We call them ” click bait “, “clickbait” or sometimes even “putacclicks”. Social networks are full of these sites which, to attract the attention of Internet users, rely on deliberately outrageous titles which often do not reflect the purpose of the texts. What we don’t know is that a good part of this content in Quebec is produced by the same company, which owes its spectacular growth in recent years, among other things, to cheap labour, sometimes paid less $5 per item.
Few people know the name of H&L Media. However, the company boasts of generating more than two million clicks daily thanks to these different platforms, such as Marker, Fanadiens, Noovelles, L’Informateur or ToutQc.
The company has also acquired Facebook groups and pages with huge reach, such as Spotted: Montreal, which has 120,000 likes. These spaces, which initially had a completely different function, are now used to promote the content that the company produces. Thus, thousands of Quebecers are now exposed to articles from H&L sites without having asked for it.
“They understood better than anyone, and especially better than traditional media, how social networks work. If it’s true they got two million traffic [de vues] on their pages, they have to make money like water with Google advertising”, underlines a competitor, who did not want to be named so as not to harm his business, but who recognizes that H&L Media is supplanting other groups that have also adopted clickbait as a strategy.
Rampant growth
A few years ago, the phrase ” click bait was mainly associated with sites like Monde de stars or Grands Titres, which were bought in 2016 by the production company Attraction. At the time, Marc Ouimet and Patrick Dragon each still operated a blog on the Canadiens. They joined forces in the summer of 2020 to form H&L and since then their company has continued to grow.
Today, the tandem manages dozens of pages and sites, several of which are dedicated to hockey and sports betting. H&L was notably associated until last year with The blue pocket, the most popular sports podcast in Quebec. The two businessmen have also extended their activities to gossip sites by acquiring, among other things, Qc Scoop, a page with more than 200,000 subscribers on Instagram which has built its reputation by relaying gossip about influencers.
On the group’s various sites, the content is written most of the time by freelancers, “bloggers”, as H&L Media calls them, even if the latter are not asked to give their opinion or even to unearth original stories. In fact, they have rather the mandate to rewrite news unearthed on other sites to make fairly rudimentary texts of barely a hundred words.
Those who worked for H&L report that their job was basically to find headlines that are catchy enough that people can’t help but click on them. Alex Déry, a claims adjuster from the Quebec City area, remembers being paid $2 per article when he started out in 2018 for the Habs and NHL site, which was then owned exclusively by Patrick Dragon, before the latter joins forces with Marc Ouimet.
“At the beginning, when you start, you are not really aware of the value of an article. I did it mostly for fun because hockey is my passion. It wasn’t my main job. But over time, you realize how much money they make from it. You kind of feel like you’ve been had,” says Alex Déry, who stopped working with H&L Media a year ago. He was then paid $5 per article.
Paid “pinottes”
The duty was able to talk to four other former employees of H&L Media. Although they all asked that their anonymity be preserved for fear of reprisals, they confirm that the salary of “bloggers” generally fluctuates around $5 per article. They also say that freelancers are under pressure to write as many articles as possible as quickly as possible. Some remember being required to write at least one article a day, seven days a week.
“I remember getting up at 4 a.m. to write my required article, because I didn’t have time the rest of the day. I was a student, and my goal was to make a living from my passion, hockey. I knew it wasn’t a big payday, but I thought it would open doors for me. After a year and a half, I realized that it didn’t make sense. I also saw that there were no opportunities for advancement. All we did was copy articles found elsewhere to change the title. We took the readers for fools, ”regrets a former editor.
We have not been able to confirm whether these terms are still in effect. But in the ‘terms and conditions’ section of H&L websites, it still says that a blogger is considered an ‘independent contractor’, who acknowledges being entitled to ‘no salary’ and ‘no compensation’.
The company also seems to blame bloggers in the event of a lawsuit. We can read on the sites operated by H&L: “the opinions and other statements of our users and third parties (such as bloggers) belong to them and are not ours. Content created by third parties is the sole responsibility of such third parties, and its accuracy and completeness are not endorsed or guaranteed. »
H&L’s business model was partially exposed for the first time in January 2021 when entrepreneur Olivier Primeau indicated in a publication that he was looking for columnists for his Beach News Everyday site, for a fee of $5 per article, this which had aroused ire in the journalistic world. H&L was at the time linked to the site of Olivier Primeau, who says he ended his business relationship with the company two years ago.
We repeatedly asked the two owners of H&L Media for a telephone interview. Patrick Dragon replied that they were overwhelmed with preparations for the next hockey season, which does not begin until October.