Why The Arena Group Has, Implausibly, Rebranded Into an AI Company

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Why The Arena Group Has, Implausibly, Rebranded Into an AI Company

The media company, now known as Paradium.AI, is pivoting toward a contributor model, amplified by AI, in response to declining traffic and revenues

By Mark Stenberg

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This story was originally published in On Background with Mark Stenberg, a free, weekly newsletter that explores the key themes shaping the media industry. You can sign up for it here .

On Monday, the publicly traded media company The Arena Group, which owns a stable of editorial brands including Parade, Men’s Journal, and The Street, made a series of startling announcements in conjunction with its second-quarter earnings.

First, the company declared that it was rebranding to Paradium.AI , a nod to both its marquee editorial brand, Parade, as well as its intent to stylize itself as an artificial intelligence firm. It also announced that it had refinanced its debt obligations, acquired the AI-content generator InfoSentience, and launched Cutter Studios, a proprietary AI-assisted video and article generation platform.

Taken together, the news is striking. To start, reframing a constellation of digital brands as an AI company will likely rank, alongside Allbirds’ AI rebrand in March and Long Island Iced Tea Corp. ‘s 2017 pivot to blockchain, as one of the more implausible corporate reinventions in recent history.

It is certainly not the first time a publicly traded media company has characterized itself as a technology firm to bolster its stock price, a tactic the beleaguered BuzzFeed tried most recently, but it is one of the least convincing. The market, for its part, was largely unmoved by the news, as shares in Paradium popped briefly on Monday to $2.20 before dropping to $1.30 on Wednesday, nearing its 52-week low of $0.81.

The audacity of the claim might have been intentional, however, as it nearly distracts from the dismal financial results. Compared to the same quarter the previous year, revenue at Paradium halved, from $45 million to $22 million; gross margin declined from 56% to 39%; income dropped 86%; and adjusted EBITDA fell 76%, from $18.6 million to $4.4 million.

The company is in a genuinely challenged position financially. It is carrying nearly $98 million in debt with only $11.2 million in cash, and its total accumulated deficit now stands at $357 million.

The situation is attributable—at least in part— to the duress facing its editorial model. The media company generates a large portion of its traffic and revenue from the open web, making it vulnerable to the declines in traffic brought about by AI disruption. According to data provided by the measurement firm Comscore, traffic to the Paradium portfolio declined 27% from June 2025 to June 2026.

“While our financial results reflect broader industry volatility, our strategic path is clear,” CEO Paul Edmonson told ADWEEK via email. “We are fundamentally pivoting from a search-dependent publisher to an AI-powered technology company.”

As a result, the company needs an ambitious plan to reverse its fortunes, and it appears to have found one.

Like many digital media companies, Paradium is only the latest iteration of a much older company.

The company as it currently stands was created in March 2018 with the merger of three companies: Maven, Say Media, and HubPages. In September 2021, under the leadership of then-CEO Ross Levinsohn, the combined organization rebranded itself as The Arena Group (TAG).

At the time, the crown jewel of the TAG portfolio was Sports Illustrated, which anchored its broader sports portfolio. But SI was technically owned by Authentic Brands Group, which acquires legacy brands and licenses them out to paying operators—in this case, TAG.

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In late 2023, the billionaire Indian businessman Manoj Bhargava, the founder of 5-Hour Energy, acquired TAG through a controversial series of events, which I detailed at the time .

Amid the takeover, Bhargava refused to pay the $3.5 million quarterly licensing fee TAG owed to ABG for the right to operate Sports Illustrated, so ABG sued over the missed payment and TAG lost the right to operate Sports Illustrated, which quickly found a new licensee .

As a result, in the course of just a few months, TAG lost its marquee property, came under new ownership, and saw key members of its executive team, including Levinsohn, leave the organization.

In the immediate aftermath, the company briefly promoted Sara Silverstein to serve as its chief executive, before parting ways with her less than a year later in February 2025. It then named the current CEO, Paul Edmonson, to the position in March 2025.

Unfortunately for Edmonson, his appointment to the role came just as AI began to dramatically alter consumer traffic patterns. This boded particularly ill for TAG, now Paradium, as the company had historically depended on the open web and its digital advertising revenues for the bulk of its business.

It has made notable efforts in recent years to diversify away from its reliance on the consumer web, including increasing its brand licensing, commerce, and syndication revenues, according to my past conversations with Edmonson.

But a key part of its response also lay in reducing its cost base by transforming Paradium into an independent contributor model, one in which its writers and content creators are compensated through revenue shares based on the performance of their work rather than paid as salaried employees.

Paradium has been transitioning toward this contributor system since April 2024, but the model, it turns out, is not new to Edmonson.

In fact, Edmonson was the founder of HubPages, one of the three original companies combined to form Maven, which later became TAG and, on Tuesday, became Paradium.

HubPages, in its heyday, also operated as a contributor network, where writers were paid $5 per post for any article that passed through a vetting process and was published across a broad network of websites.

Following the merger in 2018, Edmonson advocated for the company to operate its editorial using this contributor system, but Levinsohn pushed for a more traditional newsroom approach, according to three people familiar with the dynamic, who requested anonymity to discuss the situation. The result was a mixed model, where some sites employed contributors and others full-time staff.

But after Bhargava took over the company, Levinsohn was pushed out, and Edmonson found, in the new owner, a receptive audience for his more cost-effective vision, per the three people.

Back when Edmonson ran HubPages, AI was not nearly as sophisticated as it is today. Now, following its acquisition of InfoSentience and the debut of Cutter Studios, Paradium can use the technology to enable its army of independent contractors to produce much larger volumes of content.

InfoSentience will enable Paradium creators to generate “AI content at scale,” Edmonson told investors on Tuesday, while Cutter Studios, an “AI-driven video and article production and distribution platform,” will help do the same.

“Every generation of the web needs a different publishing infrastructure,” Edmonson told ADWEEK. “What we’ve announced with Paradium.AI is a tech stack built for a completely different reality: an AI-driven, multi-platform media environment where creators need real ownership and sophisticated distribution tools. Paradium.AI isn’t an iteration of past web models; it’s designed for the future of digital media.”

The strategy has its potential drawbacks.

Content assisted or generated by AI might perform worse with audiences or be penalized by search engines and social media companies. More critically, even if the solution works perfectly, it does not solve the problem of the contracting internet; it only makes content production in the meantime more cost-effective.

The hope, no doubt, is that the increased volume of output will compensate for any decrease in efficacy, and that this short-term solution will buy the company more time to grow other lines of business and sources of audience.

If the new strategy accomplishes those goals, it could be a worthwhile gamble. But if, in doing so, it harms the brand equity of the very publishers it is trying to save, its success would be a Pyrrhic victory at best.

Podcaster Paydays : The gold rush for podcasting talent continues to heat up. On Monday, Disney partnered with iHeart to bring six of its podcasts to the Disney streaming ecosystem, with a specific focus on shows related to its IP, like Hey Jonas! and Pod Meets World. Then on Tuesday, the podcast firm Acast acquired the Austin-based creator network Backyard Ventures for $20 million. The two deals reflect the primary ways in which the space is evolving: Streaming services like Disney (and Netflix, Roku, Tubi, and others) are signing deals to bring podcasts to their platforms, while podcast networks are scouring YouTube for up-and-coming creators to join their networks. If you were waiting for a sign to launch a podcast, this is it!

Out of Style : Over the weekend, The New York Times published a story about the travel concierge Olivia Ferney , a 25-year-old who facilitates the capricious whims of billionaires. Oddly enough, the reporter behind the story, Guy Trebay, published a nearly identical story a year prior, a profile of Ferney. This is inside baseball, sure, but it really baffles me. The second story in no way references the first, nor does it advance the narrative. Just the same reporter profiling the same influencer one year later. No shade to Ferney—I too would welcome repeated press from The New York Times—but something feels amiss. I imagine the story performed well the first time around, but why not then acknowledge the original piece in the follow-up? Puzzling.

Gallery Group Get (EXCLUSIVE) : On Monday, Gallery Media Group named Erin Collier its first chief commercial officer, a move meant to mark its expansion beyond publishing into scaled experiential and brand partnerships. Gallery Media, the media arm of Gary Vaynerchuk’s marketing agency VaynerMedia, is not a household name, but its penchant for experimentation has made it a noteworthy firm to watch. Collier, who joins from iHeart Media, comes from an experiential background and will look to apply those talents to the Gallery Media portfolio.

AI Blocks Ads : The concept of publishers serving ads to bots still strikes me as something plucked from a science fiction novel, but the practice has lately become somewhat more commonplace. But on Tuesday, a plot twist unfolded that Isaac Asimov himself could not have imagined. According to Digiday , after Time began serving ads inside the markdown versions of its webpages, a gambit intended to influence the results of AI scrapers, Perplexity began blocking the ads, with the AI firm calling the practice “deceptive.” Ads for we for but not for thee, Perplexity? If indeed bots are so easily swayed by advertising, I fear that the coming singularity may arrive speaking fluent chumbox, i.e. “AI overlords HATE this one weird prompt.”

Christine Cassis is the new chief marketing officer at the live-stream platform Twitch, news that I broke for ADWEEK exclusively on Tuesday. Cassis, who comes to the platform following stints at Reddit, Google, and, most recently, Shopify, joins Twitch at a critical moment for the company.