This reeks of Fear Of Missing Out (of the Chinese market)
Simple business strategy. you need to make more profit every year, otherwise the shareholders will dump you. China is now that possibility for expansion, so every company does whatever it needs to, to please their future customers.

Gaming companies selling their souls to get a slice of that Chinese market.

If you know anything about what’s going on at Sports Illustrated or TheMaven,...

Not to mention SB Nation...

Not the folks at SI. Hey-ooo!

The same thing jumped out at me.

The LLC thing is absolutely to insulate themselves from the recent heightened attention to abuse of independent contractor status. They’re trying to avoid getting hammered the way Uber is. 

i really respect the hell out of y’all for the journalism on this subject, really in depth, no punches pulled. When I was a wee teenager I dreamed of being a sports writer, specifically someone who worked for Sports Illustrated. Jeff Pearlman’s SI story about John Rocker that exposed him as a future FoxNews…

Ah! The coked up Sunday night work email!
The mindset going in: “Dude, we’ll write it and send it out now so people will see it when they wake up. It’ll seem really professional to have it there for them first thing Monday morning and we’ll look like bad-ass take-charge bosses.”
Reality: In bed, trying to sleep. New…

IT WAS REPORTED HALF THE SI NEWSROOM WAS LAID OFF.

Indirectly, they give away the long-term plan: “look, these identical platforms that we’re copying got bought, and so their owners got paid out.  Thus, we don’t care what happens to their employees, because we the owners are just looking for that exit”

Remember when capitalism was going to democratize and liberalize China?  Lulz.

“These entrepreneurs are independent, third-party businesses that are provided access to Maven’s digital platform to post their content.” Any freelancer can become an LLC by paying a fee...”

What is China worth?

Can you please use the “NSFW” tag, please? Some of us have jobs. 

A photo of a calculator with 80085 in the window.

There’s so much here - but my personal favorite is the assertion that Rivals operates profitably as part of Yahoo.

One of the things that’s super troubling about this is Maven basically saying, “the entrepreneurs get to post on Maven digital platforms” which is really fancy for “you’ll get exposure.” But, the whole myth of “exposure” is you do it long enough to catch the eye of a top level company in your industry LIKE Sports…

The swimsuit issue is now just ascii boobs, between pages of motor oil ads.