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.
Back to its roots
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.”
