Media, the old publisher, rather than Italian Publisher or ClickOut. So ADM had not somehow banned one of its own partners. By then, GiocoNews had moved elsewhere.
The website that remained
GiocoNews still publishes industry news. It also carries casino rankings, betting guides and articles about gambling operators that do not hold Italian ADM licences.
Its own editorial policy says some links can generate affiliate commissions. If somebody follows one of those links and opens an account, GiocoNews may get paid. Affiliate publishing is common and, by itself, unremarkable.
GiocoNews, though, came into that business with sixteen years of history already attached to its domain. Google had seen the site for years. Other publications had linked to it, and officials knew the publication well enough to answer questions from its journalists.
A new casino-comparison site starts with none of that. GiocoNews came ready-made.
On 4 August, the day before ADM signed its blocking order, GiocoNews published a guide covering casinos and betting sites without Italian ADM licences. The page also discusses the risks and points readers towards licensed alternatives, so there is no evidence that this particular article was one of the pages behind ADM’s decision.
Even so, 4 August is quite a date for it.
The site continued publishing. GiocoNews had new material and was still publishing in September, and the website remains available from outside Italy.
That leaves GiocoNews in an odd position: a publication covering the Italian gambling market from a website Italian internet providers have been told not to show to Italians.
What sixteen years buys
An old publishing brand is useful in ways that have nothing to do with whatever appears on the homepage today. Links survive. Search history survives. The domain already has a record with Google, and people may recognise the name before they inspect what has changed underneath it.
For a company that earns money when people arrive through search, those years are valuable. Press Gazette and Übermedien have both reported on ClickOut’s use of established publishing brands for gambling and affiliate content.
My own experience was a miniature version of the same basic advantage. ClickOut did not need to introduce a new writer on Esports Insider. My name already existed. Boyens did not need a newly invented expert either; apparently I had spent 999 hours doing the job.
GiocoNews came with something far more substantial than one journalist’s byline. It had sixteen years of archives and recognition inside a regulated industry.
The people running it could change without making the domain new again.
What I could verify
I previously worked for ClickOut and later filed formal and data-protection complaints over articles published under my name after I had left. That history is how this story reached me, and it is also why I have tried to keep the reporting anchored to evidence outside my own dispute.
Italy’s company register shows the ownership trail. GN Media announced the end of the print magazine. GiocoNews explains its affiliate arrangements on its own website, and ADM confirmed the block directly to Popkulturist and gave its reason for imposing it.
A former GiocoNews employee spoke to me directly about what happened to the staff. GN Media and Italian Publisher did not answer questions sent in August. ClickOut received detailed questions about the acquisition, the employee’s account of the staffing decisions, the affiliate business and the ADM action. I also asked how AI is being used on GiocoNews.
One part of the former employee’s account remains unconfirmed. They say EsportsMag, the other site acquired in the deal, had already been blocked by ADM in late 2025, and that employees were told ClickOut’s lawyers were trying to restore access. I have not yet been able to establish that independently.
GiocoNews is still publishing from a domain built over sixteen years. When I spoke to the former employee who helped build that history, they were looking for work.
