Why is Reddit Disappearing from Google? The Truth Will Surprise You

Welcome back to the Niche Pursuits News Podcast!

This week Jared sits down with guest host Thomas Smith to talk about the latest news, share their thoughts, reveal the stats behind their side hustles, and highlight some of the strategies being used by some weird niche sites.

Let’s get started!

The first news item they talk about is that Reddit’s traffic is declining, a surprising development to say the least! With their visibility dropping quite a bit, and they discuss the site’s metrics and an interesting tweet from Lily Ray.

Thomas saw little drops for big keywords, so Reddit is still getting a lot of traffic, and he shares some other observations. Where is this story headed? Do you agree with Thomas’ thoughts about AI Overviews? Is it a “deal with the devil,” as Jared says?

Listen to the full episode to hear what they have to say.

Then, Jared brings us up to speed on the TikTok drama that could lead to the platform’s ban in the coming days. As Thomas says, it’s a total nailbiter!

He also offers some great advice in view of the TikTok situation and the use of different platforms to build businesses. How will this shift the landscape? Who will benefit if TikTok disappears? 

Do you agree with their predictions?

Moving along, they talk about Google and its decline in market share to less than 90% for the first time since 2015. So where is it going, and why? Is this a real trend? 

Is Google more like Kodak or McDonalds? Do you agree with Jared’s view of the current scenario, or with Thomas’ predictions?

Jared then talks about his HCU-website which he then was able to revive on Pinterest. January is off to a great start, despite low RPMs, with $4200 to date. 

He talks briefly about his strategy and about how looking for an alternative strategy after the HCU really paid off. Could you use a similar strategy on your sites?

Then Thomas provided an update on his YouTube channel and talks about why he’s leaning into video at the moment.

He talks about putting his Amazon Influencer videos on YouTube, where he made around $2400 last month from a combination of those videos and others. He also talks about his content and goals for the future.

Are the riches really in the niches? What do you think about Thomas’ advice, and his future plans?

Then Jared shares his weird niche site, Flight Memory. He talks about the site’s features. How’s it doing traffic-wise? What do you think of the concept? Do you agree that there are missed opportunities?

 When it’s Thomas’ turn, he shares What’s Good at Trader Joe’s, an exact match domain and review site for the store. He talks about the content and monetization strategy and its recent growth.

Do you agree that there’s value in pivoting to news content, as Thomas says?

And that brings us to the end of another episode of the Niche Pursuits News Podcast. We hope you got a better handle on the biggest headlines in the industry, feel inspired by the hosts’ side hustles and ideas, and got some new ideas after exploring some very weird niche sites.

See you next week!

Transcript

Jared: Welcome to another week of niche pursuits news. My name is Jared Bauman. So Reddit is back in the news today. Uh, and we finally got a story that does not involve their traffic going to the moon. Uh, quite the opposite in fact. So we’ll get into that one. The, uh, the TikTok deadline it’s looming large in the U S Supreme court recently heard both sides of the case, the deadline January 19th, that is fast approaching.

So we’ll analyze what was said. And what the future might look like. Finally, we’ve got some updated numbers pertaining to Google’s overall market share of search. Their stronghold on organic search seems like it might be finally slipping a bit. So, uh, we’ve talked about that a number of times in the podcast.

We’ve got some new data that we’ll go over. Moving along, it’s mid January already, so we’ll get an update on our side hustles and how they’re looking. Uh, early on here for 2025. And of course, two weird niche sites, one related to travel and another one related to food. Joining me today, Thomas Smith.

Thomas, welcome back. How you doing?

Thomas: I’m doing great. Thrilled to be here.

Jared: Happy new year. Can’t remember if we’ve done one yet in the new year. Have we done one yet in 2025? I don’t think we have. No, this is

Thomas: the first one. So yeah, I’m excited to kick off the year.

Jared: Welcome to be here. Uh, happy to have you here and welcome to 2025.

I blended both of those. Um, let’s get into our first story today and it’s kind of a big one. I mean, we’re, we’re talking about where we talked about Reddit for probably about a year and a half now, if I was guessing, and that year and a half has really been mostly, Hey, Reddit is going up into the right.

And, um, it feels like very well timed ever since they, um. Uh, kind of did this deal with Google to license their content. They seem to have been rewarded leaps and bounds in, um, in, in search. Right. And so they’ve moved up to like one of the top two or three positions in terms of visibility and the entire world for websites, but in the last week or so, uh, their visibility has dropped.

Quite a bit. So the article here is from Search Engine Roundtable is written, um, a week ago by, uh, Barry Schwartz here, and it says Reddit not ranking as well in Google suddenly. Um, and basically, uh, people started noticing that, um, uh, there was a small but visible ranking drop for Reddit, but that has since picked up speed since this article has come out.

Um, uh, some of the early metrics in, if you can see this chart, uh, Cistrix chart shared by Glenn Gabe, you can see that drop. It might not look like much, but let me go ahead and share a, um, subsequent tweet by Lily Ray. Uh, and I’ll have this up and, and she shared here on January 13th. So this is about four days later and really only a couple of days ago.

And you can see that that drop in visibility has kind of, um, has gotten a bit more extreme and that’s normal, right? It takes a while for these rank trackers and these visibility indexes to pick up on the actual results versus what is, you know, kind of looked at, at first glance. But, um, according to what she had here, uh, here is they dropped from number three to number four in terms of the world’s most visible.

domains. Um, and they’re showing a percent drop of 18 percent in one week. Um, and so that would be pretty major to have a, we’ll just for rounding air called 20 percent or so, uh, one in five of those queries that they were ranking really well for are now. Uh, have fallen a bit. I’m being oversimplified on purpose for the record, but it’s just a huge shift for a website That’s just gone completely up and to the right for about 18 to 24 months now

Thomas: Yeah, I mean, I think we shouldn’t feel so sorry for reddit yet.

Like if people are looking at the screen It’s like this mountain the graphs of these mountains and then this It’s a little dip at the end, but it is picking up momentum. And, you know, I did a bit of digging on this and I was looking at what, what some other folks have been saying. And it seems like it doesn’t seem like a, you know, Forbes advisor style hit where they’re just sort of being phased out of, out of the rankings.

What I saw were basically like little drops in big keywords is the best way I could think to put it. So like Reddit was ranking, I think like second place or something for chat GPT. Which is obviously like one of the hottest keywords at the moment, and they dropped to fourth place or something like that.

So they’re still, you know, getting tons of traffic for a term where it’s questionable whether they should exactly be in there. But, um, it’s, it’s still, these are such huge terms that even that little kind of adjustment or tweak. Means something like hundreds of millions of, you know, fewer, fewer, uh, uh, views.

So that’s what I saw. And it really seemed to be, and this sort of mirrors what I, what I saw the discussion in the article and also online, it seems to be branded terms like that, like chat GPT. Um, another one I saw was bath and body works. You know, they were ranking well for that. I guess people talking about their favorite products or whatever, and they’ve lost some position on those kinds of things.

And cumulatively, that seems to have made for a pretty big drop at this point. So, I think my big question is, is this going to keep up, are we going to see bigger changes, are we going to see them drop for other things, or is it really kind of a story more about Google choosing different branded, uh, you know, different results for branded searches.

Reddit was getting more of that than they should have, and now they’ve sort of adjusted to where they should be, and we’ll see that. Taper off a drop taper off.

Jared: Well, like you said in the article, it was addressed like, hey, how are some of these other UGC sites doing or some of the other ones that are often lumped in with Reddit stack exchange in court were both analyzed in this article, and they both seem to be doing fine.

During this january 7th update, uh, and a bit to your point glenn gabe shared his thoughts on twitter And it was pulled into this article. I’ll quote a couple things He said for reddit i’m seeing drops across several tools when digging in there are potential several factors at play Uh, here you go thomas.

I see reddit dropping from any branded queries So that could be a relevancy adjustment or tweak by google also the what are people saying cert feature does contain reddit often but Reddit could be dropping in the organic results, right? So there’s way, there’s different ways that Reddit is getting pulled in here, um, to, to Google.

And we’ve seen that, like, it just seems sometimes like they own the organic spot. They own the, what people are saying spot, they’ll own a PAA. And so Glenn addresses that by saying, also, I’m seeing Reddit drop across both the organic results and insert features like PAA, image packs, et cetera. Again, very early, but worth noting, stay tuned.

So, you know, Reddit has taken up so much real estate. And in such a variety of Google real estate places like PAAs, along with your organic search, like there’s a lot of opportunity for them to lose. And, and I, to your point, I want to point that out, like. They have almost nowhere to go, but down. So going down doesn’t necessarily mean they’re getting penalized or something.

It just, any adjustment nowadays would almost certainly see them go down just because that’s the only place they can go.

Thomas: Yeah. Unless they’re going to be in the first slot for literally every single query, you know, it’s. Yeah, it’s only, only down from here. I think, you know, one, one of the theory I saw floating around was that there’s more AI overviews showing up for a broader range of SERP features.

So, um, I think there was one tweet. I don’t remember who, uh, who posted it, but, um, mentioning that. Some of the PAAs were starting to have AI overviews. So when you click that little dropdown of, you know, the, the people also ask instead of getting a website result, it’s kind of just adding to that AI overview summary.

And so if they were showing up in a lot of those SERP features and those are now kind of getting eaten by the AI overviews, that could be another reason why they might be losing some of that visibility, some of that traffic. Kind of feeling the pain we’ve all been feeling for a bit over a year now, you know, since it was search generative experience and we all started losing traffic to it.

I think they kind of were in this different position of being UGC content, but if Google’s now starting to say, okay, you know, we bought all your data, read it. We know the answer to this. We don’t need to send people over to you. We can answer it with a AI overview instead of sending traffic to Reddit that they might be seeing a little bit of drop in that.

That could pick up. We could see this start to accelerate. If that’s the case.

Jared: I mean, we’ve talked about it for, they’ve kind of done a deal with the devil, right? Like, Hey, here’s our content. We’re going to let you license it. And we know people like it. That’s in theory, why you’re putting at the top of Google results.

So here’s a licensing deal, which is awesome. But now that you’re licensing it, you kind of, at some point won’t need it. And so where do we go from here? And I don’t know if that’s what we’re starting to see to your, you know, like, is AI overview starting to say like, thanks Reddit. We’ve kind of gotten all the value we need.

We can now answer all these queries without having to rank Reddit number one. We can just kind of say, this is what it is. Or do people still like and prefer, um, a UGC experience where instead of getting a Google and AI overviews, giving them the answer they’re getting, you know, uh, Billy Bob Thornton from, uh, you know, from the sticks answering their Reddit query or something, you know, it’s hard to say.

Where user intent comes in versus, Hey, we have the answer. Let’s just give it to people. So I don’t know. I don’t know what’s coming to play for this 18 percent drop, but it’s going to be interesting to see how it progresses. I think from a bigger level, it’s nice, I suppose, as content creators to see like, Oh, maybe this is a sign that people don’t think that.

Random users generating answers over authoritative sources is the end all be all. But again, I’m just grasping there. We don’t know that.

Thomas: Yeah, I mean, another possibility is maybe they started to see they were kind of getting in trouble for what looked like a little bit of a shady thing. Like, you know, we’re gonna, we’re gonna cut this deal where we get access to your data.

Then all of a sudden, you know, you’re going to just surge and we’re suddenly sending so much more traffic. Over to you. And hey, that yields more data and we have access to that. And I think, you know, in our community, people were starting to point out that that feels a little fishy and maybe they were thinking there was gonna be another verge article, you know, going after that practice or whatever and decided they get ahead of it and kind of just tamp it down a little bit.

So that’s the other thing I’m thinking is like, with all the stuff happening with antitrust and these weird deals that they’ve caught, maybe they were thinking we shouldn’t really be Putting Reddit so high and we’ll just tone it down a little, give Cora a bit more traffic.

Jared: Well, speaking of not getting ahead of things, let’s move to our next story.

And the fact that we’re coming up on a deadline here where no one has seemed to get ahead of it. And we’re waiting in the last hours to figure out what actually is going on. I feel like we’ve been talking about this for years. I don’t, I know it hasn’t been years, um, but it, it feels like it. And that is this whole TikTok saga.

Um, this week. We’re coming fast upon the deadline, uh, and I’m sharing the wrong screen here. Uh, we’re coming fast upon the deadline for TikTok’s, uh, ban. This was, this went through in Congress, uh, back in April of 2023. And the Supreme Court weighed in this past week on it. And they, uh, obviously, uh, needed to have, uh, You know, we’re not legal experts here, but basically it went all the way to the Supreme Court for whether or not TikTok was allowed to get banned in the United States or not.

And they didn’t rule on it, but they did have a lot to say on it. Um, basically, to bring you up to speed, Congress passed a law. That labeled TikTok’s Chinese ownership as a national security risk. Uh, that law required that ByteDance, which is their parent company, has to sell the platform by January 19th or face a ban in the United States.

TikTok argued that it, uh, violated their First Amendment rights. And so on and on we go until we get to the Supreme Court this past week. The justices expressed skepticism about TikTok’s First Amendment defense. Um, they kind of focused on the risk of the Chinese influence on it. Uh, TikTok’s lawyers argued that the law violates free speech by targeting their content.

Um, uh, uh, soon to be President Trump actually requested, uh, the court delay the law implementation until his term begins. He’s kind of been outspoken about wanting to settle it outside of court and not have to do this. The justices in the Supreme Court seem disinterested in this and disinterested in granting the request, um, viewing it as lacking substance.

Uh, we have another article here that came out on Reuters and this just came out today. It says TikTok prepares to shut down app in U. S. on Sunday, sources say. Um, and I’ll read this part here. TikTok plans to shut U. S. operations of its social media app used by 170 million Americans on Sunday when a federal ban is set to take effect, barring a last minute reprieve, people familiar with the matter said on Wednesday.

The Washington Post reported President elect Donald Trump, whose term begins a day after the ban, guy, the coincidence there, is considering issuing an executive order to suspend enforcement. Uh, the report did not say how Trump could legally do so. Um, users who have downloaded TikTok would theoretically still be able to use the app, except the law also bans U.

S. companies starting Sunday from providing services to enable the distribution, maintenance of up, or of updating it. Okay, lot there. Uh, I feel like we still don’t know exactly what’s gonna happen, but we have to talk about it. I mean, we’re kind of at the 11th hour. And it doesn’t look like, I mean, I, I’ll, I’ll be the first to admit, like, I, I figured at some point, somehow this would get worked out.

It feels like TikTok might be getting shut down.

Thomas: It’s a nail biter. I mean, you know, I, I kind of remain skeptical that much is going to happen with the Google antitrust thing. Like, I know a lot of people are saying, Oh, they’re going to split Chrome. You know, they’re going to do all this stuff. I kind of feel like that’s not really going to happen.

But this one, this is kind of a similar thing where we’ve been following and saying, Hey, they could break up this company, you know, and it feels like we’re kind of at that at that point where we’re definitely going to get some kind of an answer, you know, I think there’s, it seems like there’s a couple of concerns.

There’s the idea that if you control something that 170 million Americans are using, and you get to. Dictate what it says and what gets amplified. You know, it gives you a lot of control. Um, and then also I know there’s some challenges with like you have access to everybody’s photos. You have access to their location.

Um, and so that’s I think some of the grounds that this is this is being kind of challenged on. I again, not a legal expert, so I don’t think we know how it’s going to pan out, but just looking at it from the perspective of content creators and folks in our space. This just hammers home to me, platform risk, right?

Like people, you know, there’s this message that you sometimes get, and I know both of us are the kind of people that have a ton of side hustles, and we love to diversify and go off in many directions. And people will say to me, Hey, you know, you’re really wasting your time. You should hone in on one platform.

I hear that all the time. Put all your energy into that. Like, what are you doing? I got several of those comments

Jared: on LinkedIn this week. Yeah.

Thomas: It’s like focus, you know, people say that and you just hone in and like, really, you know, put your head down and five years later, you’ll have this incredible channel.

And, you know, if you just, but then this really shows you, I mean, I feel really badly for the people who did that with TikTok built up these huge followings and it could all just go, go away, you know, poof, it’s all gone. So to me, it really hammers home, you know, don’t listen to the people who say, avoid side hustles, lean into one thing, focus your efforts.

You know, you can do that, but the risks are huge because you could build a following of a hundred thousand or a million people and have this huge ecosystem on one app. And then one of these legal decisions could just make it go poof and you’re back to square one.

Jared: I feel like so much of the reasons why I never really saw this coming to fruition probably is wrapped up in that most of this is both political.

And, um, and, and, and, uh, and, uh, international, right? Like it’s, it’s not really about the social media platform. We’re so used to talking about social media or Google from an algorithmic standpoint, right? Like, uh, Tik TOK from a standpoint of their algorithm, their rankings, who they’re prioritizing, whether they’re giving content creators a fair shake.

Right. We talk about that on every platform. And if the algorithm is going to be what comes to hurt you and your efforts, it’s not really. Well, not usually something where it’s a political thing, it’s a, uh, a legal thing, right? And with the Google antitrust lawsuit, we were able to wade into that because so much of the information that was coming out of that was what we did, right?

It was algorithmic. It was partnerships with the ad team. It was how the ad team worked with other platforms like Apple and how the, uh, Chrome experience worked with Apple and how the third party data was used. Like this is all stuff we kind of know well, because we’re in that world. So much of this just feels out of left field to us.

I think I’ll speak for me because I’m not a legal expert. I’m not in the political scene, so I don’t really understand much of it. So it almost feels like a kind of blindsider caught me by surprise.

Thomas: Yeah. And, you know, I, I think the thing to look at here too, is even if this does get turned around last minute, what damage has already been done and how might.

This shift the landscape for vertical video, because I know, I mean, I don’t have a big presence on TikTok, but if I was a TikTok creator, I would be going to other places, you know, even if it comes back, I would never be able to trust it was going to be there again. So I’m wondering what impact this will have.

And the thing I’m thinking is, it’s probably going to be really good. For YouTube shorts and for Instagram reels and Facebook reels. And I’m wondering if some of those big name TikTok creators are going to end up at least having a presence on these other platforms. So for me as a YouTuber, where that’s the, that’s the main video platform.

I’ll talk about that in a little bit, but I’m wondering, are we going to suddenly have a huge influx of creators and audiences? Will this be good for some people who maybe aren’t as reliant on TikTok?

Jared: I’ll flip that on its head though. And play devil’s advocate with you. I feel like this might scare off a lot of content creators from Tik TOK, but if it does come back, I doubt it will make much of a dent on any of the 180 million Americans that use it.

They’ll just be like, Oh, whatever. That was. You know, that was a blip. I’m back to TikTok and there could be this gap of content creators that left the platform because of platform risk and an opportunity for someone willing to take the risk to go back and be able to have maybe a little bit of an easier platform to, um, to, to create content for, uh, with perhaps roughly the same number of eyeballs.

I don’t know. Just thinking out loud.

Thomas: Yeah, and I saw people saying, okay, well, you know, I’ll just get a VPN and I’ll access it, you know, even if it’s banned and I think that, you know, like you said, if the algorithm there is still as strong as it is, I think is one of the big selling points for Tick Tock is a really good at matching people.

With content and there’s fewer creators and, you know, people stay on there or it sounds like the app doesn’t just disappear from your phone. You’ll just sort of not be able to update it. Maybe you’ll have to jump through some hoops to, to be able to access it. I’m not exactly sure. But if there’s maybe still an audience there and still the same tech, or maybe you’re reaching an audience in other places, maybe it means you have to diversify your content to reach the countries where this is not banned.

Jared: And remember the, um, the goal from the legal perspective is not to actually get rid of TikTok. It’s to have them sell their stake. To a non Chinese owner from what we understand. So it’s, it’s, it’s not that they’re trying to get rid of Tik TOK. They’re trying to change up the way the ownership model works because of data.

So we’ll see, boot your phones up on Sunday morning, see what’s going on. If you got Tik TOK app on your phone, you’ll probably be the first to know just when you wake up on Sunday. Open that up, app up and see what happens.

Thomas: Exactly. Yeah. We need some company to come and just start hoovering up all these, you know, take Chrome from Google, take, take tech talk and, you know, just create some new company.

That’s got all these pieces that are getting shed from the, from the other big, uh, big companies and social media, you know, it’d be interesting, but yeah, I’ll, I’ll certainly check and see what happens with it. That’s a great point. You know, this could end up getting absorbed into some other company and then that just.

Makes it that much more, um, competitive. So

Jared: you heard it here first, Thomas predicts Chrome and TikTok to merge. Uh, wouldn’t that be great. Boy, that’d give us a lot to talk about. Um, Hey Google. So wouldn’t be a podcast episode of the news if we didn’t talk about Google. They’re in the news. The timing is interesting because we have, um, we’ve talked about this, uh, Without data, right?

We’ve talked about this from the standpoint of, Hey, how’s Google’s market share doing in light of all that’s gone on in 2024? We’ve got the antitrust lawsuit. We’ve got AI overviews. We’ve got chat GPT. We’ve got so much going on. You mentioned half the stuff, right? Well, here we’ve got a story that says that their market share has dropped below 90 percent for the first time since 2015.

And, um, this is very interesting because, uh, we’ve been talking on and on about that. I do want to read a couple things from this article, but I thought I’d quickly turn over to you, Thomas, and get your reaction to this news, because it’s something we’ve been surmising for a little while.

Thomas: Yeah, you know, we reported this back, I think, about a year ago, even, when there was just a little blip.

And a lot of people came, came in after that, you know, on social media and all over and said, not necessarily to us, but to the overall reporting on this topic, you know, it seems like it was just maybe the stats weren’t kind of tallied correctly and it was just a kind of a measurement error or something.

So to see it actually reflected here in these three data points of the drop at the end of the year. And to see that this is really more than just kind of a blip, uh, I think validates, yeah, they’re, they’re losing market share. And I think the biggest question then is, well, where’s it going and why? You know, is this, is this something that’s going to accelerate?

And, and does this mean that somebody else is gaining? Before we looked at Bing and saw that Bing had picked up some market share, that seems to be holding steady. They seem to be at, I think it was about a 4 percent

Jared: market share.

Thomas: Nothing to write home about overall, you know, compared to, to Google, but still, um, that’s hundreds of millions, billions of extra queries that they picked up.

I know I’m still seeing more Bing traffic than I did before, um, but it seems like this is something that’s sticking. And so I think that’s makes it a much more interesting story than just, Hey, we noticed this little drop could have been a measurement error. It seems like maybe it came back. This seems like a real trend.

And so we really have to hone in and say, okay, what does this mean? And, and where’s it going

Jared: to your point? I mean, we reported earlier that there was this drop, right? And I can’t remember, is it. It’s a stat counter and then they reversed it and like, oops, sorry, we made a mistake. And it’s like, well, that’s kind of a big mistake to make.

You might not want to. So I think that this is different because this is three months worth of drops. Okay. So this isn’t like, oops, we made a mistake. If you’re listening and you’re like, Hey, they reported this. Turned out to be a mistake, like what Thomas said, this is three months worth of data that is under 90%, and so it’s much more sticky, and frankly, I don’t know if you can see this, Thomas, but, uh, I wish they had numbers here, you know, so we could see what the percent was, say, a year ago, I feel like it was 93, 94 percent a year ago.

Uh, I, I could be wrong about that. It was definitely like 92 or above. And that makes this drop pretty significant. Like to go from 93 to 89 is a, yeah, pretty big drop. You can kind of see it started about a year ago. Look at this. Like there’s a little drop here in the April, May timeframe. Then some stability, uh, over the summer.

And then really, frankly, it started dropping in July, down to August, down to September, and then October, November, December. Is where we first get those three months that are under 90 percent market share. And so I think I’ll just say kind of like what you said, like, is it a big deal? Yes. And no, it is a really big deal.

It’s a big deal because it’s a huge drop when you look at relative percentages. And that is significant to go from 93 to 89 is significant. Is it significant from the standpoint of like, they’re still the dominant player and are going to be for a very long time to come because of the runway they’ve created.

Yeah, from that standpoint, this really isn’t going to change anything about how, um, how you experience, uh, Google and organic search. So it kind of goes both ways at the same conversation, you know?

Thomas: Yeah. And I think before there was some thinking that they just made a lot of people angry with the quality of the AI overviews or lack of quality of AI overviews.

Enough people were told to put glue on their pizza that they just decided to go elsewhere and went to Bing. And that was the story, you know, last year. With this, it seems like Bing has held steady and it’s the other category that’s starting to gain. And that, presumably, is a lot of the perplexities and, you know, chat GPT searches of the world.

And that, to me, also is much more significant. Because that means maybe these AI powered search engines are starting to pick up steam. And so I, I just start to think, you know, is Google a Kodak or a McDonald’s? Like those are the breakdowns to me. Cause we saw, you know, Kodak was this, this world leading company.

They developed this incredible technology. They were the company in the, you know, the early 1900s. And then they just kind of failed to keep up with the shift to digital. And now they’re pretty much a non entity. I mean, they exist really only in name versus, you know, McDonald’s. They innovated and created this idea of.

Fast food. And for a while again, you know, they were the company doing it. And then your Wendy’s and your Taco Bells and everyone came in and it’s not like McDonald’s went away. There’s still this huge, powerful company. They just. Had to share the market with a bunch more people. So that’s, I think the big question here, and I’m sure Google is asking themselves that question too.

You know, are they the Kodak or the McDonald’s? Like, did they miss the boat on the pivot to AI? Are they not going to be able to recover? And ultimately everybody’s going to move over to these AI powered search experiences, and they’re going to end up, you know, like Kodak with, with not much to show. Or are they going to be the McDonald’s where maybe they’re not going to have a 92 percent market share, maybe it’ll land 70%, they’re still going to be huge, but they’re going to have to share the market with more people.

And I don’t think anybody knows exactly. I mean, my guess is probably, you know, we’re not going to be saying goodbye to Google for a very long time, if at all, but it’s. Always interesting when you see somebody who’s been the dominant player in the market for decades now, really, um, start to, start to lose share and you have to say, where’s this going to land?

Jared: I’ll read this out of the search engine land article we have on screen here. I think it kind of sums it up nicely and then we’ll, we’ll kind of move on. But the big picture, Google has been under attack for nearly two years over the growing unhelpfulness of its search results, despite dominating thanks to its illegal monopoly status with a commanding 90 to 92 percent share for nearly a decade.

So I guess I was off by a percent or two. The article goes on. We’re finally starting to see the beginning, uh, of people moving away to other search engines. Um, they, they go on to say, where does searchers go? You kind of address this a little bit at the front end, Thomas. Did they go to AI answer engines like ChatGPD search and Perplexity?

Well, not the way StatCounter measures things. I thought this was interesting. StatCounter mainly tracks Microsoft Bing, Yandex, Yahoo, and Baidu. But also has another grouping called other, which includes the likes of DuckDuckGo and uh, uh, uh, Akosha. Uh, Bing, Yandex, and Yahoo each gained some of Google’s lost share.

Can you believe Yahoo’s gaining? My goodness, I haven’t heard that in 20 years. Uh, second place, Microsoft being hovered at just under 4 percent for the final five months of 2024. So it’s, it’s a little bit hard to understand where that data is going because I don’t think they’re tracking. Search GPT, uh, you know, even chat GPT, which isn’t the same as organic search, but kind of is cause we all kind of use them interchangeably depending on, on who you are and how you use it.

But we don’t really know where it’s going. And that’s a bit of a mystery. Um, but we do know being in some of those are picking up, are picking up some of that slack. Um, very interesting. I mean, you, you can’t look at that data coming out at the beginning of 2025. I go back to how Spencer and I finished the year.

Uh, the year end podcast on 2024 and we talked about the 2 biggest stories in our opinion of 2024 were AI overviews in the antitrust lawsuit. And so both of us pick stories related to Google. And we kind of concluded 2024 by talking about do we have a 2 horse race now? Do we have a multi horse race? Is Google?

Really up against it now, and this data just seems a couple weeks later pile on the fact that we’ve got ourselves at the beginnings of more than Google when it comes to search going forward.

Thomas: Yeah, like Spencer said, and then I think their CEO echoed. They have to get scrappy if they’re gonna, you know, kind of become the dominant player and I and I don’t know what what 2025 will hold for them.

I. Suspect that, you know, these new players are going to continue to take some of that market share. I’d be pretty surprised if we ended 2025 by saying, Hey, Google made back all the, all the stuff they lost in AI. And now everybody uses Gemini and no one, no one cares about what’s happening in open AI anymore.

I would be shocked if that was the outcome. So I think, you know, probably we’re going to see a continued decline here. But I really doubt it’s going to be something, you know, massive. I think another, maybe they’ll lose another five, 10 percent market share, um, in a worst case scenario, I could be wrong though.

I mean, that’s the thing about tech, you know, disruptions happen and they can happen a lot faster than people think.

Jared: Got a vision, Thomas, as we kind of transition out of the news. Of, uh, you know, you and I are going to be grandparents sitting by the fire in 40 years. And one of our grandkids is going to walk up and say, grandpa, tell me a story about when Google was the top of the market.

Right. Well, pull up a chair. Let me tell you a yarn. It’s going to be a while before they lose that prestigious seat. But yeah, we might be seeing the beginning of the dominoes starting to fall. So.

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Jared: Uh, well, uh, that was a fun week of news, you know, there’s so many different topics, so many different storylines.

I mean, I can’t wait for next week. We’re going to be able to report back on TikTok and figure out where we’re at with that mess. Um, uh, uh, we’ll see where Reddit’s at, you know, see if Reddit’s still at, you know, 20%, more than 20 percent drop. So a lot of stuff that if you’re listening today. We’re going to check back in on a week or so as you want to make sure to be here next week as we talk about that.

Um, hey, so this will be the first one for you of 2025. Looking forward to hearing your side hustle update. That means we’ve been about a month since we’ve heard from you on that. I’ll go first though. People are going to have to wait a little bit for yours. Uh, I’m first on the agenda here I see. So we always follow the agenda.

I laugh jokingly because we don’t, uh, it’s just more of a guide, but, um, uh, I’m going to talk about, uh, give an update on my website that was hit by the helpful content update. And I’ve talked about frequently that I’m driving Pinterest traffic to, and that we’ve had a full rebound on, right. If you know, just, you know, catch you up if you haven’t, if you haven’t been listening, but basically this site was destroyed by the helpful content update and the March 2024 update.

Started a Pinterest first focus in, you know, right after that April, May, June, um, recovered the site to earning more than 2, 000 a month by October. Uh, it broke, uh, 2, 600, I think, if it was, in December. And, uh, January. January is off to a fantastic start now, full disclosure, January is one of its better months due to seasonality and due to the type of site it is and an appeal.

So January will always be one of its best months. It has historically, this is like the fourth year of owning it that we’ve had it. Um, but we’ve followed the same exact strategy, posting content every single day to Pinterest. Via fresh content that we publish on the website. Um, and if you, if you, if you’re familiar with owning websites and owning properties in January, you know, that January means low RPMs.

So when I report the numbers for the site and how it’s doing so far in January, just know that the RPMs are probably only about 60 percent what they were last month. So huge drops, right? And that’s not abnormal. So if you’re looking at your RPMs, this is your first January going through being on like a media vine or a raptive, like very normal.

30, 40 percent drops typical because so many advertisers just dumped all their ad budget in Q4 and aren’t in a hurry to spend it starting this year. Um, so far, halfway through January, recording the 16th, we got 15 days for the data. Uh, we’re on pace for a 4, 200 a month. So that would be more than 50 percent above the previous site’s high of 2, 600.

Now again, The site, uh, previous high, which was last month, January is one of the best months for this site historically, pre HCU and post HCU. Pre HCU, January was the highest earning month and it only came in at just over 2, 000. We’ve already eclipsed 2, 000 15 days in, so it’s gonna Set a record, uh, more than likely.

Um, and, uh, uh, the RPMs aren’t great, but the traffic is really, really high. Six, seven, 8, 000 page view days. Um, and it had, uh, over the weekend, it set a record, had a 225 day, uh, on one day, uh, via Raptive. So site’s doing very well. It’s supposed to do well in January. It will drop off. Kind of february march just because of seasonality because of the way the niche is but happy to report man It is um, it is a it is really successful when it comes to the flip flop of where it was a year ago Uh, even before the march 2024 update

Thomas: What a great recovery story, you know, it’s like it just shows you if it hadn’t been for the HCU, you would have just kept plugging along with organic search and you never would have found this.

And, you know, I, I imagine that Google, Google traffic is pretty high quality, but Pinterest in my experience is even better in terms of the quality and the RPMs depending on the niche this is in. And, um, so I can imagine, you know, you’re probably not only getting more traffic, but you’re probably seeing, even with the drop in January, which is brutal, by the way, my site is down, it’s like every year I know it’s coming and every year I’m like, Oh, it won’t be this year, this year will be the year and every time it’s just, it’s, yeah, it’s brutal.

Jared: It takes, it knocks your legs out from underneath you every year, even though you know it’s coming, you know, I’ve been doing this for almost a decade, right? Like. Why am I surprised? And I’m still like, Oh my goodness, look at those RPMs. And I wouldn’t say I’m surprised as much as just so saddened because those December RPMs are so good.

I guess the flip side is at least the traffic is so good in January. It kind of makes that fall from those good RPMs a little bit easier, you know?

Thomas: Yeah. I mean, again, you know, we talked about diversification. I think a lot of us have. Sites that are in kind of e com niches or niches that do well around the holiday.

So like my main site is kind of news and travel and it’s not that that’s necessarily a holiday thing, but people are home. So they’re looking for stuff to do, they’re looking for activities and they’re planning their trip for the next year. So it tends to do well and the RPMs are super high, but if you can own a site in a space.

I think of like if you’re doing gym reviews or something like that, that’s going to do well after the, after the new year, then that can be something to think about adding to your portfolio. Cause otherwise the RPMs are great, but like you said, you know, if you’ve got all your sites in that, in that December timeframe, you’re going to have this huge month.

But then how’s that going to work out for you the rest of the year and you might trick yourself into saying, wow, you know, December was so great. I should invest all this back into my site or, you know, I should go on to some giant vacation. And then, you know, you find out, hey, once you get into the new year, your RPMs are dropped.

So I love that. You appear to have a site here that not only Has recovered and is doing great in a, and really well, I mean, 4, 200 bucks, um, in a, in a totally new strategy with Pinterest, but it tells a story about that diversification, like, you know, you don’t come out of the holidays and go off, you know, new year.

I’m not going to do well at all. You’ve got this, this. It’s a site that’s, uh, you know, going to, going to pick up traffic. So that’s fantastic.

Jared: And if you’re not careful to that point, I’ll just offer this little piece of advice, especially if you’re newer on this side of things, like you come out of for oftentimes, like if you’re typical, you got the higher RPMs, you got the e commerce type sales.

And so November and December can be really good. Well, you don’t really get the checks for that until January and February. You know, sometimes in a March, depending on which ad platform you’re on, or if you’re on Amazon as a January and February are depressing. Look at the numbers, but then you get the big check and you’re like, well, it’s not so bad.

And then you get to like March and April and you’re like, oh my goodness, like RPMs aren’t that great yet. And the money from January is starting to come in and it’s really bad. And so it can really kind of catch you by surprise in January to see that RPM drop. But then in March, you’re like, oh my goodness, my check this month is going to be awful.

Um. Yeah, circling back just to finish it off. Yeah, you’re right. The Pinterest traffic is amazing, uh, at least for this niche, right? Like time on site much higher and Google time on site is usually pretty good, uh, from organic search, uh, number of pages per session, right? Page views per session is another good metric to look at, especially if you’re an ad revenue generating type site, because you know, every page they look at, you’re going to generate new ads.

You’re going to, uh, uh, get more money per visitor, which kind of. Speaks to that RPM, depending on how you measure that. That’s also very good. One of the higher average pages per session is from Pinterest. So, all around good source of traffic, good quality traffic. Um, Uh, yeah, very happy overall and, uh, hope to continue it.

So, um, uh, let’s turn over to you. Let’s get some updates. I can only imagine. Are we getting new side hustles today? Are you going to finally just update us on the bevy of side hustles? You’ve already introduced us to.

Thomas: Yeah. I mean, today it’s mostly an update. Um, I, I think there’s potential to start new things here, but I figured I’d, you know, kind of let you know where I am.

Um, overall, uh, on one thing I’ve talked about before, which is video. So I’ve shared about my YouTube channel and YouTube channels, actually. And I’m not talking about toaster guy. Toaster guy is continuing to do great. Yeah. I mean, that’s everybody wants to hear more about toaster guy. I think we’re at maybe 1700 views or something like that across toaster guys, uh, uh, video.

So I’ll certainly will continue to develop it. That’s yeah, that’s, that’s not the, my, uh, yeah, my. My toaster related ukulele songs, unfortunately not taken off. I haven’t gotten a record deal yet. I’m assuming that’s, that’s coming, but, um, what I, yeah, what I am focused on is video because I think, you know, what we’ve seen with.

With AI first, it kind of ate all the content sites and it was so easy to generate pretty good articles with AI that we’ve seen the shift where it’s no longer valued as much. And then we started to see it with. Imagery too. I mean, I go to Facebook and so many sites are just, I mean, so many pages are just using really beautiful, but AI generated imagery and I feel like video is one of the last holdouts.

And I’m sure that eventually video is going to kind of get supplanted by AI to some extent, but it feels like that’s where a lot of the. Traffic that formerly had gone to info sites or travel sites is now going to YouTube. And also as a YouTuber, I’m looking at the TikTok ban and saying, Hey, you know, well, if there’s suddenly a demand for vertical video and people aren’t, uh, You know, aren’t able to get it from Tik Tok, maybe they’ll come over to me.

So I’m really leaning into video. And the other thing that really inspired me here was your numbers from Amazon influencer. You share it in the last couple of podcasts. I’m looking at that and going, wow, I am missing out on an opportunity here because you just crushed it. I know you’re not updating on that.

This week, but listening to the last couple of podcasts, hearing about how your November, December were, and really all you did was make a lot more videos. And that’s, that’s the bottom line where we do it in a pretty similar style. And you really, you know, just really did a great job of that. So I’m thinking, okay, I got to step it up.

I got to kind of match your pace. On what you did, which I think you said was about 30 or 40 new videos per month and

Jared: so about 424. So you just divide that by 12 and you’re like, whatever, 35, you know, 30, 36 a month, something like that. Yeah,

Thomas: yeah. So, you know, if I can do that, if I can review all my products that I’ve gotten, I’ve kind of gotten a little bit complacent about not doing as much of that.

And I can start to add to that. And I’ve seen, I think you alluded to this before too, but I’ve seen a pretty strong start to 2025 on Amazon influencer. I wasn’t expecting that. Normally it drops off, but I’ve been seeing pretty good performance so far in 2025. So that really gives me hope that this is an area I should put more time and effort into.

So that’s really one of the core pieces is just to do more of those kinds of video reviews. Um, the kind of stuff that I’ve been doing for influencer all along, but then my other strategy around that, that I’ve shared before is you take those videos. And add them into a YouTube channel. And my main one is DIY life tech.

And it’s kind of a hodgepodge of a bunch of home topics, car topics, um, you know, reviews and that kind of stuff. And it did really well in December, it made 2, 395 just, and this isn’t sponsorships or anything, literally just from the AdSense earnings on there. Um, and that’s a lot of stuff that’s kind of repurposed from influencers.

So, yeah, my goal is to, to sort of match your pace 30 to 40 videos per month in 2025, maybe a bit more, I’ve done 14 so far. So I’m pretty much on pace. Uh, if I do, you know, a couple each day, I think I should be able to get there. Um, and then I want to take those videos and post them to. DIY life tech and kind of keep growing that channel.

Cause again, you know, 2, 300, almost 2, 400 bucks in December. That tends to be the best. Month for the channel, but if I can keep that growth going, I think that would be awesome But I also want to start to grow some other channels So I think I mentioned once that I have this channel called California dad reviews.

Yeah. Yeah, it’s basically like kid products You know stuff related to having kids It is not yet monetized. I have at the moment 777 subscribers 1579 watch hours. So I’d really love to get that channel monetized in 2025. So basically what I’m thinking is I’ll shoot these influencer videos. I’ll shoot some other kind of related videos about the products and that kind of stuff.

And then I’ll sort of just do a filtering. Like I’ll take those videos and the ones that are home related. I’ll put on DIY Life Tech, Tech products, obviously. Anything that’s like my kid’s toys that got over the holidays, I’ll review that. I’ll do Lego sets. I’ll do whatever. I’ll put that on dad reviews and I’ll see.

I want to get that channel monetized. So I need to hit 4, 000 watch hours, basically a little more than doubling and a thousand subscribers. So I need about, yeah, about 300 more subscribers about double my watch hours. I think I can do it, but yeah. What do you think?

Jared: I. Well, I’m really fascinated by this because I want to ask you about this, like you, I’m DIY life tech.

I mean, what percentage of the videos that are on that are your Amazon influencer videos? Because people have long talked about, Hey, take your influencers videos, put them on influencer, but then put them on YouTube. Add an affiliate link to the product. Amazon is totally okay with terms of service. It’s fine if you’re wondering and make money, but I’ve never heard of somebody who made, we’ll call it good money with that YouTube channel.

You know, a couple hundred dollars here, a couple hundred dollars there. Not that that’s anything to sneeze at, but it just was more work. And I was always looking at the payoff, but you’re making the thousands in the thousands of dollars, like how many. Or what percentage of the videos on there are just straight from your influencer?

Thomas: It’s a good percentage i’d say it’s about half of the videos on the channel in terms of the overall number I would say that the value per influencer video on there is much lower. Okay, then the value of the kind of It’s mostly kind of how to and tutorial videos and it’s super simple stuff like literally one.

I think I’ve shared this before. One of my best videos is, um, how to change the, the, um, cloths on your Swiffer wet chat, how to fix your Swiffer wet chat, these kinds of topics, hundreds of thousands of views, um, you know, thousands of dollars in earnings on these. I have one that’s How to light a gas fireplace that has a wall key that does really well this time of year again I think hundreds of thousands of views I’ve started to do car related ones and it’s not like a car review.

It’s how do I open the gas tank? Um, how do I open the trunk? How do I switch on the parking brake? DIY

Jared: life techs, uh, philosophy is like, if you think it’s too simple to need a video for, right up our alley. Absolutely.

Thomas: Yeah. You would be shocked what people need a video for. And it was like, um, you know, about 10 percent of the comments are people being like, you wasted 10 minutes of my life.

Why did you make this video? And then the rest of people are like, I felt so dumb that I couldn’t figure this out. And I wasn’t going to ask a friend and then I found your video and, you know, you saved my road trip and that kind of stuff. So it’s amazing what people need a video to know how to do, but that’s the bread and butter of the channel.

So yeah, uh, earnings wise, a lot of 2400 comes from those, but I would say the RPMs on the reviews are really solid and the channel is very well established. It’s been around since 2015. So, you know, it’s doing well. I think one question I have, and maybe, maybe you have some insight on this. The other kind of video I love to do are kind of these AI tutorials, talking about AI tools, how to use Sora, that kind of thing.

So this gets into the, the new side hustle territory. You know, do I put those on DIY Life Tech? Is that going to dilute that kind of, you know, explainer video type of content? It’s monetized. I’d love to make money from them. Or do I create some new channel, you know, a whole other place to put those AI ones and really lean into that.

Maybe I could sell it or something.

Jared: Well, I’ll answer that by sharing kind of a little bit of a success story. I was actually talking with somebody this week about it and they pointed it out. And I was like, Oh my goodness. Um, related. I’m not sure if it answers your question, but related, I don’t know if you remember about a year ago.

Uh, all the niche pursuits content was under one YouTube channel, the podcast. Both Wednesday and Fridays would go on to the Niche Pursuits YouTube channel and all of Spencer’s videos on different things that were happening in the industry, different tutorials, different things he was trying would go on the same channel.

And, uh, I know there was a lot of conversation that went into it. I was a part of those conversations and Spencer decided to split the two channels. And so we started the channel you’re listening to now if you’re on YouTube, which is a Niche Pursuits podcast channel. Which has not grown massively, but it’s also not the type of channel to pick up a lot of subscribers.

It’s at like seven or 8, 000 subscribers now, still getting about the same amount of watch time though. So that’s interesting. The niche pursuits, uh, channel now when you’re in without podcasts going on. So fewer videos going on, it has doubled subscribers in the last while, huh? And watch time per video is skyrocketing.

And Spencer has been sharing about this, um, on Twitter and Facebook of late. So. I don’t know. The riches seem to be in the niches, my friend.

Thomas: Yeah. Maybe that’s an argument for creating yet another channel. I I’d love to hear the audience’s perspective too. I’ll check the comments. If people want to chime in, let me know what I ought to do.

Um, you know, I’ll, I’ll be here to report on it. So yeah, I mean, that’s, that’s my thinking is create an AI focused channel, really just kind of go in on that on these kinds of videos. I’ve been doing this stuff for a long time. It’s easy enough to shoot them. Honestly, a lot easier than shooting a product video.

You just pull up the tool and bring up OBS and do a screen share and chat for a bit, share some stuff. And you know, I’ve got a newsletter I’ve shared before about AI. I could easily push it out there and get those initial thousand people, maybe get that one monetized. So plus you talk about

Jared: all that.

Stuff on medium. I see your medium articles on, on AI a lot, you know, I don’t know if you can embed them, but you can at least link to them and stuff like that. So a lot of ways to use it. I mean, I got a little bit inspired hearing you talk about it because I’ve always thought when it comes to my influencer videos, do I just push them straight on YouTube?

So if I do a thousand influencer videos in a year, I’d then have a thousand YouTube videos, right? But to some degree, a concept kind of emerged in my head, hearing your numbers and hearing that, yeah, about half of them are influencer, but then there’s this other half that are more how to tutorial, but. You know, for every product you put, make an influencer video on, you know, you got your coffee cup, then you could use like how to reheat your coffee cup in the microwave and, you know, so you can almost basically take the concept of each product you’re doing the influencer video with, and then that could dovetail into a couple of additional kind of how to, or comparison videos, and so you could really round out.

Account, even with just 15 influencer videos a month, you could turn that into 30 or 40 YouTube videos that month. And that could be something that you could also grow in addition to the influencer account.

Thomas: Oh yeah. I mean that the way I ended up creating that, that very lucrative, uh, wall key fireplace thing, I actually got sponsored to do a re a review of a product.

For influencers, that is one of the most ridiculous products I’ve ever seen. It’s basically a little speaker that makes the sound of a fireplace and you put it next to your gas fireplace so that it sounds like a crackling wood fireplace. And when they reached out to me, I was like, this is amazing. I have, I have to do a video.

I don’t even care what you’re going to pay me. I’m just going to do it. But then that got me, you know, using my fireplace and switching it on. I thought, Hey, this is kind of challenging. I remember when I, when I moved into my house, the gas company guy had to show me how to do it. So I shot a video while I was reviewing this silly little product and, you know, the product review, I’ve sold some of their, some of their, you know, fireplace thing, but lo and behold, the video of switching the fireplace on super, super lucrative.

So, yeah, I mean, once you’re out there shooting. Just add that extra one or two minute video. This, this is not really long things. You don’t have to have a script. Just think about is there something you can do for that product or even generically, you know, toaster guy. If I’m reviewing a toaster, maybe I can just do something about, you know, how do you, uh, how do you choose the right toast settings or something, you know, toaster comparisons or something like that and grow it.

And yeah, that’s definitely a strategy I’d recommend.

Jared: I’ve watched your Swifter video. I will, uh, I will, I will say it’s not

Thomas: rocket science, folks.

Jared: He’s not kidding.

Thomas: No, there’s absolutely nothing distinguishing about the quality of my production or, you know, my delivery or anything. It is 100 percent the information and you would be shocked what people need.

Jared: Well, let’s move into, uh, the final segment here. Congrats on your success in December. We’ll be watching, um, uh, eagerly to see how your video play goes in 2025. Let’s move into some weird niches here. Um, for me, I’ll, I’ll go. Uh, mine is, uh, mine is shared by a, um, somebody, uh, a listener. Thank you very much. I gotta get better.

I was going through a really good spell there. I wrote down people’s names. But, uh, Throw them into a doc and then I forget to write your name down. So I apologize. You know, you are this weird niche is flight memory. com. Talk about a great TLD, by the way, flight memory. com. Um, okay. So what does it do?

Welcome to flight memory. Flight memory enables you to easily keep track of where you’ve flown and then easily produce maps showing your flight routes. I, I, this website got introduced to me by somebody recently, but I’ve seen these routes. These flight maps posted by my friends on Instagram and say immediately I was like, Oh my gosh, this is, this is crazy.

I think there’s more than one website that does this because the flight maps here aren’t always what my friends look like, but maybe you can customize them, right? I’m not really sure. Um. Uh, if you hit it, by the way, this website again, classic to the weird niche segment looks like it was built in about 1999 or maybe 2004, you know, have to look up when it was built, but, um, uh, I I’m on the website right now and I hit the preview button to kind of see what it look like.

And you can kind of, it says right here, here’s an example what your data can look like on flight memory. Um, and I don’t know exactly, I didn’t go through inputting. I wish I tried to leave time to kind of input some of my flights from last year to see what it was. But, um, you know, you can kind of see this example of a worldwide map.

And, um, a domestic flight map, maybe where this person has flown and it gives you all sorts of really cool stats, longest flight in distance, longest flight in duration. Um, uh, and so it’s, it’s, it’s a really cool kind of flight map here. I don’t, uh, I’ll, I’ll, I’ll say this. I’ll go over to Ahrefs here in a second, but here’s to me the brilliance of it.

I don’t know how many they sell Thomas, but they have this tab called poster. And sorry, bear with me because I got to laugh like so you can basically buy a poster of your year of flights, right? Poster prices start at 32 and range up to 153 depend the size and the type you order, right? It sounds kind of cool They have the classic flight memory map.

They have the political boundaries map I love the opening line a real eye catcher in your living room or office and completely unique As it contains your personal flying data. And then you go down and they have some images here. And these were definitely photographed in 1999. And they are absolutely not eye catching photos at all.

But, nonetheless, I do think it’s pretty cool. Like, I remember I had a year where I flew a ton for work. I was on the road 150 nights that year. Um, And I flew a ton of miles, right? Like I’m thinking back, like I probably would have bought one of these, you know, like that was my year of flying, like all over the globe for work.

I was in so many cities. I don’t know. It would have been pretty cool to put one of these up in my office. Like these do look pretty cool. Um, really quickly. I’ll pop over to age refs, uh, and just kind of share what it’s doing over there. Um, It is a DR 53, which is pretty cool. Um, uh, however, it only ranks for 1, 200 keywords and it gets less than 100 organic searches per month.

So, it’s not exactly killing it in any stretch of the imagination. But, uh, uh, a DR 53, it’s gotten mentioned in photos in a couple other places. So, it’s, um, it, it could be something good if they wanted to build out that website a little bit.

Thomas: Yeah, I mean, I think it’s so cool. Like I, when I fly, I always turn to the back of the in flight magazine and they have that map of where they go.

And then you look for your city and you see all it’s there’s, you know, it’s, it’s so exciting to think about, Oh, I could fly at all these different places. So I can see the appeal. And the bragging about, I took the 16 hour flight to Australia or whatever it turns out to be, I think I can see why people would want to do that.

I just think they have so much, there’s so much missed potential because they’re really honed in on a term that I can’t imagine anyone thinking of and putting into Google. Flight memory or like. Make a poster of the flights that I’ve been on. It’s a really cool concept when you think about it. And yeah, I love like the photos on there.

It’s whatever it is. It’s not AI. Like that’s kind of, I’m going to miss the days when you had photos like that. Once AI creates everything, uh, there’s something kind of charming and folksy about, it’s like people’s office, poorly lit with like other stuff covering the poster partially and, and that kind of stuff.

But I feel like if they really honed in on some of these info queries or some other topics around the aircraft, looks like they’re ranking well for the aircraft. So maybe if they talked about that they could bring in that’s their shop,

Jared: I mean their ranking. Yeah, I have up on screen if you’re not watching like their keyword rankings and to your point, like they rank for condor a three 20 and number seven granted.

Uh, but it’s shop, you know, and they, it seems like from this URLs that they have a community as well.

Thomas: Yeah. I mean, you know, this is pretty good ranking position for these big keywords like the names, I mean, personal flight tracker, but you know, some of these other things. I’m seeing a ton of traffic. On some of these, and I’m sure there’s aviation enthusiasts and people searching who would also buy one of these maps.

I feel like this is a play where they need more info content to bring the traffic to them. No one’s going to think this exists and search for it. But once you learn it exists, you go, hey, that’s kind of cool. So, I don’t know, I have a couple of articles, they answer questions like How many bathrooms are on a 777?

You know, really there’s some stuff out there that people search and they’re curious and there’s no content and you can rank, um, and I do, and I’m thinking of something that had the niche and actually had some authority in that niche. Started turning out that kind of content. And then once you’re there, there’s a pop up that says, Hey, do you want to get one of these personalized flight maps?

I think, I mean, I would buy one. I think it’s pretty cool.

Jared: I mean, they rank number six for my past flights. That’s their top keyword that is not branded. But that search volume almost 2, 000 a month, you know? So, I mean, uh, With a DR 53, like, they stand a chance. Like you said, if they kind of built this out.

There’s definitely some potential there. So pretty cool. Pretty cool. Um, let’s see here. I’ve got yours booted up. Thomas, I’ll turn it over to you.

Thomas: Yeah. So mine is, um, it does exactly what it says. Um, the site is whatsgoodattraderjoes. com. So this is an exact match domain. It also looks like it was built many, many years ago and never updated.

There’s a Google site search box at the top of the page. Yeah, this is like

Jared: late 2000s, I feel like. So it’s got a couple years of freshness on it, on the Flight Tracker one.

Thomas: Yes, it is very, very full of ads. But basically it is a review site for Trader Joe’s. Trader Joe’s food. And, um, you know, if you know Trader Joe’s, I know here in the Bay Area, I don’t know if it’s the same where you are down in SoCal or other places in the country, people are obsessed with Trader Joe’s.

People

Jared: love Trader Joe’s or Trader Joe’s. My sister is a Trader Joe person.

Thomas: If you get invited to a party and you bring anything from Trader Joe’s. It, people are going to be thrilled no matter what it is, even if it costs you 3 or whatever, people love it. So there’s this niche kind of interest in it. And what they’ve done is basically reviewed all of the new Trader Joe’s products and all the Trader Joe’s products that come out.

And when I first saw the site, I thought, Oh, based on the design, this has got to be low quality content, some kind of thing that existed years ago. And, you know, it’s just sort of petered out. But no, it’s, it’s current. I mean, they are, they reviewed stuff this month, new products at Trader Joe’s. They have original photos.

They have video, they seem to have a YouTube channel. I’m looking at the top one. It was yesterday. I

Jared: was going to say, so

Thomas: this is an ongoing thing. Yeah. I mean, the reviews are great. It’s got original images. They clearly tried the products. They’ve got video. They’ve got the nutrition information. They’ve got ranked ratings for it.

And the site is just laden with ads. So are they making YouTube

Jared: content?

Thomas: They appear to be, yeah, that’s, that seemed to be the case. Yeah, that they’ve got, it doesn’t look like I have a ton of followers. It looks like maybe, maybe they added the YouTube channel later and they’re trying to grow it, but they’re doing video content and the site is just so rudimentary.

And from what I’m seeing on the monetization, it looks like it’s just AdSense. It doesn’t even look like it’s. You know, Mediavine or Raptive or anything. I mean, I can’t even

Jared: find a, like a menu here. Like this is straight up blog spot style. Like,

Thomas: you know, it’s a, in the, in the sidebar, there’s a list of years and the number of posts.

They did 168 posts in 2024. Look at this, Thomas. Look at that. Yeah. 58 million page. They’ve got a page view counter on this thing.

Jared: Nothing says 2007 like a page view counter. Come on now.

Thomas: Yeah. So it’s like, they just hit on this idea. You know, I didn’t look at how old the site is, but It must have been there forever and they just seem to be continuing to churn out the content.

Yeah. It’s a, it’s on blogs. It’s powered by blogger. I love it. Uh, it was not broken. Don’t fix it.

Jared: I pulled it up here in age drafts. I mean, over 3000 pages.

Thomas: Yeah. And it’s all great keywords. It’s literally trader Joe’s and then a product. So trader Joe’s salmon, trader Joe’s cakes, trader Joe’s hash browns.

And they’re ranking for all of it.

Jared: Now, again, we, we, I bring this up every time one of these sites shows up. Is there a risk for copyright and for trademark infringement on the site like this?

Thomas: Yeah, I think that’s, it’s really risky to put an actual brand name in your, in your EMD because any point in the future, Trader Joe’s come along and say, Hey, we’d prefer you not do that.

And then you’re going to have to change and rebrand the whole site, but they’ve been around for a while. It doesn’t seem to have happened yet. And, you know, maybe if that happens, they’ll, they’ll just shift over to, to something else. But yeah, I mean, it’s risky. And even the, the idea of using an EMD, like one of their big queries was what’s good at trader shows.

So clearly they saw that at some point, you know, made the site for it. And you’d think, Hey, they probably would’ve gotten hit for that. Doesn’t look like it.

Jared: Well, I have on screen as well, the organic traffic chart in Ahrefs. And I don’t know if you saw this, but one year ago, here we are, you know, mid January, 2024.

Uh, they’ve had two massive growth curves. They’ve had a drop in there as well, but they’re basically up almost three X on where they were two, uh, one year ago. Um, you know, it’s funny, I’ve got this five year traffic trend. They were pretty flat, you know, publishing. We saw content, content, hundreds of. Of blog posts every year throughout 2020, 2021, 2022, they’re just flat here.

And then look at this growth over the last year. They’ve almost tripled in organic traffic.

Thomas: Yeah. I mean, one trend I’ve seen, and I think some others have spoken about this, maybe a niche site lady, I think has said something about this. Even though content sites have suffered a lot. Google seems to really love news sites.

And that’s not just news in the traditional sense of like this happened in a town. It’s news related to products or the industries, anything that’s kind of new information. It’s breaking. And when Trader Joe’s releases a new product, that’s a version of news. So I wonder if they’re actually seeing gains and it makes me start to think, Hey, you know, if you’ve got a site that’s been hit and you’re trying to think, how do I recover it?

I’ve had great success pivoting my own site to more of the news content. That’s something to think about. Is there news you can report on in your niche that Google might still be wanting to rank, even if they don’t want to rank your 3000 word, you know, review, uh, or, you know, sort of a longer info article.

I

Jared: mean, this feels at glance, like your classic content or affiliate site, right? And I don’t, I’m not saying they have any affiliate. I don’t think you can affiliate Trader Joe’s, but your classic informational content site with ads, it has gotten. You know notoriously crushed over the last year and yet this thing has tripled in traffic So there’s got to be something there.

Perhaps what you’re saying. Um, good find. That’s great. Uh, yeah, Trader Joe’s is a hit I’m gonna share this one with my sister. Uh, she loves Trader Joe’s They do have a good cult following. Um Well, that brings us to the end. That hour flew by. It always does. I say that almost every time, but that hour did flow by fly by.

I mean, a lot to a lot to circle back on next week. So thank you for joining us this week. We left you with more questions probably than answers. What’s going to happen with right? It’s traffic when they continue their nose dive. Where are we going to end up with with tick tock? I mean, a lot of big questions that will answer next week, but until then, open that phone up on Sunday morning.

See what’s going on with tick tock and we’ll keep you posted on Reddit. Have a great weekend. Everyone. Thanks for joining us.

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