Dope1:Get woke. Go broke.

BHM: I assume that recently there have been SI models that needed to tuck?

Fellas, you never disappoint.

SI has had financial problems dating back to the Great Recession, documented years ago in The New Yorker.

The magazine’s revenue from print ads had been plummeting since the recession; it had dropped more than forty per cent in just the previous two years, from 100.1 million dollars, in 2015, to 57.4 million dollars, in 2017. Digital-ad revenue didn’t make up the difference, and subscriptions were down.

The magazine went bi-weekly back in 2018 when its publisher Time Inc. was sold to the media conglomerate Meredith Corporation. Eighteen months later it was sold again, to Authentic Brands, with plans to publish the magazine for two more years. Instead, Authentic Brands -- known for scooping up stressed brands and licensing them -- licensed the magazine’s publishing rights to a company called Maven - The Arena Group. The Arena Group quicky laid off around a third of Sports Illustrated’s staff.

The Arena Group, in an effort to pinch pennies and wring dollars out of SI, generated content from news aggregators and low-paid, or even free, labor. The magazine’s tradition of deep reporting and award-winning prose was discarded and readers were not happy finding out that content was now written by fake authors with AI-created biographies and headshots.

Long story short, The Arena Group killed SI but it's fun to watch you guys reveal your sexual insecurities.

newyorker.com - The ham handed money driven mangling of sports illustrated and deadspin

fastcompany.com - Sports illustrateds AI failures highlight the need for authenticity in the LLM era