Jared Bauman is back with the latest episode of the Niche Pursuits News Podcast, and he’s got guest host Brooks Conkle with him today.
In this first episode of 2025, they dive into the latest news, share their inspiring side hustle plans, and reveal some very cool, and very weird, niche sites.
Watch the Full Episode
The first item up for discussion is the news that Google’s CEO shared the company’s 2025 goals, the importance of being scrappy, and his concerns that ChatGPT was becoming synonymous with AI the same way that Google has become synonymous with Search.
Brooks gives his analysis of the situation and Jared asks a good question about the two products. Do you agree? And is it difficult for such a large company to “stay scrappy?”
The next story they discuss comes from TechCrunch and details how Google is using Claude to improve its own tool, Gemini. Jared explains how they’re doing it and points out a potential contradiction in the company’s strategy. Brooks disagrees.
What do you think? And do you agree with their assessment of Claude?
They touch briefly on the latest update news, discussing how the 2024 spam update has officially concluded, and then move on to provide a year-in-review of Google updates.
Jared shares the stats of the updates over the last year as well as the last four years and shows an interesting visual from Search Engine Land and talks about the different updates, when they happened, and what the general impacts were.
Brooks weighs in and shares his approach to Google updates, and he makes a prediction for 2025. Jared talks about his impressions as well. Do you agree with his assessment for the year?
Moving on, they talk about their side hustles, with Jared going first and discussing the Amazon Influencer program.
He shares his stats for December and then talks about how he crunched the numbers for 2024. How much did he make over the course of the year? How many products did he sell and how many were returned? How much did Amazon earn from his videos?
What surprising stat does he share? Brooks has a theory. Tune in to hear the interesting conversation.
When it’s Brooks’ turn, he reveals that he bought a Facebook page related to dogs. He bought the domain Dog Mom Humor and talks about potential plans for the domain.
He shares his strategy for pricing Facebook pages and his strategy for growing the page.
Moving along, it’s time to talk about Weird Niche Sites. Jared goes first with Fantasy Name Generators and explains how it works.
How many keywords does this DR69 site rank for? How did it fare during the updates?
He shows the breadth of the site and talks about its potential earnings. Brooks makes an interesting observation. Listen to the full episode to hear it all.
When it’s Brooks’ turn, he shares Distance.to, a simple DR61 site getting a ton of organic traffic. He shows how it works, its stats and growth, all the data it pulls from, and reveals a unique feature of the site.
And that brings us to the end of our first episode of 2025. We hope you enjoyed it, and are feeling informed and inspired as always. Share your thoughts in the comments, and we’ll be back next week with a brand new episode.
Transcript
Jared: All right. Welcome back to the very first episode in 2025 of the niche pursuits news podcast. My name is Jared Bauman, and we’ve got a couple of fun and interesting topics to discuss today. Uh, so first off out of the gate, Google’s CEO is warning employees that open AI might be the Google of AI, if you will, uh, beyond open AI, Google seems to be making use of a different LLM.
To improve Gemini. So we’ve got those two stories to dive into right out of the gate. Then we’ll round things out with a look back on 2024 and the various algorithm updates that it brought. Um, I’ll give you a little sneak peek, a couple less than the year prior, actually. Uh, with last year in the books, we’ll get, we’ll also get an update on our side hustles.
And of course, Don’t worry. The popular weird niche segment. We’ll have our first two weird net niches of 2025. So that one is here to stay. As Spencer and I were joking about last week, joining me today, though, is Brooks Conkle Brooks. Welcome
Brooks: Jared. Happy new year, man. 2025
Jared: happy new year. You get the honor of being in the, uh, the, the co host seat here for our first one of the, of the new year.
This is our, our third year running the news podcast started in 2023. Uh, we did a full year in 2024. We’re here for 2025. I’m looking forward to it.
Brooks: Nice. I’m ready, man. I’m ready. Let’s rock.
Jared: All right, let’s get into our first story today. Like I kind of teased at the outset. Um, uh, Google’s CEO is, uh, I would say maybe taking a different tone, if you will, to, uh, to how he is approaching chat GPT and, or open AI in general.
Um, uh, I got the story up here. And so I’ll kind of read through some of the high level points. There’s, there’s a lot to get through. So I’m gonna try to pick and choose which, uh, sound bites we’ll look at. But the headline is Google’s CEO warns that chat GPT may become synonymous to AI the way Google is to search.
And as a result, Google will focus hard on scaling Gemini as a consumer app in 2025. And this is a report from CNBC. Um, and so basically this is an executive team meeting where, uh, Sundar Pinchai had a strategic meeting with employees last week. This article was written on December 29th, so probably sometime during the holiday period.
And basically it was all about the 2025 outlook and what Google needs to focus on to, um, to reach its goals. Um, here are some, uh, quotes. Again, I don’t know where this exact quote is being pulled from, probably maybe from someone inside of Google, but quote, scaling Gemini is on the consumer, on the consumer side will be our biggest focus next year.
Um, and the issue is that chat GPT from open AI is quickly becoming the brand for AI like Google is for search. Um, in that CNBC article, uh, it said this one, um, uh, somebody questioned following that saying, what’s our plan to combat this in the upcoming year, or are we not focusing as much on consumer facing LLM, which is weird because it sounds like he had just said that on the consumer side, Gemini was going to be the, uh, the biggest focus.
Um, and, and Pinchai went on to say, Google wants to be. The, um, kind of the, the, the Google of AI, if you will, not open AI. And so it kind of led to some questions about whether it’s going to be baked into Google search, if there’s going to be some new AI model, um, one or two more quotes, and then, then Brooks, we can talk about it some more.
Um, pinch, I showed a chart of large language models with Gemini 1. 5 leading open AI’s GPT and other competitors. Um, but that lead might not stay and they might have to play catch up. And, um, he went on to suggest, I expect some back and forth in 2025, I think will be state of the art. In history, you don’t always need to be first, but you have to execute well and really be the best in class as a product.
I think that’s what 2025 will be all about. The final thing I’ll just mention that he said, which I actually really like a lot and we’ve been talking on and off this podcast about how we kind of agree with this, um, pinch. I also stress that the company needs to go back to its early roots and build and ship faster while also being more scrappy throughout the mean, he kept reminding employees of the need to stay scrappy.
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Jared: Okay. Lot there. Um, Brooks, what, I mean, you know, coming in hot here in 2025, uh, what are your thoughts here on this kind of, you know, circle the wagon kind of meeting?
Brooks: The boxing match is on, man. It’s like, um, yeah, like, like open AI, chat GPT, you know, the product came out biggest, fastest growing consumer product basically ever.
And then, you know, Google caught off guard on the ropes. And now Google’s like Google shipping fast. Like it’s kind of interesting what they’ve just recently launched and come out with. Um, but I do think he’s right about like. Chat GPT being the name, the household name, uh, and all the cool kids call it chat.
Like I, I found myself saying chat as well, just cause like chat GPT, it’s like so many, so many syllables. So it’s a good move that OpenAI also owns chat. com now. Uh, chat. com goes straight to the, straight to the product. Um, yeah. Yeah. So chat, maybe it’s just chat, maybe that’s the, uh, that’s, that’s the brand and, um, but yeah, they are going to have to fight against that.
I think like Google is going to have to fight against that, that name brand, if you will.
Jared: Well, you bring up an interesting point because you know, uh, the CEO of Google is basically saying like, this is our biggest competitor when it comes to, uh, what we’re doing in the LLM AI space and yet the, what you do with chat GPT is, uh, Frankly speaking, like a lot different than what you do with, um, with Google.
Like with Google, you, you kind of type a prompt, but you get a bunch of different results that you pick from. And with chat GPT, it’s a tailored experience where you’re given an answer to your query based on a bunch of different things. And so it’s almost like they’re fighting, but are they fighting the same battle or are people just going to pick, maybe not necessarily based on who’s better, but just which layout they like the best, you know,
Brooks: That’s a really good question.
I mean, I, I, I think it, let’s see what happens in 2025, like with what Google does and how they integrated or whatever, because like ChatGPT we use as a standalone product, um, but then they, you know, started their search product, right? So it’s like search engine, well, Google has only been a search engine and now it’s integrating AI, so it’d be curious to see like, if the, if the user interface changes in some sense, um, yeah.
You know, like do they roll it into the same product or is it just the separate, like the separate Gemini or whatever? Yeah. Are we going to say Gemini? Uh, you know, consumers, consumers out in the wild, I guess is part of what he’s asking. Like, are people going to say that? Are they going to be, you know, just saying chat GPT?
Jared: And you’re right. Cause chat GPT has search, which is kind of like the Google equivalent of what they have. And then Google has Gemini, which is kind of like the chat GPT equivalent. So there, Their flagships are different, but they’re both leading the pack in AI. And now the CEO is admitting like. They might’ve beaten us to the initial kind of name recognition.
Um, what do you think about the second part of his comment, which is related, but kind of unrelated. It’s this idea of being scrappy. You know, Spencer’s talked many times on this news podcast before about like, Hey. Is Google so big that they’re not going to turn the ship around fast enough? You know, um, uh, once you get really big, it’s hard to stay scrappy.
It’s hard to pivot. It’s hard to adapt. It’s hard to change quickly. And now you have the CEO kind of basically admitted that.
Brooks: Yeah. I like hearing him say, we’ve got to be scrappy in order to, um, In order to win, you know, I, I guess like win the race or be a like serious competitor. Um, and I think he’s right.
Like they are going to have to be scrappy because there’s tons of, there’s tons of cool companies that didn’t exist two years ago that are, that are cool now and are, are people are using. Um, obviously chat GPT being one of them.
Jared: Yeah. Yeah. It’s, um, it’s interesting. I just, you know, to kind of wrap this one up, we’ve got a second story about Google and AI that we’ll then move to.
But on this topic, it feels a little bit like a change of tone from, from, from Pichai, you know, it feels like. And again, we don’t typically get access to a lot of his internal meetings. There are typically these presentations that he gives, but it just always feels like we are the best. We’re, we’re so confident we lead the race.
And they always have a bunch of data that shows they’re in the lead. And all of these kinds of state of the unions seem to be like, we know where we’re going, we know what we’re doing, and we’re going to beat everyone there. And this almost feels like a slightly different tone, which is, Hey, we got work to do.
We got, we got to roll up our sleeves. I know he’s said that before. You know about how they got beat to the release on the chat side of things, but still it feels like a Bit of a different tone from him and you know kind of going into 2025.
Brooks: He’s ready man. Yeah, he’s ready to fight He’s ready to fight.
It’s it’s kind of what I feel like. Yeah, it’s gonna be an interesting year I mean is the way I see it as a as a uh on the consumer side of things It’s gonna be interesting to see um what companies offer and how they how they kind of battle it out It’s well time on the last couple our business.
Jared: It’s well time.
On the last couple podcast episodes, we kept saying like, it looks like we’re gonna get a two horse race out of 20, 25 and beyond. Looks like. He might agree.
Brooks: Yeah. Yeah. Um,
Jared: well, hey, this is a really interesting storyline and I’m going to pull it up here on screen. Uh, I actually, um, had to write a bit of an overview on this one that I’m going to read just because there’s kind of so much going on here.
This is a story out of TechCrunch, um, and I thought it was really, really interesting. So this story from TechCrunch is about Google. And Google’s Gemini products. So we just talked about that. Basically Google is leveraging, it would appear from this story. Google is leveraging Anthropics, Claude AI model to evaluate and improve its Gemini AI model.
So contractors who are working on it and that are tasked with rating Gemini’s performance, what they do it apparently. Is it compares outputs against those of Claude based on a bunch of criteria like truthfulness, uh, verbosity, you know, how verbose the answer is, and I guess they’re allowed to spend up to 30 minutes per prompt.
Um, and then some contractors have observed that Claude. is basically being referenced inside of, uh, of, of, of, of Google’s Gemini model in terms of how it’s being used to rate and evaluate it. Uh, they’ve observed that Claude emphasizes safety more vigorously than Gemini. Um, and we know Gemini has been in the news and gotten criticism for some, I guess, inappropriate responses would be the best way to put it.
But this internal correspondence, it revealed that Google might be using Claude in ways that would help be trained its model. And that, that is against Claude’s, um, Terms of service, if you will. Um, and so, uh, Google’s denied this, uh, I believe. Um, uh, and you know, it kind of gets into the nuances of how training is done, how feedback is done, but it’s interesting that, you know, and again, TechCrunch, I believe somewhere in here, it said like they have, They have verified some of this.
Yeah. At least one of the outputs presented to Gemini contractors seen by tech crunch explicitly stated, I am Claude created by anthropic. So it’s interesting, you know, as we talked about the last story and Google saying like, we’re kind of behind in this part, but, but we’re, but we’re going to, we’re going to get scrappy and we’re going to go there.
Now we got this story that they’re basically like, well, in order to improve our AI, we’ve got to use. Something better, you know, uh, Claude, I, I don’t know. I, I might be reading a little bit too much into it, but it, but it’s interesting. These things are dovetailing each other.
Brooks: I, I almost see this as being scrappy.
It’s kind of how I see it. I’m like, Hey, what’s more scrappy than taking your competitor’s product and like using it and being like, Hey, how good is it? How can we improve ours based on what it, and, uh, it sounds like they’re not like, you know, using, it’s not like they’ve stolen any code or anything like that.
It sounds like they’ve actually hired people to like, Just literally use the product and then compare the output and then really see, hey, where are they better? Which is like, I don’t, I don’t know if you have to ask a competitor if you can do that, right? Like if you’re, if you’re any, if you’re any business, like if you’re a car wash, can’t you just go to your competitor’s car wash and be like, oh wow, well I like how they uh, I like how they do this or they offer these cool, cool lights in their suds.
Um, yeah, we should do that too. You know, I mean, like to me, that’s the ultimate scrappiness. Um, there, there’s also one more funny thing in there that I didn’t know this, but Google apparently is a big investor of Claude, like one of the major investors. And so I, I also imagine Google being like, Hey man, we can do what we want.
Like we’re, we’re like a major investor of your, of your company. Uh, so anyways,
Jared: I’m glad you brought it up. I was thinking the same thing, like where, where’s the line like to just from just using it and, and these are contractors. So they’re just kind of people who have been hired to do a job, like spend up to 30 minutes.
Tell us if this is the best answer available and they’re like cool I or is there more going on that that maybe I’m not satiated enough to know, you know Like I I know is there is it like, you know, how far can you go using a competitor’s service to help the other? Service versus where it’s against the terms of service You know, I don’t know those answers.
Um, no idea. I know. I don’t either. It’s it’s but it’s interesting to hear It’s interesting. You talk about how they’re an investor, you know, it feels almost like the reddit thing, right? Like google is uh, An investor now of sorts in in reddit due to their commercial deal they have and now all of a sudden reddit is doing really well and in search and there’s an interesting connection there, but I I it’s good on one side that You know, it feels like the quality raider guidelines, you know, and how they hired quality raiders for search Kind of feels the same thing of what they’re doing for their gemini product
Brooks: Yeah, uh, that’s kind of how I would that’s kind of the uh, the avenue I would put it in That’s exactly what it seems like and it seems like cool Let’s compare our product and let’s just let’s just see how we’re doing against the against the competition.
Jared: You feel like that They would have to have checked it to make sure like, Hey, what we’re doing is, you know, is good within the terms of service. And maybe this is just a story without a whole lot of bite to it. But, um, at the same time, I don’t know, with the antitrust lawsuit, you can’t put anything past these tech companies these days.
Brooks: Yeah. Well, if it’s against terms of service and this is a big deal, then, then I guess we’ll hear, we’ll hear more about it on a, you better believe.
Jared: Yeah,
Brooks: exactly.
Jared: I’m sure we’ll, uh, I’m sure we’ll hear more about it. I think it’s interesting just to close on it, that it, It does acknowledge in the article, um, uh, training aside and that whole complicated mess, it does acknowledge that basically like these people that were interviewed feel like Claude is a safe, it does have higher safety standards and parameters than Gemini, which is also interesting because that that kind of correlates a bit to some of the snafus and the Gemini releases and some of the PR nightmares that have happened in service for them.
I don’t, I can’t think of one that Claude has gotten themselves into yet.
Brooks: No, they’re, uh, yeah, Anthrobit, yeah, Claude, they are, uh, safety is a huge, it’s like one of their biggest, one of their biggest, um, no, like, like part of their mission statement kind of thing, you know, uh, safe, safe AI, so I can totally see that being, you know, safer, quote, quote, safer than, uh, than, than, than Google’s, uh, Gemini.
So
Jared: we’ll see where it goes. I mean, interesting that Gemini was kind of in the first, the first two, the two big stories, um, of, uh, of the 2025 for us. Uh, okay, let’s move on. We got to talk and touch on, uh, algorithm updates. Uh, this wouldn’t be a niche pursuits podcast if something didn’t come up there really quick note.
I know that we had left you guys a couple of weeks ago. Um, in the last kind of standard news update, uh, standard news podcast, that is where the spam update had just rolled out. Um, right. So we had November core update. That one took a while. Then we had a December core update. That one did not take a while.
And then we had a spam update. Um, that one launched on got up here on screen December 19th and finished on December 26th. And so the reason we didn’t update you on that last week was because Spencer and I did a pre recorded year in review sort of episode last week. So the spam update is done. Uh, this was a pretty volatile one from what a lot of people talked about.
Um, again, Barry Schwartz reporting here saying, um, while the update was announced the day after the December core update, it does seem. Does seem that it hit very hard within a few days and was much more widespread than some previous spam updates So it’s always tough to evaluate these sorts of updates when they’re being done right in the middle of the holidays You’ve got the holidays.
You’ve got the kind of Holiday sales rush plus the holidays that were happening around that so very hard Dust gonna have to probably settle a little bit, but early reports are, hey, it had some, some pretty big impact. And that kind of transitions us nicely into this final story that we’re going to quickly go through here.
And that’s just kind of a year in review of Google updates. Um, Brooks, I don’t know if you know, but there were, uh, four core updates. There were three spam updates for a total you can do math. I’m sure over dramaticizing this seven confirmed algorithm And a drumroll. Where’s the exactly get those drums out if you’re wondering Seven in 2024 there were nine In 2023, and, uh, I, I’m pretty sure when listening, we’ll feel this way.
If you do feel this way, it’s confirmed. March’s core update was the biggest update. And apparently in this article that Barry wrote the biggest update ever. So that’s interesting. Um, I, I, I felt like it was the biggest update certainly of the year, but this is saying the biggest update ever. Um, a little bit more than I’ll turn over to you for a few thoughts.
2023. I said, nine confirmed updates, 2022. See you. And 2021, there were 10 updates. So we actually had the fewest updates in the last four years. That’s interesting. It doesn’t feel like we’re getting less updates, but the data would suggest that that’s the case. Really cool visual here that, um, that search engine land put together, um, of the, the different updates and how long they last.
If you remember back to that March core update, it took a really long time, started March 5th. And, um, finished April 19th. They also launched a spam update on the same day that wrapped two weeks later. Remember they also announced all their new site reputation abuse stuff. Um, that was to come in May, didn’t come in May, but we started to see the effects of that happening in terms of manual actions, but not algorithmic actions yet.
That second spam update was in June. You had a core update in August. That was the one Brooks, I remember you and I on the podcast, you’re talking about finally some HCU sites, getting a little bit of recovery. Uh, not full recovery, but we did finally start to see some, it talks here in this article about how that was the first update where Google publicly said, we’re trying to go after sites that were hit and help them.
Um, and then we had these, this triple header here towards the year, November 11 core update, December 12 core update, December 19 spam update. Oh, all right. I’m gonna catch my breath. Turn over to you thoughts on 2024 and Google’s updates.
Brooks: Yeah, it’s a lot. Um, it’s, it’s funny when I read the title. I was like, Oh wow, seven.
I was like, man, that’s a lot. And then the subtitle is, Oh, two less than last year. And then, and then just after that, you know, 10 before that. And I’m, I’m like, Oh, I, yeah, I, I, I also didn’t realize it was that many on an annual basis. Um, but admittedly, I think I’ve told you this before too. I. I personally don’t pay as much individual attention to them anymore, especially since, you know, Like, I guess starting like a year, year and a half or whatever.
Since there are just so many, I’m like, they all roll into each other. They’re all, I don’t know. Um, I don’t know if that’s smart of me to do that, and I don’t know if other people do that, But, but that is, that is what I do. I just kind of, I’m just, I just kind of take it for what it is and don’t try to like, You know, draw a particular conclusion.
So, um, it’s a lot, it’s a lot of updates, but there’s going to probably continue to be a lot of updates, I guess I would say
Jared: it’s, I mean, you know, I think a lot of people with the, um, the, the, I, what they didn’t talk about is how extreme the updates were. And I don’t know that data in front of me, right?
Like if you have four updates or if you have, you know, four updates throughout one year and two updates throughout the other year, but the two updates are significantly more volatile. It can have the same impact. Right. Um, and so, right. That’s what we don’t know. What we do know they said is that March, March is core update was the biggest ever.
Uh, I don’t know how they’re evaluating that, but you know, if there’s only seven updates compared to nine last year, but one of them is the biggest one ever. Maybe that’s kind of why we feel like the updates were, were fast and furious this year. Um, but there were some gaps. I mean, you know, waiting until March to have an update, that was a couple of months.
And then we went another six months. Okay. Until we had a core up five months. No, we had a core update in August. So there there were some gaps there where, you know, I know people were waiting around a lot. Um, I think suffice to say, if we look back on 2024, at least for how we at how we experienced Google here in this community, certainly going into 2024.
There’s a lot more hope that Google would have figured out what they got wrong with the HCU and made some corrections. And while those corrections did come. In August, we wanted them to come in the March core update and they didn’t. And then when they did come in August, they were too, they were too small and too few.
So I think a lot of people are going to look back on 2024 and say, Google got a lot worse and Google didn’t fix a lot of the stuff that they messed up in previous years. And maybe that gives us hope for 2025, you know, Google is what we’ve been talking about so far and the need for them to get scrapping improve, I don’t know, maybe, maybe that’s a reflection of how they feel about 2024.
Just kind of like how we feel about it.
Brooks: Yeah, totally, totally. I was just thinking while you were going through that, it would be really interesting to see the aggregate overall data of what actually transpires with like, almost like the internet, like, like, like all websites, you know, uh, traffic to those sites versus like AI, because the reason why I’m saying that is because there’s always, there’s, there’s noise, there’s always noise, like whatever group that we’re in, forum or whoever we’re talking to.
The people yelling out is typically, you know, the people that, that lose traffic, the people that are traffic is going up usually are not talking like they’re not as loud. And so I’m interested as 2025 goes on to see that the overall, like internet data, um, kind of not, not just in certain groups or, or, uh, arenas or certain types of sites, but like almost the internet as a whole.
Um, so we’ll see, we’ll see, we’ll see as we go forward. It’s, it’s hard, right? Cause I mean, yeah, it’s a big place. The internet’s a big place. And there’s,
Jared: there’s so many things going on at once, you know, and it’s just so hard to compute as site owners, as websites, as businesses, like what is. It’s never one thing, you know, and I mean, yeah.
How much of perhaps people not clicking as much is because they’re now in a, uh, a, a, a, sorry, a generative chat kind of environment, right. With with with AI and stuff, I mean Yep. It’s, um, 2024 was a big year of change, like no doubt. And it’s just going to be super interesting to see where we go in 2025.
Brooks: Um, yeah, yeah,
Jared: yeah.
Brooks: I don’t, I don’t think the change is going to slow down, I guess. Uh, yeah, I don’t know if it’ll continue to be disrupted, but the change is not going to slow. It’s going to continue. The, the, the, the paces, the, the acceleration of changes continuing in the same speed, or if not. And if not faster this year, probably
Jared: totally.
I mean, yeah, we could, we could go on about this, but if, if going back to the start of the podcast, if we’ve got ourselves a two horse race now, if we’ve got Google and open AI, we’ve got others, but if we’ve got those two with incredibly deep pockets, incredible motivation to innovate, we’ve got Google getting scrappy, we’ve got open AI releasing products, releasing new models, releasing extensions of what they’re doing, owning the chat environment.
Like you would think there would be. More frequent, more rapid development and thus more change. So, um, Hey, we’re, we don’t have a crystal ball. We’re not fortune tellers, but it stands to reason, you know, it stands the reason that 2025 and it’s kind of why it’s good. We’re talking about that now. So, um, well, we can put the theorizing aside and get into some more brass tacks stuff.
We got to talk side hustles here. 2024 is in the books. I mean, I kind of felt like I had a blank slate this week on what to talk about. Um, There’s so many things about,
Brooks: you
Jared: know, technically I could just talk about the last week or two of side hustle stuff, but I could also talk about the whole year. It’s very weird.
So I tried to do a little bit of both. I’m going to probably, I get to host every week so I can kind of talk about different topics each week and kind of ping pong back and forth. I’m going to talk about Amazon influencer this week. So Amazon Influencer, let’s talk December really quickly. Let me get my notes up here.
Um, so December is done. We’re recording this, uh, on the second day of January. Um, and it came in at just over 54, uh, 5, 400. And so 5, 400 was the final amount. Now I had hopes of a little higher the first couple of days of December, but as I believe it was Thomas who was quick to point out. He’s like, don’t forget Black Friday happened much later this year.
And so your early December, probably feeling a little bit more like a Black Friday time period than normal. Um, he was right. So it did drop off quite a bit. We know that’s the case as you get closer and closer to Christmas and those subsequent related holidays, like it just slows down a bit. I actually had a negative 91 day the day after Christmas.
Brooks: Somebody
Jared: returned a 2, 500 product.
Brooks: And nobody was buying a thing. And nobody was buying anything to help compensate. It was just bad
Jared: luck, but the chart didn’t even know how to show that to me. How do I go down? I was like, wait, it says negative 91, but there’s like nothing on the chart. It was very confusing.
It doesn’t take many of those to really put a damper on things, but that’s kind of the nature of like, you know, people aren’t shipping much on Christmas stuff. But anyways, so if you look back, um, November of this year was, was somewhere around 5, 250, 5, 250. So, um, December, just a little over that. So we almost hit 11, 000 for the November and December.
If you’re wondering what that looks like compared to last year. This November 52 50 ish last November 4, 000 ish. So that’s up 25 percent this December 5, 400 ish last December 4, 200 ish. So up 25 percent is kind of up 25 percent across the board. Um, now. That’s December. Let’s talk about 2024. I, um, I went in and I downloaded, and I don’t know if you know you can do this.
I went and I downloaded all of my data from January 1st to December 31st for 2024,
Brooks: huh? Okay.
Jared: All into a spreadsheet. And so I was able to do a little bit of crunching. I didn’t, I wanted to nerd out so bad and spend all this time on it. But I gave myself like 10 minutes. Um, here’s some of the stuff that came out of that.
So in 2024, I made over 40, 000 in the, in the influencer program. Um, and so, yeah, I know side hustle. I’ll take that. That’s that’s a, that’s a great side hustle. Um, I sold 34, 000 items. This year through the influencer program.
Brooks: That’s crazy.
Jared: That came out to a total of 1. 4 million in revenue for Amazon.
Brooks: Crazy.
Jared: So it’s almost like last week, Spencer was talking about how much he made from the Facebook bonus program. And then he shared that. Like some months, people, 9 million people were seeing his posts. And he’s like, man, I’m not making that much. When you think about 9 million people seeing my posts. So I made a bunch in 2024, but when you see how much I made Amazon, I’m like, dang it, man.
I don’t know. I sure made them a lot of money.
Brooks: When you, when you think about the products, is that, like, to me that’s almost more mind blowing than like the, than like the income. Because I kind of look at mine too, like, whatever, the little chart last seven days. But when you look at the items shipped and like the revenue done, that’s so interesting.
Like it really, it really makes it real that you’re like, oh, I am like driving real business. To this company and it’s a lot and like they’re shipping a lot of products and doing a lot of revenue. That’s cool, man That’s really cool that you pulled up that data
Jared: That’s exactly right because I just think about in terms of like I got this many videos i’m making this much You don’t think about the scale of it all.
Yeah, i’m just one influencer out of you know, thousands probably tens of thousands of influencers um Anyways, a couple, a couple, uh, a couple more data points. One, I think it’s super fascinating. I’ll close on that one. Um, so 34, 000 items sold or so. Uh, that’s, that’s, that’s an approximation by the way. All these numbers are approximate approximations.
Um, around 3, 000 of those 34, 000 items were returned. So just under 10 percent return rate. Um, I don’t know if that’s good or not. I feel like staying out of double digits is good, but I don’t know. Just thought I’d share. So like 9 percent return rate in the end.
Brooks: Yeah.
Jared: Um, this is interesting. So I watched my wife use Amazon, right?
And she’s like the Amazon user in the house person or she’s always doing it on her phone while she’s like bouncing around doing a bunch of stuff. Right. And that’s, I see my dad do that. Like, but obviously influencer people who watch influencer videos in the make purchases might have different buying habits than people who don’t.
But anyways. 72 percent of my 34, 000 products sold were purchased on desktop.
Brooks: Interesting. Yeah.
Jared: I would have thought that completely flipped like 72 percent on mobile, right? No. 72 percent were purchased on desktop.
Brooks: That is, that’s super interesting data. I actually use Amazon from my lap, from my desktop as well.
Everything I do, I order, my wife the same. Like everything through her phone, like she orders, buys everything. Like I, yeah, I would be a desktop purchaser, like through you. I also wonder, um, if the, Horizontal videos have it have anything to do with that? Like where, where Amazon is serving those videos. And I make mostly,
Jared: I make almost all horizontal videos and we know that on a phone, like vertical videos look best.
Right?
Brooks: Yeah. Well, I guess, I guess what I’m asking is I wonder if Amazon is serving. Like different videos to different people like so, um, you know what i’m saying? Like are they are they are they putting your videos on people that are on that are on a desktop device, right? And on mobile devices are they?
getting different videos? Um, or, or is that the stat that like seven out of 10 people are, are ordering on their, on their desktop? It’d be fascinating
Jared: to talk to someone who makes mostly vertical videos and see if their 72 percent or whatever their number is, is flip flopped. Right. Exactly. To your point, if Amazon is going like, well, You know, every time you have a vertical video, we tend to show that on mobile purchasers.
And every time you have a horizontal video, we tend to show that on desktop desktop purchasers, or it could just be indicative of who buys, uh, products after watching influencer videos, you know, cause like an influencer video on my phone is like, you have to turn the screen and do all this work versus on your desktop.
It’s the right aspect ratio and everything. So.
Brooks: Exactly. Exactly. Let me ask you this. Did you think, did you ever think when you started making your first Amazon videos, that you would make this much revenue? Cause this is literally a salary, right? For like, um, for, for, for some people in the U S like that’s their, that is their annual salary.
Like did you think that this side hustle could be that big or would be that big or maybe you thought it would be bigger? I don’t know.
Jared: I did think it could be this big if I’m being honest. Okay. Because we had interviewed a couple of people on the podcast. That we’re making actually around this somewhere in the 5, 000 a month and change up and down and I I felt strong about this one just because I have such a strong photo video background.
I, I’ve done tons of YouTube stuff. I do, you know, podcasts. So I’m very comfortable talking on camera and I have a lot of audio video experience. So I was like, Oh my goodness. Like, I feel like we got a couple of use cases that I’ve talked to in depth that are doing it. And I feel like the skillsets required to succeed, I might actually have them.
So I kind of did, but you, but you, but you know, we’ve been doing this long enough to know like on paper, it can look great. And then you just, you don’t, you do this long enough, you know, like that doesn’t mean it’s going to actually work out. So I wasn’t sure it was going to work out, but I did have high hopes.
Brooks: Right, now that’s awesome, man, that’s awesome, and, and I’ve heard a lot of people recently talk about, uh, the saturation of influencers, and, and I, I get where they’re coming from, and that’s probably true, because every market does have supply and demand, and there probably, there probably is maybe some saturation or whatever, but like, um, yeah, so, so you, Thank you.
You never know how it’s going to work out. I would be curious to hear those people that, that, that you interviewed. And, and now I’m remembering those interviews. I’d be curious how they’re like, do you keep up with them? Are they doing the same now as they were then? Like revenue wise,
Jared: that would be interesting
Brooks: to find out.
Jared: One of them is Thomas, uh, that we interviewed. Oh, okay. Okay. He shared. Whenever he was last on, uh, that he hadn’t, I don’t think he’d done a video in 2024. And so his earnings had dropped quite a bit, but was still earning, you know, Spencer like money. Like I don’t remember exactly under 2, 000 a month. The other one was Matt Donnelly.
I haven’t talked to Matt in a while. I haven’t talked to Matt to be curious to see if I’m still actively doing videos and stuff. Cause he had, You know, years on me when I interviewed him and he was one of the two people that collectively the two of them, plus Spencer, I’m like, okay, I’ve got enough people there to succeed in this.
I’m going to give it to God. Yeah.
Brooks: Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I love it. And I love them not making video. I chuckled at that, not making a video in 2020. I laughed because I knew you were going to say, and still making like, The passive, the passiveness of that is where it becomes truly passive. Um, like that is actually passive income, like not doing anything during 2024, but making, you know, thousands of dollars from not the
Jared: myth of
Brooks: password income.
Jared: Like, yeah, exactly. Exactly. Income.
Brooks: Yeah. Actual passive, but actual passive income takes a lot of hard work, uh, to get, to get set up or, or it’s just money that’s invested in making money. Like that’s it. Uh, that’s, that’s it. Passive income in a nutshell. That’s it done. Uh, you do a lot of hard work and set something up and you know, or, or your money’s making money.
Um, that, that’s awesome, man. Hats off to you. I’m, I’m excited. Shoot, man. Let’s see what 2025 does. Right. I
Jared: I mean, I, I was putting together my email every month. I send out an email to, to, to my email list. It’s that’s asked to be notified about Amazon influencers. Not everybody wants to be, which is fine, but there’s a subset of people that have opted into my Amazon influencer updates.
And I was putting together my email actually for, for the email, uh, today. And I was like, 2025, what’s the plan? It, it literally is just do 2024 over again. Like keep making as many videos as I can. Uh, without trying too hard and, um, you know, it worked. So let’s just do that again.
Brooks: Nice. Yeah. If it’s not, if it’s not broke, don’t fix it.
If it’s not stressing you out, if you can fit, you can fit it in, you know, then fit it in, um, and do it and see what happens, man. That that’s awesome.
Jared: Try to carve out a couple hours tomorrow. Tomorrow, tomorrow’s Friday. Uh, we’re recording a day before this goes live, uh, to do, uh, to film all the stuff we got in December, you know?
So, uh, yeah, I’ll, I’ll right back to it. No rest for the weary.
Brooks: I need to take motivation from you, man, because, uh, I feel like, I feel like I only get off my laurels now and film something when I feel like Amazon is like, Hey, could you please? Film some stuff like this, um, which, which by the way, let, let me ask you this, those, the, does that revenue include like special deals from Amazon?
Like, uh, I forget what they’re called, like creator offerings or something like that. It does. Yeah. It
Jared: includes creator connections. Um, you know, they’ll give you bonuses every once in a while to try different things. And so it does kind of wrap all that up into one final, just number.
Brooks: Very cool. Very cool.
That’s awesome, man. Yeah, looking forward to see where it goes.
Jared: Well, next week I’m going to talk, I’m not 100 percent sure, I’m probably going to talk about, um, the Pinterest project and, and, and that sort of thing. So, we’ll table that for next week. What do you have for us? I know because I’m on your email list that you’ve been busy.
Uh, since I last talked with you.
Brooks: Well, I’ll be, yeah, I’ll be brief of mine. Cause I don’t have like crazy revenue numbers like, like you for years. But, um, and, and I
Jared: actually, you’re spending money.
Brooks: Yeah, that’s true. That’s true. Yeah. Yeah. I’m, I’m, I’m out of pocket, man. Uh, I’m investing, but I’m also not as nice as you, like you let certain people get updates on Amazon.
Everyone that gets my email gets. They, they get all updates on whatever I’m working on. Uh, so there’s no, yeah, I’m not being, I don’t know. I’m not being nice. I’m like, well, you know, hopefully if you don’t like it, you just scroll, you know, just scroll on past and find something that you’re interested in or whatever.
So I, I bought, I bought another Facebook. Well, I shouldn’t say another, I bought a Facebook page. Um, it’s, it’s a doggy. It’s in the dog niche. Um, it’s going to go, it’s going to be, it’s going to be in the doggy humor niche because my, my wife, She loves dogs. We literally have seven dogs at the house right now.
I put a picture on the thing, you saw that. We’re also, yeah, uh, side shiny objects shenanigans. We’re also, we’re also dog sitting over the Christmas and like holiday break. Um, We’re not gonna do it as much in the future, but we had at one time we had like as many as I think nine dogs in our house. Oh my goodness.
Yeah, it was crazy. It was crazy. She was like, um, yeah, we’re not gonna do, we’re not gonna do that many going forward. I say that to say, My wife likes dogs. And so this page, uh, it’s kind of cool. Like she she’s all day long looking at funny dog stuff. Um, on Facebook. So, so I’ve already made her, I’ve already made her a, you know, a page manager, um, starters for insurance.
Uh, no doubt there for anyone. If you have a Facebook page, invite, you know, your spouse or someone, cause you, something could happen. You could get locked out of your page. I’ve seen that happen to people like multiple times. So the first thing I do is actually I get my, I make sure my wife is like a, a page admin on any pages.
But now I’m like, Hey babe, uh, share all that funny stuff to this page, please. Um, um, So that’s, that’s like, that’s like one thing that we’re doing. And I, um, when, uh, Morgan, Morgan talked about cat mom humor the same day I bought dog mom humor. I was like, okay, I’m buying dog mom humor. com. So I own, I own the domain name.
And so what will this brand be? I don’t know, but it has, it has, you know, it has potential to obviously Facebook bonus program, you know, develop something out of it. It it’s currently for me, it’s like, it’s content in my email newsletter for me to build something in front of people. It’s also that. I’m also like diversifying Facebook pages, like having a few, because I’ve heard a lot of chatter about the bonus program, like, That Facebook slowing down their invites and also that it may make sense to like diversify.
Like you don’t know which ones are going to grow faster and like get invited in the program. So that’s like, that’s like a piece of my thinking as well. Um, well tell us some of the numbers on this. It’s all those
Jared: things. Like I wouldn’t know where to start with in buying a Facebook page, whatever you’re comfortable sharing.
Like how does one price out a Facebook page?
Brooks: Yep. I have no idea. I’ll tell you, I’ll tell you how I, I’ll tell you how I priced it. I, I, yeah, I was, uh, I was offered the page for X, X dollars. And I said, uh, I don’t feel comfortable with that. But what I did was I offered, Less than what I thought I could buy a page likes for, uh, for the page.
The page also had not really been like, uh, super active in 2024. So I discounted for that as well. That I like, that was, you know, I’m like, Hey, I mean, that’s risk. Uh, I did confirm that the page is like all, it’s like all us. Followers. So I thought that was super important. So it’s people in the United States.
Um, but I basically, I basically offered, uh, and paid like half of what I thought I could acquire page likes for is how I negotiated the price. So,
Jared: and that makes sense for a page that sounds like fairly dormant. Um, not earning any real revenue, just got followers, got traction at Facebook and has a group of people that all seem to like the same thing, which is dog humor.
Brooks: Exactly, exactly. Yeah, so I mean, you know, all I can do is scroll back and look at like, okay, cool It’s got it’s got some good interaction from the past like when it was active and yeah It’s kind of me taking a stab at it saying like cool I can bring this back to life and then continue to grow it. Yeah Which which also is another reason to like, Buy it at a discount in my opinion.
Cause it’s like, you’re having to, like you said, you’re having to bring it back to life. It’s not, yeah, there’s, there’s no revenue. So I can’t like, you know, it’s not like I’m buying it on a multiple of revenue or something like that. I mean, again, it’s like
Jared: buying a, yeah, you know, websites. It’s got a bunch of content.
It’s been aged, it’s been sitting, uh, it’s, it’s indexed in Google, but it needs a lot of work to get the love back.
Brooks: Exactly. And, uh, can you, I don’t know, is, is, Um, yeah, I’m not going to like list the actual page cause I, I don’t know. I don’t think Meta’s going to go through the trouble of that to like shut me down.
I don’t think you can technically, technically sell a Facebook page. People do it all the time, all day, all along, but you know, it’s, you’re, you’re, you’re, you’re changing money. And, and, and I mean, there’s some trust involved, right? Cause you’re, you know, page admins having to add an admin, remove an admin.
So it’s like, I, yeah, I probably wouldn’t like bet the farm on a, on, on a page unless I had a different. What way to do it, but like, um, yeah, I mean, you can totally just, you know, transfer, transfer ownership of like, of, uh, You know, Facebook page or group or whatever, but uh, nonetheless, nonetheless, I’m excited.
I mean, I’m excited to grow it as a part of my, you know, projects and stuff. So
Jared: goal is to get this in the Facebook bonus program. It sounds like, sounds like you’ve outsourced Yeah, adequately to a fellow family member who’s passionate about the topic.
Brooks: Yeah. Yeah. So she’ll just share. Yeah. I will completely turn this over to one of my team members to produce content on and just like, let it ride.
He also likes dogs. He owns a dog. And so like, I’ll, I’ll spell out the process and the, and the, like what, where, what we’re doing, like we’re, we’re growing another page on the Gulf coast, like with some, with some strategy and like, um, yeah, so I’ll just take that same strategy, transpose it over to doggies and then, you know, we’ll test a bunch of different stuff and I’ll just let him just rock and roll with it.
And then. We’ll see. We’ll see where it goes.
Jared: Onwards. That’s amazing. That’s cool. It reminds me, I bought like a, a small kind of similar project in the email newsletter space over that summer. Um, it was the slice and I bought it and it’s like, well, I didn’t have to pay much. I paid less than if I would have had to go out and get that many subscribers on my own, you know, like you kind of know how much these costs and does the same exact way to evaluate it.
Wasn’t earning much, hadn’t sent many emails in a while, but it’s like, Hey, I can have this as an asset. We send out emails for other brands for other projects. We have like, let’s slide that into this. I mean, it sounds exactly like what we did in July with the, uh, with the email.
Brooks: No, that’s awesome. Yeah. The, especially if it’s like related to what you’re doing, technically this page is not very related to any of my, any of my other projects.
I would much prefer something that’s like related that you could like cross pollinate, you know, and cross pollinate stuff, but yeah, but, but you bind that newsletter, um, Yeah, and people don’t understand. Yeah, buying it at a discount. It’s kind of tough because like if there’s a there’s a project and it’s not producing revenue Like it’s good.
It’s gonna take tons of sweat equity from you for me to like to grow these things Like it’s not gonna it’s not gonna grow on its own You know, like you got to spend a ton of money ton of time energy to try to like turn it into something cool So, um, yeah, that’s why you can I think if you can you can find that find a deal like that at like What I would consider a discount, you know, um, it’s great.
Jared: Well, hey, good stuff. Um, as always exciting to hear about different side hustles, give a lot of people, uh, give a lot of people a lot of different things to think about, especially as we go into 2025, this is the season when a lot of people are saying, this is the year, you know, this is the year I’m going to, I’m going to, I’m going to, I’m going to do something.
I’m going to do this. I’m going to, I’m going to do something in addition to my nine to five, or I’m going to add another project on to build for the future. And so, you know, Just giving you guys ideas. Just sharing. Not saying all these ideas are going to work, folks, but some of them do. We share when they work, but we also share when they don’t work or when they haven’t worked yet, so.
Brooks: You gotta, you gotta, you gotta swing the bat, right? Like, Spencer, uh, I know we’re about to move on, but Spencer, I guess had a post recently where he was talking about all his projects of something, and I was like, man, like, if you don’t, if you don’t swing the bat, like, you can’t, you can’t ever hit the ball, you know what I mean?
You can’t ever make a hit, so like, um, yeah, you just, you gotta, you gotta take swings. Thanks, guys.
Jared: That’s what a lot of this is. I mean, that’s the great thing about it’s a side hustle thing. So for me, I run a marketing agency every day. That’s my day job. That’s my paycheck. That’s what I do. This is all stuff on the side.
If it works like it did with the Amazon influencer. Awesome. If it doesn’t, it’s still a bummer, but it’s not going to, you know, sting in the way of, uh, of the way that, you know, um, like a non side hustle or main gig would, so
Brooks: sure. Sure.
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Jared: Uh, you know, let’s get into the weird niches here. This segment, Spencer and I were joking last week on the year end podcast.
It’s like, So what everybody wants to talk about, even though, you know, it’s always at the end of the podcast and was always something that was just kind of more to be amusing, but it’s kind of, it’s turned into certainly one of the favorite episodes or parts of the episode every week. Um, my weird niche, I will go first.
Um, and, uh, I appreciate this. A, um, a former podcast guest guest, Mike with niche twins, shared this one with me. It is fantasy name generators. com. Now I’m, I’ll admit I’m not really in the fantasy world, so I don’t really know a lot about this, but. I was, I had a lot of fun playing around with it and it’s a very popular website.
Um, and so I’ve got it up on the screen in front of me. I will say it’s pretty busy. There’s a lot of options and there’s a lot you can do, which definitely kind of overwhelmed me, but I also have not the target market. And so, um, so fair play. Uh, I’ll try to navigate through what it does. It is a random name generator, uh, in the fantasy realm.
And so I just basically clicked one of the links on the homepage, if you’re not watching and it randomly generated a bunch of names for, um, a S a segment of fantasy basically. And so this is Catalan. Uh, Catallion. I don’t know how to say this. Um, one of those two. Catalonia is a small autonomous community in northeastern Spain.
Um, and, uh, they’re very similar to Spanish names. Um, you know, and so basically there’s, uh, all these, I’m not sure this is fantasy to be honest with you. I think they might’ve gone a little bit outside their niche, which I’ll talk about here in a second. But the idea is fantasy name generators. Let me try, let’s go to a random generator.
Um, guy, this is very confusing. Um, here we go. This is why I say they might have, uh, uh, strayed a bit. Not that it’s affecting them. But if you go to fantasy and folklore, I mean, there are just so many different name generators here. Um, evil names, uh, genie names, um, giant names. Let’s go look at giant names.
Here we go. Um, I don’t know. What do you think? Do you think any of those look like giant names? Tizis, Jerser. Yeah. Groovar. Groovar. Yeah. Like that’s a good giant names, right? It’s a giant, man. It’s a giant name. Um, I, I’m not gonna poke around anymore. I want to take over to Ahrefs and show you what it looks like over there.
Um, because this is a super popular site. So 69. It ranks for over 300, 000 keywords and it gets an estimated organic traffic of 2. 4 million. Um, I mean, It’s, it’s just crazy. Like, look at this, this is the last two years here. This graph, like it, it hasn’t gone steady, man. It’s steady, right? It’s just like
Brooks: trucking though.
Trucking. Yeah.
Jared: Going back to the beginning of this podcast. Like you would think Google hasn’t launched one algorithm update in the last two years. If you look at this, exactly, exactly. If you go over here to top pages and this is kind of where I was, I was poking around, Uh, let’s see. Come on. Well, it’s taking its time, but, um, if you come over here to top pages, if it goes, I guess it’s not going to go.
There we go. Um, it’s got almost 2000 pages. So it’s, uh, I mean, it’s just got, they’ve gone the fantasy name generator and they’ve, I mean, they have city names here. Like it’s just, they’ve gone down the rabbit hole. Final thing here is, and I’ll go back to the, uh, uh, go back to the website. I was trying to figure out like, how are they earning revenue?
Brooks: Yeah. I saw that ad on the homepage and I didn’t dig any deeper other than like hopping on the homepage and just looking at it, but yeah, I saw that ad is that. Have you seen much more?
Jared: No,
Brooks: no.
Jared: There’s like a video ad. Yeah. It’s, and it looks like almost like a YouTube video ad. Uh, it’s for YouTube obviously, but it feels like that’s a very, uh, uh, had choices.
I don’t know which ad network this is. Um, it’s not YouTube. I thought originally it was just by what I was seeing. If you go over here to about, uh, where was it? Contact and support. And then you go to help the site. The guys basically like. Hey, uh, just, if you want to help, just give me ideas. And if you want to help more, um, share it with your friends.
And, you know, it’s just like, he doesn’t really say he doesn’t try to make money on it, but it has this vibe that he’s just trying to kind of do this for the fun of it. Um, he does have a donate page. And so if you keep going here, You can donate, um, but he kind of tells you to donate to a charity and he gives you all these different charities like DonorChoose.
org, JustGive. org. Um, he shares which charities he uses. Um, he’s, uh, into reforestation. And so he talks about that there and that’s a support on the homepage. So, I mean, it’s pretty cool. Uh, when you take a step back, because like a site that’s getting this many visitors, uh, if he’s, He’s not monetizing enough.
I almost wish he monetized more just so those charities would get more money But in general it does seem like he’s fostering more of a community with this website than maybe a monetization strategy.
Brooks: Yeah Yeah, it’s kind of hard to know like maybe maybe maybe he cares. Maybe he doesn’t maybe like like How often do you want to reach out to the people?
On like from the websites that come up in this, in this segment. Cause I feel like while you’re showing that, I’m like, Oh, we should totally just like send them a message and be like, Hey, do you, do you want to produce more revenue? You know, like maybe, maybe we can help you do like, it may be this, like some people don’t know, like don’t know that other ad networks exist or have like have those ideas.
Um, it’s true. I, I, I find that really interesting that people, you know, people can try really hard to, and know how to monetize and like try to get the traffic and not get it. And then other people can get like. Millions of monthly visitors, but, but not necessarily have the knowledge of like what to do or how to like monetize.
It’s almost like influencers and like Tik TOK, not to get, not to get sidetracked, but a lot of those that have millions of views aren’t as good at like monetizing. Like they don’t really know business per se necessarily. Um, so yeah, I don’t know. Or they’re under monetized, which I mean,
Jared: I know people, exactly.
Like I know this is kind of. Synonymous with YouTube influencers where they just will monetize with YouTube ads and merch, right? It’s like these are like two of the lowest paying Um revenue generating things that you can do But it’s so many of them do it It is when you interview them when you talk to them Some of them are just like I don’t know any the other ways to do it, you know And so to your point like it feels like Yeah, he’s got an ad in the homepage.
It’s not like he doesn’t know that ads exist. Maybe he just doesn’t realize that he can put ads on all these things. And in between the name generator, before the name pops up, he could have an ad come up or he could go as far or as light as he wanted. But I wonder if he’s under monetized just because he doesn’t kind of know all the ad monetization methodologies.
Maybe yeah, I don’t know. Yeah, people like reach out easy to forget. We’re in this world. So we’re always like, what’s your RPM? How soon?
Brooks: Sign up sign up sign up. Yeah, exactly That’s totally true, man. That’s totally true. That’s in our circle, right? That’s what people are saying. Yeah. Yeah, totally
Jared: So that’s a cool, cool, cool website though. It’s tough talking about a really cool, weird niche when you have no knowledge of the weird niche.
Right. So yeah, at some point I, I gotta fill air every week on a weird niche. I can’t be an expert in every weird niche we talk about. So I got to delve into some of these, even though I don’t know much about it. It does seem like he’s got a little outside of just fantasy. Uh, but if you don’t know fantasy, you don’t really know if he has, but I think he has.
That’s my guess. So, all right, Brooks. I will be pulling up yours while you bring yours up, uh, and start talking about it.
Brooks: Yeah, sure. Yeah. He might, well, maybe he knows SEO then. Uh, if he’s going way outside, maybe he, maybe he was doing the SEO play, man. That’s what I mean. I sure felt that way. Exactly. Sure felt that way.
Yeah, maybe he does, maybe he does know. He knows exactly what he’s doing. Uh, he knows exactly. All right. So this, this site is called distance, distance dot two. Um, interesting. It’s not a dot com. I don’t think you guys have done this one in the past as far as I know. I don’t know. I don’t think so. Um, distance dot two and interesting.
So the, yeah, the, uh, uh, what am I trying to say? Dot com is called a TLD. No, it’s called a TLD. TLD. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. I don’t know. My brain was freezing. Yeah. Dot, dot two. I don’t, I don’t even know what country that is with, but, but pretty cool play on words there. Distance dot two, but it’s getting apparently a ton of traffic and what this does.
I like, I played around with it for a few minutes. Pretty, pretty simple yet. I think it’s like has crazy amounts of data in the site, which is why it’s getting so much traffic. Cause it’s not necessarily like Pages. If you like, there’s not, there’s not like, there’s not places to click around and read articles per se.
Right. So it’s not like that last site, but you can click. literally click start and yeah, go to a, and yeah, you’re doing it right now. Um, I was playing on my screen and I forgot that like, I wasn’t the one up on the, uh, up on, up on yours. Um, yeah, so, so you just, you just went from the Northeast to Mexico and it tells you how long the distance is.
So it’s like, it gives you the straight line, but it also gives you like, uh, I guess the driving path or whatever.
Jared: Um,
Brooks: That’s it, man. You just, you just discovered the entire website, as far as I know.
Jared: I was just trying to be interactive here while we were talking. I did New York City to Mexico City. Uh, and, uh, first I did Buenos Aires, but it didn’t want to give me a driving route.
Uh, I think you can drive, by the way, from New York City to Buenos Aires, but maybe it didn’t find a connecting route that was perfect. But yeah, look, you got I think it’s cool. Like you said, it’s got a distance, which is the straight line distance. I’m not sure that’s the flying distance or just like as the crow flies kind of terminology, but then the driving route is a lot longer.
It’s like 2, 600 plus miles.
Brooks: And that’s the website. Like, like, as far as I know, that’s, it doesn’t do other things than that. Maybe it does. Maybe it does do other things than that. But, um, it also appears to get. A lot of traffic. Um,
Jared: Oh yeah, I brought that up. Let me switch over here. Uh, share this tab instead.
Okay. I got up on screen.
Brooks: And in my tool, okay. Yeah. And my tool is showing quite dramatic growth over the time. So yours isn’t as like as steep of a line, but it, but it is showing like growth over, over time. Uh, yeah. DR 61 is kind of what I saw. Yeah. So it’s like, um, so what is, what is your tool showing the traffic has?
Jared: So mine’s showing some really good growth in 2022 and 2023, and then into mid 2024. And then that’s when it kind of stagnated. But traffic wise, um, over 250, 000 organic page views a month is what it’s, is what it’s reporting.
Brooks: Interesting. Interesting. I mean, that’s,
Jared: that’s a lot for a, like a one page site, basically.
Although to be fair, it does generate a new URL every single time you do a search query. So I wonder if those are being indexed and if those are, you know, uh, getting search traffic on their own. Oh yeah. Look at this. Okay. Let me go back. Look at this in Ahrefs. I go to total pages. It’s got over 43, 000 pages that Ahrefs has found.
And so, it looks like it’s indexing, here we go, Los Angeles, San Francisco. And it ranks for how far is LA from San Francisco by car. It’s got the number one featured snippet position for that. So that’s interesting. All, it’s only a one page site in looks, but it, All these other pages are being indexed.
Brooks: Wait, do you think that, so did they produce all of those pages from the start or is it like producing pages as you, like, is it live producing pages? Like as you choose a, a connector, is it then like, Then create somehow creating a URL and saving that or something, or, or do you think they just already created?
Well, I guess they already had to have all the data. So I guess they’ve already created all of that.
Jared: So it’s interesting because I don’t know, but here’s one of the things I will share is what I just booted up on screen is, um, It’s the URL distance to distance dot to slash India slash USA, okay, and it just basically showing the same search query that we went through with New York to Mexico City, but the URL string string is different, right?
It’s almost folder and subfoldering versus when we did the search. We and let me show you this here. Um, I guess it is the same query. Nevermind. I thought it was a different URL string. Here’s New York State and Mexico City. So I thought maybe they had an internal, um, an internal database. They must still have an internally internal database that is somehow surfacing itself because it’s got to get crawled.
And yeah, it’s got to get crawled and ranked for this. Um, yeah. It is interesting. Oh, here we go. Look at this. Okay. Look in the upper right here, Brooks. I kind of figured this out on the fly. So it’s got a similar distance and it says Mexico city is just as far away from New York city as correct. Uh, Caracas is Mexico city is from, and then it goes through all these other ones, Phoenix and, uh, Pueblo and, uh, Valencia.
And it, look, you can click here and it’s got all these prebuilt URLs. So this
Brooks: is like an internal
Jared: mastermind here.
Brooks: Yeah, so if you click on, if you click on one of those, it just pops up that, that route.
Jared: So here’s New York City to Phoenix, and yep, there it is. New York City to Phoenix. It is a very similar distance, and it’s already pre built.
And then my guess is they’re probably gonna maybe do the same thing here, although I don’t see it. It’s got all this information in the sidebar that’s super interesting. Yep. There it is. Similar routes again.
Brooks: Crazy. Yeah. So a mass, I wonder if there’s anything like that doesn’t exist. Like if you choose something, if you choose something on their site that like doesn’t exist, I don’t know, like doesn’t exist, like some small random place to small random place.
Does it, does it have that in their index or, um, I don’t, I don’t know the answer there.
Jared: I mean, it looks like it’s pulling. Like you said, like their database, I, I would be, I’d be so curious to see where they’re getting their data from, you know, like, cause they have a ton of map data here. It feels like they have every, I’m trying to think of a tiny, uh, I’m trying to think of a tiny town.
Uh, here’s a town in my area. There it is. I mean, that’s a, that’s a pretty tiny town right there. it’s
Brooks: using mapping coordinates. So like I just put one in the middle of the water. Uh, I don’t know. I just clicked two random places. And, uh, I mean it. It, it maps it and it gives you the distance, but I’m like, would that be, would that be in the, in Google’s index?
I don’t know. I mean, that would be like infinite. That’d be like infinite points of, that’s what
Jared: I mean.
Brooks: Like
Jared: it’s got a lot of two data. It’s got local time data. I mean, it’s got a lot of information here. It really does. It’s got the nearest flight, um, nearest airports to each place. And it’s got the airport code.
Uh, it’s also got a separate URL for that air pair, that airport. I mean, it’s, it’s got a lot of data that it’s pulling from, and it’s pretty cool to play with. I gotta say, I’m, you and I have been talking about this one for a little bit longer than normal, and it’s because this is such a cool site in terms of the data that it has.
Brooks: Yeah,
Jared: I just realized. It says how the distance is calculated, and it’s some formula. I don’t know if you can see it here in the bottom right of my screen for those of you watching. I just kind of highlighted it. But, um, man, this would be a fun site to spend much more than five or ten minutes on.
Brooks: I just realized as we were going through this, there’s probably some programmatic SEO out there that was laughing at everything I was saying and all the questions I had.
Sorry. Sorry, you expert.
Jared: Yeah. You gotta get used to when you co host these suckers, like, just leave all your preconceived notions about how smart you are at the door because no matter how smart you are, there’s somebody listening who’s like, dude, come
Brooks: on. We’re here to ask questions, man. Hey, hey, we’re just here to ask questions, right?
We’re exploring.
Jared: Yeah, no ego, I guess. Well, I probably still have one, but this is sure helped put it in check. I’ll tell you, co hosting. Anyways, well, that hour flew by, especially the last 10 minutes. That was That’s going to go down as one of my favorite weird niches. That was, that was really good. I feel like we could have spent a half an hour on that and still not have dove all the way into it.
Monetization. I saw a couple ads, but it doesn’t look like much more than that. Um, super cool site with you. Ah, okay. Hey, 2025 we’re off. We’re off to the races. We’re outta the gates first one in 2025. Thank you everybody for joining us. We’ll be here for all your news every week throughout the rest of this year.
All the best to you in 2025. We wish you the best and we wish you, uh, a ton of success as you go about your projects, whether they’re side projects or your main gig. Stay with us here, ’cause we’ll be here all year talking about it, Brooks, until we talk again, thanks for coming by.
Brooks: Here’s to a great year.
Thanks.
Spencer: Hey there. Thanks so much for listening to the Niche Pursuits podcast. Did you know that Jared and I are members of a private group called the Niche Pursuits Community? And today I wanna share with you how you can join for just $1. The Niche Pursuits Community is a private members area for niche online publishers.
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