Google’s Ranking System Exposed: What the New Exploit Tells Us

Welcome back to the latest episode of the Niche Pursuits News Podcast. 

Jared Bauman and guest host Thomas Smith are back this week to bring you up to speed about the latest news around SEO, Google, Reddit, and more.

They also discuss some very creative side hustles and share some successful but weird niche sites. Let’s dive in!

They kick things off by talking about how Google’s December Core Update concluded on Wednesday , and comparing notes about the impact it had as they saw it.

Watch the Full Episode

But the bigger news on this episode is how a recent exploit revealed how and why Google ranks content. The author talks about the areas where specific insight is now available, such as consensus scoring, query classifications, and site quality scores. 

They also talk about click probabilities and the importance of domain authority.

Do you agree with Thomas’ theory about AI content performance?

He shares his experience and thoughts on the importance of brand building. Has your experience been similar?

Moving along, the topic turns to Reddit, which is testing out a new AI feature called “Reddit Answers.” Jared comments that it looks a lot like AI Overviews, and Thomas compares Google and Reddit and their ability to produce quality answers to queries.

Do you agree with his assessment of who’s going to do it better? And what about his theory about one replacing the other?

The next news item up for discussion is an article in the Wall Street Journal about the problem with searching Google for “the best.” The article talks about the challenges for regular people to distinguish between actual links and sponsored ones.

Jared makes some interesting observations about the mainstream news, and Thomas points out the irony of the situation. The importance of brands comes up again as well. 

Tune in to hear their interesting conversation.

Lastly in the news, Thomas talks about the arrival of Sora, OpenAI’s video generator. How did the launch go?

He shares the details of how it works, how fast it works, and how it compares to similar tools. What does he say about Google’s attempt at a video generator? He shares some cool ideas for using Sora. 

When the conversation shifts to Side Hustle Shenanigans, Jared goes first and talks briefly about his experience with the Amazon Influencer Program as it gets closer to Christmas.

He shares his November and December stats, and Thomas chimes in with his. They compare notes and talk about the passive nature of the side hustle.

Jared then moves on to talk about his efforts to revive an HCU-hit site with Thomas using email. He shares the results of his efforts and Thomas talks about the economics of their list. How are they doing? What are their plans to grow their list?

Listen to the full episode for all the details.

When it’s Thomas’ turn, he created a YouTube channel called “The Toaster Guy,” based on a recent interview on Niche Pursuits with Cyrus Shepard. 

He talks about the content he’s creating, why short-form is the way to go, and why video presents a great opportunity at the moment, much more so than a niche website.

When it comes to Weird Niches, Jared goes first with Character Count Online. He talks about the ads, the general appearance, and how it works. The DR57 site doesn’t rank for lots of keywords but they certainly get a lot of traffic. Listen in to hear more!

When it’s Thomas’ turn, he shares Cheese Professor, a DR50 info site about cheese. He talks about the content, its performance during the updates, and its organic traffic.

He points out, in particular, the site’s monetization techniques. What strikes him as unusual? Is this a strategy you’d try?

And that brings us to the end of another great episode! Thanks for listening and catching up on the news. We hope you’re inspired by their side hustles and weird niche sites and have lots of ideas of how to apply some new concepts to your business.

See you next week!

Transcript

Jared: All right. Welcome to this week in niche pursuits news. My name is Jared Bauman. We’re going to have to fly today because there’s a lot going on this week. Uh, for starters, we’ll check in on the December core update, but focus a lot of our attention, at least in today’s episode on a recent exploit discovery that reveals new information on the how and why of how Google ranks content.

In addition, Reddit has a new tool that it announced and Google’s SERPs are back in the mainstream news. I’ll be at this time from a slightly different angle. Uh, OpenAI’s Sora is here and Google counters to some degree with their own AI video tool. Whew! Uh, as if that wasn’t enough, we’ve got some big side hustle numbers to report on.

A few weird niches to discover. Back in the co host seat is arguably the king of side hustles, Thomas Smith himself. Thomas, how you doing?

Thomas: I’m great. It’s great to be back.

Jared: I have a sneak peek of the agenda. We haven’t talked about this, but I’ve got to say you have another crazy, weird, off the wall side hustle that you’re not just thinking of.

You’ve actually started and you’re going to share with us today.

Thomas: Absolutely. And it’s kind of inspired if you’re a long time listener by some things that have happened on previous episodes. So. Definitely stick around. Yeah. It’s a, it’s a strange one.

Jared: Well, let’s dive into the news today. This just came up.

Um, this came up so recently, like minutes ago that I didn’t even have time to tell Thomas we were talking about it. Uh, basically really quickly last week, we announced right before the podcast that the December core update was being rolled out by Google. This surprised all of us, given that it was only a week after the November core update.

Concluded while this update only lasted six days. So it’s now complete as of December 18th, 2024, which is minutes before we hit record and one or two days later, if you’re listening to the podcast. So check your numbers, check your Google search console, check your Google analytics, look and see what happened.

If it affected you at all pretty quick rollout, Thomas, anything to share about that before we get into the big story of the day,

Thomas: what I’ve seen is that the content sites that Google seem to be putting back. Some of them have suffered and went right back down again. The sites that have focused on things like news, though, I’ve seen have kept with their trajectory.

So I think there’s still a slice there for us, but it’s not maybe quite as good news as we initially hoped with the last update.

Jared: Yeah, I don’t have it here to bring up on screen, but Lily Ray said something similar. She saw a lot of the sites that have recovered or partial recovery from the HCU gave up some of that.

Not all of them, obviously, but there was a little bit of that going on there. So we’ll dive more into that in depth in the coming weeks. You know, we’ll kind of maybe combine in November and December core update, uh, recap at one of the news episodes. But for now, let’s get into this really interesting, um, Uh, storyline that came out of a YouTube video.

And this basically is an exploit that reveals how and why Google ranks content. So this was shared by Mark Williams cook. And, um, I’m going to go through it from a high level, Thomas, and then I’ll go over to you to share the YouTube videos about 25 minutes long. And this is just going to be a quick little recap, but basically he’s provided.

Pretty significant insights into Google’s ranking methodology, including consensus scoring, query classifications, and site quality scores. And so kind of like the, the data leak, um, the warehouse data leak earlier, this is another kind of loophole in Google’s, um, Uh, in Google’s code that Mark was able to dive deeply into, let’s just quickly talk about, uh, the three or four things that he highlighted consensus scoring.

So Google calculates a consensus score by analyzing how much the content aligns with or contradicts the quote general consensus on a topic, and then this can have an impact on rankings. Uh, particularly for, you know, controversial queries, those sorts of things. Number two would be this query classification.

Queries are categorized into eight semantic classes. Um, I didn’t put a list of all of them. They’re here in the article. But basically Google can adjust rankings for different query types. One of those is, um, as it said, is query classifications with consequence, which is, I guess, alluding really to YMYL, your money, your life.

Uh, we’ve got site quality scores, which we’ve talked about quite a bit here on the podcast. Uh, in this, in this thing, uh, in this video, Mark shares how they’re calculated on a sub domain level based on factors like brand visibility, i. e. searches for the brand name, user interactions, Um, which is a variation of clicks, uh, and we’ll get into here next and then anchor text relevance.

Perhaps the most interesting thing is this click idea. We’ve, we’ve, we’ve talked about clicks having an impact more than likely on search. And this is introducing click probability. So instead of CTR, click through rate, Google uses click probability as a factor, which I think is fascinating. Kind of like an estimate of how likely users are to click a result and then seeing what happens as a result of it.

So that’s kind of a lot of techie stuff there. I get it, but I thought it’d be easier to fly through it and then we could discuss it a little bit more. Thomas, um, what’d you think of this video and subsequent article?

Thomas: I think it’s fascinating because it kind of confirms a lot of stuff that we have been talking about for a while.

The idea of a site wide classifier, which is basically what this site score seems to be. The idea of consensus being very important. And what I immediately thought from that is, I wonder if this is why we’ve seen AI content rank fairly well overall until Google kind of nukes it manually. But, you know, we’ve seen these sites that kind of churn out AI content at scale initially do really well until they get a manual penalty.

Or we’ve seen people who adopt AI and kind of make tweaks and modifications. AI Still rank really well because really AI almost always turns out whatever the consensus is, it’s taking in all the information, all the data that’s known about a topic and then writing an article based on that. And so it always Hughes very close to the consensus on it.

And so if Google’s looking at the consensus score and you wrote an article with AI, that’s going to naturally follow sort of the. Average information that’s out there about a topic, then their algorithms going to love it because it’s really goes close to the consensus. And then you add in a little extra, you know, something they didn’t know, but that doesn’t deviate too much and you’re golden.

So I wonder if that’s consensus score is part of the reason why AI content can really outperform.

Jared: He addressed that in the YouTube video. It doesn’t look like that made it into the article, but he, I have a note here, um, that he mentioned, uh, and I’m summarizing AI generated content initially disrupted Google’s quality prediction models, allowing low quality sites to rank highly.

Temporarily. So to the point you brought up, it’s almost like the consensus is this, but that isn’t necessarily what the internet needs to see.

Thomas: Yeah. And I wonder if the click data then adjusts that, you know, if there’s a consensus that the algorithm detects and then people aren’t really clicking on it, then that would kind of lower it down.

And we’ve seen that effect. And we’ve talked about that with things like nav boost that kind of modify the position of a site. We talked about that that maybe a site kind of goes close to the consensus, but it has a low quality score for the for the domain. And I mean, that’s something that Google has said over and over again.

There isn’t a site wide classifier. I know 1 of the insights that came out of their web summit was that there probably is, and they just might not be aware of it, or it’s like, officially, there isn’t a classifier. There’s a page level classifier applied to every page on the domain, I think is what one of the other guests had said, you know, about it.

So they might be saying one thing that technically is true, but the reality is that, yeah, there isn’t a site wide classifier, but there’s a site wide quality score. And if you have a low quality score, you get classified a lot lower. So that was fascinating to me too, that the domain is still extremely important here.

Jared: More and more important is what it seems like coming out of what he found. Um, here’s a note on, here’s a direct quote on click probability, uh, from Mark quote. And so it appears that Google does factor in how likely it thinks someone is going to be to click on your result. This would change if we modify the page title.

They actually have a tool that can give you hints about this in Google Ads Planner, because it will tell you an estimated click through rate there. That is fascinating. Um, on a number of levels, obviously we’ve known that clicks to some degree have something to do. Uh, we featured a Rand Fishkin, uh, kind of study that alluded to this kind of stuff with, with data driven analysis, uh, just a few months back, but I mean, this has been talked about for quite a while, but this idea of click probability and how likely, I mean, with their machine learning, they have so much data.

They actually. It makes, it stands to complete reason. They can actually look at, uh, a series of words and predict based on the machine learning, exactly how likely that is to be clicked on.

Thomas: Yeah. It’s interesting. Cause it would mean they wouldn’t need that user data that we’ve all sort of suspected they’re grabbing from home and other sources.

They’ve outgrown that. I don’t know if I totally buy it though. I mean, the easiest way to look at clicks would be to look at clicks, right? Not to create the score. Like I can see, yeah, why wouldn’t you use it? So I could see this applying to kind of really well known. Like things where they know a lot about the topic already.

It’s a long established query and somebody changes their title and Google goes, Oh, is it more likely that someone’s going to click because that word changed for something like a breaking news story. I just can’t imagine how they would know enough about a brand new topic to decide whether you were going to click on it or not.

So I kind of feel like they’re still using click data, like real raw click data somewhere in there. But maybe this is something they’re, they’re training or they’re using for more of these established queries to kind of. Make those fine-grained adjustments. Either way, it just shows title is super important.

Probably one of the most important things these days.

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Jared: The, um, The part about brand visibility and searches for brand name. And this, I feel like we’ve gone back and forth about this. You know, we just had a recent interview with Cyrus Shepard where he talked about how the brand is important, but more from a link standpoint, I don’t want to over summarize different people’s findings, but that I specifically asked him if, if direct searches, if ranking for branded queries was, it was a factor he said didn’t really show up in their, in their data as, as corollary here.

It does show up in Mark’s stuff. So it’s interesting to. See how we all kind of circle the wagons is clear. Brand is important, but how do we define brand? And as SEOs, we love to get specific about what we mean. And I think we’re still being somewhat generalistic about brand just because there’s just been some competing ideas that nothing’s really been completely proven out yet.

Thomas: Yeah. I mean, anecdotally, I know for my own site, I was doing great before the HCU without much brand work and then got hit by the HCU, not as bad as some people, but, um, definitely some. And then spent a lot of time completely independent of caring about Google, building up the brand, building a newsletter, as I’ve talked about before, you know, being more sort of present in the real world, more news and less sort of informational articles.

And now my brand of traffic has skyrocketed. Like, people are searching for the brand. And this is for my site, the Bay Area Telegraph, and that has kind of correlated with recovering. So even with this most recent update, my traffic’s way up again, it’s correlation. So I don’t know if that’s the cause, but it definitely saw a big bump in branded traffic and search console, and then a recovery, you know, after this.

Again, not, not a hundred percent, but I definitely see that it could be possible.

Jared: It’s really a fascinating listen. I think it’s about 25 minutes. Well worth your time. If you are fascinated by this stuff, like we are, um, the search engine land article is brief, to be honest. So well worth the listen. We’ll include both in the show notes.

You can figure out which one you want to go to. Uh, any final thoughts before we move on to Reddit? We haven’t talked to Reddit in a few weeks.

Thomas: No, yeah, I think just, you know, it’s again, like we’re on the right track. Like don’t, don’t mistrust the instincts of this community because I think we’ve all, as you said, intuited these things to a certain extent, and now these data that’s coming out is starting to confirm some of these ideas we’ve all been kicking around.

Jared: Well, let’s move on and talk about Reddit. Reddit made an interesting move this week. I have so many thoughts to share about this, but I’ll start by just sharing what happened. Uh, the title of the story is Reddit integrates AI powered search with new Reddit answers. Oh boy. Okay. So Reddit has, let me get rid of this.

A lot of pop ups here. Of course. Um, Reddit has introduced Reddit answers and AI powered search feature currently being tested. Just with a select group of users in the US, so you probably won’t see this if you go into Reddit, the tool is designed to improve the search experience by providing targeted answers and summaries from real conversations across Reddit.

I mean, can we just say it for what it is? It looks like a overviews in Reddit. And, um, it’s funny because Google and Reddit have this very interesting relationship. Um, uh, here, here on screen right here. Oh my goodness. There we go. Okay. Sorry guys. Here on screen is, is what it looks like if you’re watching, um, or if you’re listening and not watching, it’s basically like, what are some tips for better sleep?

And then it basically goes into what I, I, the only way I can describe it is what it looks like an AI overview, you know, it has a slightly different look and feel to it just because that’s how, um, Google differs from Reddit, but I mean, in short, What am I missing? Is that a good analogy here or do you see it differently?

Thomas: Yeah. I mean, I think the, the difference is that Google is really relying on other people’s data to build AI overviews. They’re pulling from all these different websites and we’ve seen that go horribly wrong when they pulled from the wrong website, or in some cases they didn’t get what was sarcasm and what was real.

Reddit has the advantage of they’re working with their own data. So they know a lot more about. You know, what people are interacting with, like they could look at dwell time on a particular answer from users and say, okay, that’s probably a good answer. They could look at upvotes. They can look at all this stuff in real time, who the users are.

I mean, Google bought a lot of Reddit’s data for 60 million or something like that, but we don’t know if they’re getting that live feed of data in the same way that Reddit does. So I think it’s like an AI overview and format, but I imagine they have a lot more variables to play with here. And whether they’re doing it as well as Google, I’m not sure.

I mean, arguably, Google has done it reasonably well in that they’ve Been successful in getting a ton of people using the feature. Um, I think Reddit in the longterm and others too, and this is just the first instance of this, you know, other people sort of building out AI overview like things with their own data.

I think we’re going to see that happen a lot more, and we’re going to see places like Reddit get a lot better at it. It’s going to be a lot more tailored to the needs of users there. And I think just with the amount of data and the recency of data and the amount of other information on their users, if they have, they could build something that’s way more useful than AI overviews.

Jared: Yeah. You talked about where they’re getting the data from and the usefulness. I was just talking about what it looked like. I agree with you a hundred percent. And to some degree, the article talks about it a bit, but really. I, it’s been surmised like what they’re trying to address is the fact that people go to Google to search for their Reddit answer.

They almost use Google as Reddit’s search engine because many people find the Google search engine about Reddit to be better than Reddit search engine about itself. And so many ways Reddit answers seeks to, uh, I’m pulling this from, uh, from, from what I, from what I noted down about the article, but Reddit answers seeks to retain users on the platform by offering better search results.

That’s reducing people’s reliance on Google for finding Reddit content, which is weird because they have a partnership. So to some degree, why do they care? But I guess at the same time, we did feature a story a month or two ago about how a lot of these users that come over to get Reddit answers from the Google search engine are not logged in.

Therefore they cannot display ads as clearly. They cannot have as much data on them. So it’s all this weird, interesting. Relationship entanglement where Reddit is to your point using first party data in a way that looks and mimics what Google does, but in a way to keep people on their platform and maybe less going over to Google, even though they have this relationship established.

Thomas: Yeah, I mean, it makes me think a little bit of like mobile phones, you know, there was in a lot of the world. Everybody got desktops first, and then we all had to transition over to mobile phones. But there were some parts of the world that never really got desktops. They weren’t at that point, you know, and then it developed to the point where they have that, but they basically skipped over and just went straight to mobile phones, right?

There was, and they, now these are countries where, you know, most people have mobile phones. And so I, it kind of makes me think of that, like Reddit never got good at search. Their search was always pretty bad and Google was always sort of the de facto Reddit search engine. Like we see a lot of people put Reddit on the end of their Google search to use it just to search on Reddit.

And is this an instance kind of like with mobile phones or Reddit just sidestepped that whole issue? Like they just skirted right around building a good search engine and went right to the AI stuff that now everybody’s doing. And I wonder if they could build it really well, then they never really needed that search.

And maybe they can start to take back some of that traffic from Google and that ad revenue from Google, where if people are using Google as the Reddit search engine, now they’re just going to go and use Reddit’s AI overviews essentially, and, you know, cut Google out.

Jared: Yeah, it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s just, it’s such a good point you bring up.

Like, I wonder if that’s kind of where this ends up going. And I wonder if at the end of the day, The, um, to your point, the Reddit, the Reddits of the world that do a better job of engaging the community that do a better job of keeping people engaged with their platform than maybe a Google is right now.

And I’m surmising about that. But we’ve talked about that, about how, you know, satisfaction with Google is down a little bit. I, I wonder if they just kind of, like you said, sideswipe what’s happening there. Uh, it’s very interesting to think about. So, yeah. Um, anything else on this before we move on to our next story?

Thomas: Yeah, I think it’s just like Reddit, Apple, Bing even. Places that didn’t quite get it right with search and let Google kind of come in and take over everything. I think they’re getting a second chance. So, it’s kind of exciting.

Jared: So let’s move on to our next article here. And this is a story that was in the wall street journal.

So again, a lot of the times we feature publications like search engine land, and, you know, even the verge to some degree that are really relevant to some of the stuff we talk about, but whenever we get the New York times, the wall street journal, this is stuff that mainstream. You know, the mainstream general population reads.

This is interesting because at first glance, I thought this was going to be about classic Google search, and once we got into it, I realized this is actually about a different aspect of some of these conversations. We’ve been circling the wagon on the title of this article in The Wall Street Journal. Uh, oh boy, is a trouble with searching Google for the best.

Now it’s a wall street journal article. It’s a paywalled. I’m not going to bring it up on screen, but basically this article is worth a read if you have access. And from a high level, this person was recounting when their parents came to visit them, this journalist and, uh, their parents came to visit and was searching for a vacuum cleaner, did best vacuum cleaner or some variant as a search.

And. Had trouble differentiating between what was a sponsored link, i. e. ads, and what was, uh, a authentic organic result, and thus started this entire, um, process where basically, uh, uh, this journalist, uh, and I have her name here, Andrea Fuller, wrote this article about really the problems of what’s happening right now as it relates to, uh, uh, Um, searching for queries where you’re looking for something that is the best it can be.

And then realizing that what you have is not at all a true analysis of that, um, from a high level. And again, this relates to ads and this relates to basically sponsored content, um, that looks like it’s, uh, it’s actual organic search results. Um, so the article talks about how ads often appears the top search results, but may link to biased or promotional content.

Um, in this case, the ads. Uh, that were touted by Google that were looking like they were for the best vacuum cleaner and an organic result. We’re pointing to products, uh, product dash reports. org. And they were paid for by a German internet, a German company, internet up G M B H. Um, they featured fake experts.

Uh, some of those review articles that, uh, Andrea found cited non existent experts like Oliver Harris. With a stock photo figure, they fabricated testing processes. Uh, some of the indicators of this was poor grammar, fake contact details, broken website links. You haven’t actually reached out to some of them.

Now, obviously never gotten him back. Uh, another feature was shady e commerce sites. So this, one of the, one of the results was snap by. us. It advertised it the v70 vacuum as usa’s number one top rated but had fake endorsements She cited as seen on fox fox news, but was not able to find that a german customer service line with an unresponsive support overpriced unbranded products, uh resembling cheaper alternatives on amazon And then the final nail in the coffin for her was fake five star ratings that had featured Trustpilot reviews for Snapbuy that were generic or questionable and Snapbuy inaccurately used Trustpilot branding on this site.

After the Wall Street Journal contacted Trustpilot, Snapbuy’s ratings were removed. Um, I chuckle a bit because a lot of what this article talks about, whether through ad, Supported content or organic content is exactly what Google was trying to address with many of these recent updates. It’s funny to see it in the mainstream news now, and it’s funny to see the mainstream population call out some of these things that Google was seeking to address and that now we’re being completely sidestepped.

With their ad platform.

Thomas: Yeah. I mean, this is just dripping with irony. Like the fact that wall street journal publishes this article kind of saying, Oh, there’s these, you know, unscrupulous people for putting out these things where they didn’t test the product. And then they just like two weeks ago, got completely slammed for, I think their buy side section, you know, it wasn’t quite as, as, uh, you know, bad as this, but you know, they’re still, we’re like outsourcing all these reviews.

And then Google is the one, you know, kind of wielding the stick and saying, you know, you can’t do that. You know, we’re going to penalize you, but then they’re happy to accept ad money to put these sort of things that look kind of like the real result and, you know, take people to a sketchy site. So, you know, it’s just deeply, deeply ironic, but I definitely have experienced this, you know, finding a product that it looks like it’s a real.

Yeah, it looks like there’s a real, you know, organic result. You click through, it turns out to be an ad. It turns out to be some, you know, clone of like a real website or something like that. Um, I do think that this will change though in, in good and bad ways with AI. You know, for one thing, I think it’ll be good because the AI hopefully can kind of parse these things and find the stuff that’s real and recognize what isn’t.

You know, when you’re using like a perplexity or you’re using search GPT, I actually put in best vacuum cleaners and it pulled legitimate sites and, you know, gave me like good recommendations, Mila and, and Dyson and good brands and shark. Um, so that’ll be a good thing, but, you know, if you want to do the work like this reporter has done of researching and figuring out where did this recommendation come from?

Can I trust it? It’s a lot harder to do that with AI, right? Like, if it ingests something, That says this is the best vacuum cleaner and doesn’t recognize that it’s, you know, kind of a fake review or something. It could just recommend it to you and you don’t really know what the source is and you might not even be able to go and find, you know, why did it make this choice?

So, I think with AI, it’s going to be good in that hopefully it’s better than humans at parsing out the scams. But, potentially bad because if you do want to do the deeper research, sometimes it’s a lot harder to do that with AI.

Jared: I mean, the, the layers of irony. Go even deeper if you ask me. I love that you outlined the Wall Street Journal irony, the fact that they’re publishing, you know, this, uh, op ed, if you will, on something that they were just busted for a couple weeks ago.

Uh, I love that you outlined the irony of Google, that, yeah, we’re trying to get rid of all this stuff, but only in the organic search results if you’re willing to pay. Go for it. And maybe they don’t want this in their organic search or in their paid search results, but we can assume that it’s not that big of a deal at today’s present standards.

I’ll go one step further in the irony of the searcher, the person doing the search, the very fact that you are searching best vacuum is because you don’t feel like doing the research yourself. And by the way, I don’t blame you because I don’t want to do the research on the best vacuum, but you’re actually actively going out and saying like, I don’t want to do the research.

I don’t want to test 10 vacuum cleaners to try to figure out which one’s the best one for my family. I just want to take somebody else’s advice. And then that opens up. Obviously to the advice you received, not being the advice. That’s actually how you would have evaluated if you had done it yourself.

Thomas: Yeah. I mean, my biggest takeaway here is just, again, the idea of brands being super important because of the brand of the vacuum cleaner. If you know a good brand, that’s a good spot to start, but also the clue for this reporter. Uh, it, you know, she says in the article when she knew this was a problem was when she realized she’d never heard of the brand of the vacuum that her father was recommending.

So. I think it does speak again to what we’ve talked about overall for us in the niche site community, but across the board, brand is just much more important than it used to be.

Jared: And to Google’s point overall, making these updates again, we’re quick to criticize Google and perhaps the way they’ve done it hasn’t been wonderful, but maybe the intent of trying to reward brands has at least some merit to it, even though how they’re doing it clearly has not maybe penciled out exactly how it would, uh, we’d like it to be.

Yeah, fair enough. Okay. Final topic of the day. Thomas, we’re doing good. We’re doing good on time. I’m a bit surprised. We’ve done pretty well, uh, but we still have to finish this last topic off here in the next five minutes or so. I’m actually gonna turn this one over to you because this is right up your wheelhouse.

I know you cover this stuff all the time with, um, your, your DIY, uh, uh, tech life brand, and I see you publishing a medium about this exact topic. So I’m going to turn over this Sora launch by OpenAI to you. If you could walk us through this story while I pull it up on screen.

Thomas: Yeah, absolutely. So about a little less than a week ago, Sora launched its new, or OpenAI rather, launched its new Sora AI video generator.

And this is something that’s been in the works for, I think about nine months now. So they announced this earlier in the year. They said, we’re going to release it by the end of 2024. And they really waited until the very last minute, like weeks before the end of the year. Um, and so it’s now live. You can try to sign up for it.

And I say, try because the rollout of Sora didn’t exactly go to plan for them. So, you know, when they released Chat GPT, they had this kind of surprise. Right. Where they thought they were just releasing this sort of kind of wonky text interface around their existing GPT 3 model at the time, they didn’t expect it to take off and it did.

It became the fastest growing product. In history at that time, they’ve got like a hundred million new users in three months. They were completely overwhelmed, you know, crashed all the time, became very unstable. So you think, oh, they must have learned from that. You know, when they released this AI video generator that’s so anticipated, they’ll make it work properly.

And of course they didn’t. So they released it, didn’t anticipate how popular it would be. Um, it crashed. No one could get in. No one could create an account. I think now people are starting to be able to. I was able to get in, but for the first couple of days, at least, if you went to Sora. com, which is where you can find it, you just got a message that said, Nope, can’t create an account yet.

Um, you know, a couple of things to know about it. It’s only available at the moment to their plus and pro users. So that’s the 20 a month or 200 a month tier that they’ve created. Um, and so you have to be a paid subscriber at this point. You can look at the videos that are being created with it. If you don’t have that paid account, but to actually.

Have any shot at getting in and being able to make these for yourself, you need to have that. The videos though are pretty awesome. So basically it’s very much like working with chat GPT or another kind of text to image generator, where you type in what you want in text and it creates that. But it’s much more powerful than the other offerings on the market.

So, you know, some other people kind of try to beat open AI to the punch. Um, Luma was a good example of that runway released an AI video generator. Right. It’s here. They’re cool. Um, but Sora honestly does blow them out of the water. It’s much, much higher quality. You have all these editing tools within Sora.

So you can dictate like an entire scene that you want, a sequence of things that you want to have happen. Like almost like you’re a film director and there’s a timeline and it’ll create the videos and tie it together. You have up to 4k resolution on these. You can choose different aspect ratios. You can upload your own image or video and edit it with Sora.

So there’s a huge amount that you can do just out of the box. And this is the worst it’s ever going to be too. Like they’re, they’re actively putting tons of resources into making the quality better and making it adhere better to the prompts. The physics at the moment are a little bit strange still.

Like people don’t look quite realistic when they’re walking. There’s stuff that it struggles with. I know they’re actively buying up, you know, big chunks of video data to train that better to make it look more realistic. But basically, if you have a pro or plus account, you can go in, try to create an account, and if you’re able to, put in a text prompt, get a beautiful looking video.

Very quickly, usually under a minute. Wow. One caveat with it that I thought was really interesting is that at the plus level, the 20 a month level, you can create the videos and you can watch the videos and download them with the watermark. To remove that watermark, you have to upgrade to the 200 a month pro level.

So that’s a big reason to make that upgrade. And I think the thinking there is if you want to put these out, for example, on your Facebook page, try to make money through like the bonus program, something like that, you’re going to have to pay more to do that. So, um, if you want to, yeah, remove the watermark, you got to pay up for it.

Interestingly, Google tried to, um, kind of like we saw with chat GPT, So, you know, we’re we’re on, you know, we’re here too. And they released their own tool, sort of. Um, it’s called Vio, I believe. Yeah, Vio 2. It’s their own, uh, AI video generator. And in theory, it’s very powerful, but it’s still in a private beta.

So you can’t actually access it. You can’t actually use it. Um, so we just have to kind of take their word for it. Look at some sample videos that they’ve put out there to me. It’s smacks of Gemini, you know, or Bard in the early days. If anyone remembers Bard as a response to chat GPT. Cool, but probably not going to be the kind of earth shattering impact of the Sora launch that we’ve seen.

Jared: Barred. Now there’s the name I have not heard in a while. Um, have, um, I mean, there’s not a lot we can take away from Sora, Sora, uh, yet, um, but like give us some use cases for how you think people listen to this podcast might use Sora in the future. Provided they can get access provided, you know, they’re, they’re able to spend that sort of money every month, but like, what are some use cases here?

Thomas: Yeah. The two I can think of, um, would be to create videos for social. So you can create pretty long videos, I think up to 20 seconds or longer, or you can create, you know, very short ones. You can create vertical videos with Sora. So if you’ve got a niche specific Facebook page, especially if it’s in the bonus program, that’s Or you’re using, um, YouTube shorts, which we’ll get to in a second.

You could churn out all kinds of super crazy awesome videos for your niche. You know, what’s food, you could do like really awesome cocktails, where they’re like smoke coming off of them and they look on fire and all that. They’re very realistic. You could upload that, probably get tons of engagement out of it.

So social videos, I think is going to be a huge piece. And the 2nd, 1 is B roll. So if you’re making YouTube videos, more traditional, you know, long form videos, maybe you talk about a topic. And before you’d have to go and buy, you know, shutterstock, like, uh, B roll clip and put it in there. You’d have to go shoot B roll with this.

You could create super, super compelling, interesting B roll. You could splice in. To your, uh, your overall video and make it that much more interesting. And it’s essentially free. I mean, especially at the 20 a month level, maybe it’s got that watermark. Maybe you just zoom in a little, just make the watermark or something like that.

But those are the two use cases I can see right off the bat.

Jared: Very good. Very good. Fascinating. What a week of news. What a week of happening. And you kind of commented before we hit record, it’s not all like. You know, Google or it’s not all one big story. Like we, we could have spent the entire time talking about each of those stories are all fascinating, all from different parts of the online world right now.

Thomas: Yeah. It’s so refreshing, right? Not to just have to talk about this crazy thing happened with the, you know, the most recent, uh, I know there’ll be time for that with the, with the update having just finished, but

Jared: there’ll be time for that. Don’t worry. You just happened to miss the week. We have to do that.

So, yeah.

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Jared: Hey, let’s move into side hustles. We got a lot to talk about here. Normally we just kind of breeze through the side hustle. Give a quick update, but I called it side hustle season either last week or the week before. I still feel like that’s happening.

So true to form, we’ve got a bunch of different stuff to discuss. I promised I’d be talking Amazon influencer this whole month, but I’ve got another thing to talk about, which I also teased. Okay. Probably last week because you’re here. So I’ve got two updates to give now it’s the middle of December recording this on December 18th.

This is about the time last year when sales started to drop off. In the Amazon influencer program, uh, notorious when the product says won’t, might not arrive by Christmas sales tend to dry up last year around this time. I dropped off a cliff because my big kind of flagship selling product of Christmas.

Q4 last year, got that banner. And so bam, there it went. I don’t really have one product that’s selling as much this year. That’s making up the bulk of my sales. And so I think that the drop off has been a lot slower, you know, it’s like we’re slowly landing the plane to Christmas this year, whereas last year we just dropped in really abruptly.

Um, let me give you some updates though. And you are one of my inspirations and one of my, you know, teachers, uh, if you influencers. So it was kind of fun talking about this with you here today. Um, as a recap, November was at, um, just above 5, 250. Um, which was about 25 percent or so higher than, than November of last year.

This year, 17 days in December is at, um, is actually above 4, 350. Awesome. Um, hard to make predictions cause we don’t know. You know, when that cliff will happen, but I’d say we’re going to, I’m going to eclipse November, probably, probably by just a little bit, but still having a better month, which is ironic.

Cause last year I looked back, I earned about 4, 000 in November and about 4, 200 in December. So it’s just crazy how, you know, years go by and the pattern still somewhat emerged the same my last 30 days. So that’s kind of looking at the last part of November. And the first part is over 7, 200. Wow. Um, so it’s really.

It’s cool. Um, it’s, it’s, it’s better than last year. It’s been a better season last year. Um, I won’t go on and on about what I’ve been doing this year with it, but certainly put less effort than I did last year, but last year was my first year on it. So very happy with those numbers. Um, any thoughts on influencer?

I know you’re going to, I see on the agenda, you’re talking influencer as well. So maybe we’ll just wait for you to get to your section.

Thomas: Influencer numbers now. Um, so in the last 30 days, um, I have made. A little bit less than you did on this. I made 1, 884. Um, so definitely nowhere near your 7, 200. I mean, you were doing amazingly with that, but I think it really speaks to the fact that there is a, there’s a passive component to this, right?

Cause I have not really added a lot of videos this year. I’m kind of more in Spencer’s camp. Like I did a lot of the work before and I’m mostly coasting. I’ve added a bit, plan to add more, but I’ve been really all in on newsletters. So that’s been my big focus. Okay. But that said, you know, 1800 bucks for not doing that much.

I don’t think I’ve published any new videos in the last month. It’s pretty solid, but pair that kind of baseline level of passive income with what you get. If you do what you did, just add a bunch more videos and you can really make some serious money from this.

Jared: I do like that. We’re starting to get a very, very basic narrative because it’s now only three people.

Um, but like I took a more active approach this year. You and Spencer both took a less, far less active approach this year. Both you and Spencer kind of similar numbers. I think he was sharing like 1500 last 30 days or something like that. You were at 1800. I don’t feel like I’ve done a lot, but I have been uploading, if I look back over this year, about 40 to 50 videos a month.

Thomas: Yeah.

Jared: So that is something, you know, and I guess I don’t feel like it’s a lot because I did a thousand my first year, but 40 videos is nothing to sneeze at either. So I don’t know, I guess you’re right. We, people are kind of getting to see a live case study of like how many videos to put up, how many to do a month, whether consistency matters.

Still, 1, 884 when you’ve done, to your point, virtually nothing, is a decent paycheck to get every month.

Thomas: Yeah, I’m certainly happy with it. Yeah, I didn’t know what it was going to be like. It was certainly a lot lower, you know, earlier in the year. But this Black Friday, Cyber Monday time period is where all of those sales come in.

And I think the reason you’re probably seeing a higher December than the previous year, just Black Friday came really late. It did. So you’re seeing some of that, that traffic, uh, get picked up, the sales coming in in December.

Jared: Yeah, I talked about that a bit last week. Um, hey, you and I switching side hustles, uh, you and I partnered up on Uh hcu hit content site that I had got many of these by the way So if you’re listening, man, I got them coming out coming out coming out all sides But you know you you had actually seen this site And like the content and we talked about it.

We kind of shared about this a couple of weeks ago on the podcast about how we were going to, you were going to use your newsletter approach that you’ve taken with some of the other brands that you’ve shared about here and apply it to this, uh, this HCU hit side of mine. And then we’d split the upside.

We’d partner up and split the upside on it. Well, we’re over a month in now. Um, so we actually have 30 days of data. It it’s, it’s interesting. Cause I was, I was like, how do I talk about this? Is this a good result or a meh kind of result? I guess the jury’s out, but I think overall, I’m pretty happy. I’m pretty excited with it.

Given that this email account. Had been generated and created about two, two and a half, three years ago. And not really much has been sent to it since then. We were kind of making it up as we went, meaning we had to test out which type of articles, which type of content, which type of, of niches inside of the, the main niche we’re going to trend the best, but basically after 30 days, the results are in.

We’ve settled into a nice two email per day, cadence previous month earnings. Before emails were started was about 600 on raptive ads. Most of that traffic coming from a combination of being, um, Pinterest, YouTube. We started the second week in November and November earnings were 1, 100. So about 500 above the 600 average.

And then the last 30 days. So taking into account. Second half of November, first half of December are at 1, 400. So 800 up on what a normal kind of 600 a month earning that we saw before that. Um, so I guess I’ll ask you, where are we going next with this? How are your, how are you feeling about this whole project?

Thomas: I feel great about it. Cause I think that the thing about a newsletter is that the work that you have to do to send the same newsletter out. To 100, 000 people or 200, 000 or 500, 000. It’s the same as what you have to do to send it to one person, right? So once you, it’s sort of more about the unit economics.

If you want to get technical about it, what does, what do you get from each user? Do people like the content? Will they stay on your list? Will they click through on it? And once you figure that out, it’s really just a matter of scaling that list up because it doesn’t take you any more work. To make that email and send it out to, you know, where we’re at, which is a little, probably around 12, 000 people on the list at the moment.

Um, if we can grow that to a hundred thousand, it’s the same work we have to do each day and we’re going to make a lot more from it. So what I want to see in the early days of, uh, working on the list is just that the unit economics play out. People stay on the list. They like the content, they click through.

You know, that, uh, they engage with it. You get good RPMs once they got to the page, which is how we’re monetizing. All of those things have checked out for this project. So now the next step is grow the list, continue to grow it. I was, that’s what I was

Jared: going to say,

Thomas: very aggressively. Um, and you know, Facebook ads are a great way to do that.

People are using those to grow, um, email lists. And there’s a lot of ways you can, you can leverage that more and better content, other places like. You know, Pinterest and other ways to bring in traffic. Those are all great ways to continue to add more people to the list. And also, I think, you know, there’s opportunities like you, you alluded to.

As you learn what kind of content. Your list links, you can get better click through rates. You can kind of hone in on what people are going to engage with and create more of that. And then your unit economics for each subscriber are going to get even better and more favorable. So I think we’ve honed in on that.

And the great news is we’ve discovered, you know, without getting into the specifics of the niche or the site kind of inspirational, uh, posts, let’s call them things that give people ideas in this specific niche. Maybe a lot of them, maybe 20, 30, 50 ideas. Tend to do the best. And those happen to be posts that are relatively, you know, easy to generate.

I mean, it still takes time, but, you know, think about this, like in the context I’ll give of my own site, which is in the travel space, you know, if what people want to see is a super detailed review of a restaurant that you went to with all the pictures and the dishes, that’s hard because you got to go to a lot of restaurants.

But if they want to see, you know, the, the top 50, um, you know, places to visit and photograph in San Francisco. Then that’s relatively easy. You know, if you know the place, you can, you can write that pretty quickly. You can drop in some photos and you’re good to go. So I think what we’ve discovered here is that these inspiring, um, posts are what people are engaging with.

And that bodes really well, because that’s something that we can create a lot of at scale. And if we grow that list, better automation to, you know, creating more of this content, um, a little bit easier. So it’s not as much of a manual process. I think it’ll help. But yeah, I see really a huge potential here and not just for, for this particular project to anyone who has good content, um, a good premium ad partner, like in this case, it’s Raptive, but Raptive or Mediavine and a list or the ability to grow one, you, you’re sitting on something that could be worth a ton

Jared: to your point.

You know, the big thing now is to put content. You know, we got a little fire burning, we got poor gas on it. Um, there’s not like, this isn’t like social traffic where it can just skyrocket. We’ve kind of hit a cadence of two emails per day. We know what the overall open rate is typically going to be. It’s going to, you know, span here or there because of specific subject lines or content, but we know what works.

We know what the general click through rate is. And so we basically have, About a range of how much we’re going to make off of ads every day. And it’s not going to change until we get more subscribers. So to that point, we’ve kind of built the model and now we’ve got to go pour gas on that fire. So, um, speaking of a project that is nowhere near off the ground to that degree, let’s talk about this crazy, weird side hustle I’m seeing in our agenda that you’ve started.

So we’ve talked about your Amazon influencer side hustle. We’ve talked about this, that we’re kind of partnering on. What is going on with this side hustle? You’re about to share with us.

Thomas: Yeah. So the last, I think two or three weeks, um, this concept kept coming up on the podcast here. And I’m an avid listeners, you know, so, you know, even if I’m not co hosting, I’m always listening and people kept mentioning this idea and that idea was the toaster guy.

The toaster guy has been used as a metaphor and a concept for what the importance of brand. The idea that, you know, people don’t seek out a person or a channel for their toaster reviews. They just go and look for best toaster. And we talked earlier about how that can be problematic. Um, we talked, you know, previous guests, I think Cyrus is on maybe and talked about, um, you know, that with the idea that the toaster guy.

You know, the brand could be really important and that that brand is significant for Google and that that’s increasingly important. And so I just heard the toaster guy mentioned so many times and I had to make the toaster, I just had to do it. Um, so I did, so I created a YouTube channel. It is YouTube. Uh, dot com slash at toaster guy.

Um, and it is exactly what it sounds like. Uh, I have made now, um, six videos. They are all about toasters. If you go and check out the channel, the thumbnail is me holding a toaster, like you would hold a 1980s boom box. And, um, these are all shorts, which has been, um, really interesting. I think, you know, that’s, that’s the point I’ll get to with this ultimately is that shorts are very powerful.

But I made six videos, um, they range, they’re sort of informational. It’s like why you shouldn’t stick a fork in the toaster, uh, toaster oven versus conventional oven. Um, I, uh, had ChachiPT write an original country song about toasters and then I got out my ukulele and performed it. Um, so you can go and see that.

And, uh, I put all these on the channel. It’s been three days, six videos. And I’m up to eighteen hundred and fourteen views. Jeez! So far. And growing. Continuously. Like, I could probably pull up my phone and see, you know, these have, some of these have done even better. Um, I have two subscribers, validating the fact that people don’t want to follow the toaster guy.

It’s transactional. But, um, you know, two is better than zero. And my best video so far, how to make a frozen corn dog in the toaster, as of right before this recording, was at 850 views. So, um, yes, I am now officially the toaster guy. I had to, I couldn’t, I just couldn’t resist. I do not have the time for this project.

I’ve put 15, maybe even 20 minutes of my life into it so far. Um, but, you know, it’s fun, it’s silly, but I think the big point I want to kind of make here is that there’s a lot of potential with YouTube these days, and particularly with YouTube Shorts. And if you’re used to the sort of niche site world, where you build a site, And it’s going to take you six months before you’re even going to rank.

And they’re probably a year before you’re going to get any kind of traffic. It’s just so slow. And nowadays you don’t even know, like you could build it and Google could have some crazy update and you never get anything with it versus with video, particularly with short form video. You can create a channel in probably two minutes, you know, it’s no effort.

It doesn’t cost anything. You don’t even need to register a domain, you know, no creating a WordPress account or whatever. You can upload some videos and in a day or two, you’ve got thousands of people looking at them and watching these things. I mean, I think I’ve gotten like 10 watch hours so far. So people are spending chunks of their time going and watching my toaster videos.

And this is silly in this instance. I don’t know that I’ll do much with it beyond this. But it validates the concept that if you want to create short form videos, you can do it very easily. And you can get really big reach these days on these platforms. And so think about like, if you’ve got a real niche site and you want to get your brand out there in front of thousands of people, why not?

I mean, you’d be crazy not to start a YouTube channel for it and churn out, you know, 20, 30 shorts. If you know the topic, you can do it so And you could have 000 people seeing your brand, you know, getting to know your site, you can link out to your site in the video description. If you have an e com product, even better or physical products, you show it, you know, people go and buy it.

It’s so easy and the reach is so gigantic. Toasters are not interesting, but I’m already at almost 2000 views on this thing in three days. So, you know, think about can you do that for your own real site or brand and where will that take you?

Jared: So you have a toaster YouTube channel. I believe you have a food safety newsletter.

If I’ve memory serves me, correct. Yup. 2, 200 subscribers. You knew that awfully quick. I don’t, we need to rename when you’re co hosting instead of the weird niche segment, we just need to be calling it Thomas’s weird side hustle segment. Uh, I, um, I’m blown away. You have 850 views in three days on how to make frozen corn dog.

Okay. I think it’s hilarious, but it’s interesting. I’ll just wrap it up here. Cause we got to get into weird niches. We actually have a very compelling interview coming out in the coming weeks, where I interviewed someone all about how to grow their followership to the millions using short form video. So it’s very interesting that you brought this up and to tease people listening, like stay tuned in the coming weeks for a Wednesday interview coming out with someone who has blown the roof off of short form video and talks in depth about exactly how to do it.

Um, perhaps some overlap in what you’re saying, although he gets into the, into the weeds about exactly what to do there, but his sentiment was the exact same as yours. Short form video, you know, is, is, is in many ways, the gateway or the starting point to building a followership and building a brand.

Thomas: Yeah, it’s amazing the reach you can get these days.

I mean, and there’s not, people consume a ton of it. They consume it quickly, and there’s not enough content to go around, especially not enough good content. So if you can create something that’s really compelling, you can, you, yeah, I mean, tens of thousands. Toasters are boring. My videos aren’t very well produced.

I’m sure the guest who’s going to share the details there, um, will show that, you know. If you do this even marginally well, the reach is just incredible.

Jared: Well, from one weird side hustle into weird niches. Let’s dive in. My weird niche today is going to be online character count. Sorry, charactercountonline.

com. Apologize for mixing that up. The title tag is online character count. This is exactly what you think it is. I ran into this because, um, the typical tool we use. At my SEO agency, my marketing agency to kind of, um, double check character counts for meta descriptions was down. And, um, anyways, long story short, I, I ran into this.

I won’t bore everyone with the story, but you can all imagine how we find these things online. And it’s just such a classic site that we would share here in the weird niche segment, because it’s so simple. I mean, and it looks terrible. Like, let’s be honest. Um, it’s littered with ads. Um, to the point where they almost built like a custom CMS just to house all the ads they wanted to make sure got on the page.

I’m not saying they did build one, but it has this appearance of it’s like, you know, a standard WordPress theme just wouldn’t allow us to get as many ads on the page as we want. So we’re going to have to build something custom. There’s ads in the left, there’s ads in the bottom, there’s ads in the right.

Um, I guess actually the right side is really more of the about section of this site. Um, I I don’t think it’s been updated since it was built. Uh, let’s see. I have my notes. It was built in 2011. So it’s been around for 13 going on 14 years and all you basically do is you basically take um, Uh, uh, let’s take some content some text here from our show notes, uh, and put it in here Uh, and it’s basically going to spit out how many characters it is.

So I have best video how to make You Frozen corndog in the toaster, 850 views, and this has 65 characters, 13 words, and 1 sentence. Uh, there also includes 12 spaces, in case you were wondering, Thomas. Nice. Uh, okay, let me share with you the Ahrefs, because that’s also equally, uh, surprising. Um, what we have here is a DR57, but that’s not really where it gets surprising.

It only ranks for 5, 000 keywords. That kind of makes sense. Like how many variations of keywords can it rank for? But those 5, 000 keywords make up an estimated 253, 000 organic search traffic per month.

Thomas: That is phenomenal. I can’t believe, well, now we know why they’re trying to cram so many ads in there.

Jared: Well, going back to it, to your point, I mean, the ad experience is not terrible, but I mean, it’s pretty. There’s a lot of ads on here. Um, I didn’t see who they’re using for ads. Um, I could take a guess here. I mean, I guess they only have two ads. I should have been a little less harsh on them. Um, a lot of it’s just poor UI and stuff that I thought was ads, but actually isn’t ads.

I think I might’ve been a little harsh, but it’s still a terrible user experience, but it gets the job done. I mean, you can quickly figure out how many characters there are. It’s simple. It was easy to build. It does give you a couple of interesting and unique stats. And then there’s some. Some pretty prominent ads on it’s gotta be making pretty good money.

Thomas: Yeah. I love the, um, the thing in the upper right where it’s like, if you like our character counter, please share it with your friends. Can you imagine like emailing this to a friend and be like, Hey, you know, next time you want to count the length of your title tag. Here’s a thing I found is the idea that they’re going for social sharing for this is kind of hilarious in the upper right there.

Yeah, um, and the story of like, you know, a while ago I decided to, I needed to, you know, look at an email template. It’s like, it goes into this personal experience that I thought, you know, I’ll do it myself and build this thing. I’m a web developer, so I love that there’s backstory to this, to this tool.

That they felt we would want to know and that, you know, we would be so passionate about their character counter that we would go out and share it with our friends.

Jared: It, it, it has recipe written all over it, you know, like recipe site, like, you know, boy, this, this is my passion. This cooking, this is what I get up in the morning to do.

My grandma gave me this recipe. I brought all the ingredients back from Italy, you know, it just screams of that, except it’s not a recipe. It’s a, it’s an online character counter. Hey, it gets the job done. It worked while the other service that we normally use was down. It got the job done. Who am I to say anything bad about it?

He’s getting how many 250, 000 plus organic visitors per month. It’s an estimate, but I mean, that is a lot of ad revenue, even if the RPMs are low, that’s still a significant amount of ad revenue. So, hey, These weird tools, these off the wall tools, these bizarre one page sites, I, boy, we, I should go home and make a ton of them tomorrow.

Thomas: Yeah, it makes you wish you had a time machine. You could go back 20 years and build all these things out, cause It’s like you had to have been there a while, I think, um, but then if you look at the traffic graph, it’s like, this is what Google wants these days, right? Tools, things that actually do something, you know, brands where you can buy something.

So I think the people who have created these and started to rank them well, they’re probably cleaning up.

Jared: Another vote of confidence, by the way, for exact match domain EMD, um, character count online. com. They basically took the EMD. I’m guessing it was gone. Character count. I’m surmising character counter probably gone.

He’s like, well, what if we just stick online on the end of it? It’s still an exact match.

Thomas: That’s like go daddy. Actually. That’s something they used to do. I don’t know if they do it anymore, but they would say. Is your domain taken? Stick online here and it’s available. So I guarantee you whoever did this, put that into GoDaddy.

It said online. Yep. That’ll do.

Jared: That’ll work. Good. Good to go. Ship it. So good. Um, yeah, I just had to call that out. So, uh, so 2010 of them to do, um, again, Brilliant. I’m not complaining. I’m actually just blown away. Boy, do we overcomplicate things sometimes. Sometimes we don’t, but sometimes we do. Um, all right, let’s move on to your weird niche.

I’ll pull it up here on screen while you start talking about it.

Thomas: Yeah, so mine is thecheeseprofessor. com It’s cheeseprofessor. com And it’s exactly what it sounds like. It is a pretty well written info site about cheese. And, you know, we’ll get to what you’re seeing when you first look at the screen here, which is not cheese, but if you scroll down, they’ve got kind of the stuff you would expect, like listicles about cheese, how to build a cheese plate, you know, uh, different Christmas cheeses, like publishing content continuously.

So it’s seasonal 12 days of cheese for 2024, you know, things about different. different types of cheese. And I love cheese. I love fancy cheeses. I’m kind of a cheese nerd. So I stumbled on this just looking up different cheeses and they have pretty good, you know, pairing with beers, all this kind of stuff that you’d expect from a classic.

Um, InfoSight, but what I found super interesting about this is the way that they’re monetizing it, but just quickly before we get to that, um, DR 49, so, um, it’s, you know, got a fair number of backlinks.

Jared: 50 since you did your research. Oh my gosh,

Thomas: yeah. So there you go. So it’s, it’s even climbing. Um, it seems to have done pretty well through, through the updates, as far as I could tell.

Um, I didn’t go back super far, but you know, it’s still going. Here’s our five

Jared: years. Let’s see what it looks like. Oh yeah, look at that. It’s flying through the updates.

Thomas: Yep, and the last, uh, basically steady up a little bit in the last, uh, couple of, uh, of a year or so. Um, and it’s getting 44. 8 K organic traffic just from search down a little bit.

Now it looks like it’s down to 40 through 43, but still, yeah, 40 ish. Um, and we know that Ahrefs tends to, you know, undercount and it’s all cheese stuff. Like what is pimento cheese, cheese wheel, pasta, Welsh rabbit, like all these cheese related keywords. So they’re just crushing it in the cheese niche.

There’s not a lot of competition in there. I’ve always dreamed of starting a cheese related site, but I haven’t had the time to do it justice. Maybe the next weird, uh, side hustle here, but the thing I found really interesting about the site is how it appears to be monetized. So if you take a look at the site, the first thing that you see when you hit the homepage, you’ll see.

Is a giant banner, like fills the whole top of the fold for some kind of Italian, um, blockchain crypto type of company. And I actually, when I first saw this, I thought, did they get hacked? Like, is this some kind of a, you know, like a secret crypto site and cheese is like some weird new meme coin or something.

And no, like it is a standard, um, info site with no ads on it. There’s no, if you look at any of the pages, there’s no ads. And all there is, is this giant banner for crypto. Thing on the, the, you know, the homepage and it looks like a legitimate crypto thing. It’s like some kind of Italian government, you know, crypto blockchain thing.

Um, so. I don’t, you know, I’m just speculating here, but what I’m wondering is if they basically had ads or something and said, no, we don’t like this user experience. And we’re going to kind of like sell our soul to, you know, the, the highest, most lucrative buyer and give them this giant one giant ad on our homepage.

Um, you know, the places most people won’t touch, like, you know, crypto, and we know all the other ones that’ll pay you a ton of money. And most people will go, we’ll just give them our, our prime spot homepage above the fold. And then the rest of the site will have no ads on it, and they’ll pay us a ton of money for this prime placement, you know, 44, 000 organic, you got to think there’s social traffic.

They’re probably at 200, 000 views a month. I imagine this weird Italian crypto place probably paid them a pretty penny to be there. And maybe that monetizes the whole rest of the site. And now you don’t need to have ads and mess up your user experience. And, you know, maybe that’s part of why they’re still ranking really well, too.

So it’s a cool approach or interesting that that’s, in fact, what they’ve done here, it’s like, I’m going to, I’m going to go for the barbell approach, right? Like I’m going to go for clean content for the rest of the site. And then I’m going to go for the most horrifying monetization. That’s the most lucrative that I can think of and not go for this middle ground of like filled with ads that are legitimate.

So, yeah. What do you think?

Jared: Well, it’s interesting because when you go look at it on a mobile device, which I’m doing right now, while you, while you were talking and we know, you know, I mean, odds are this site is the same as the predominant number of websites on the internet where they’re getting 55 to 75 percent of traffic on mobile.

And it’s not nearly as, um, dominating, right? This banner ad, if you go look at it on desktop, it screams of something that will end up being very, very small on a mobile device and they want to mimic the same experience on a mobile device. You would think they would find a way to switch it on mobile to a square or vertical based ad that would also take up all the above the fold real estate.

But I’m. I’m all devised. It looks like just your normal everyday banner ad and it almost blends in. And so it’s interesting to see that you’re right. They have no other ads on their site. They have this massive ad above the fold that really does almost shock you on the desktop. And you scroll past it.

You’re like, well, whatever I guess that is what it is. This is a legit cheese site on a mobile device. It really honestly blends in.

Thomas: Yeah. Maybe that’s part of the deal. Like, you know, the desktop is the most lucrative traffic. So we’ll give you this giant placement on desktop. You know, we’ll, we won’t mess up our, our mobile experience, which is what Google’s looking at.

Anyway. I mean, Google’s going to see this and go, Oh, crypto banner, one crypto banner on the whole site. Great. You know, it probably loads super fast with no ads. People probably spend a ton of time on it. And it’s like, seems like really good cheese content. Otherwise.

Jared: I was going to say, is it, it’s nowhere else in the site.

I just went to how to pair Christmas treats with cheese. There’s no, there’s no above the fold ad. It’s just on the homepage page.

Thomas: Yep. So it’s like a new, new approach. Like get that one sponsor that gets your best ad placement. And then can you just shut off ads for the rest of your site?

Jared: Or maybe no one’s told them about Raptive or Mediavine.

Thomas: That could be the case with the, with the level, like they’re churning it out, right? Like they’re, they’re making Christmas roundups for cheese. They’re doing cheese news. Like I got to think there’s a team behind this. So they’re probably sophisticated enough to know about these other monetization channels, or maybe your

Jared: point.

And I referenced it in the interview with Cyrus a couple of weeks ago. Like Cyrus did a correlation analysis at some point in 2024, and he correlated a lot of the impacts, the negative impacts. Um, of, uh, from these recent Google algorithm updates to ads, obtrusive ads, the presence of ads, ads, what they do and all this kind of stuff.

And we could debate that till the cows come home, uh, uh, pun intended. But, um, uh, the reality is they don’t have ads and they’ve done extremely well through the updates. Obviously that is probably not the only reason, but it could be a factor.

Thomas: Yeah. I mean, great user experience other than that giant crypto ad.

So I wonder if that’s been protective for them.

Jared: Well, Thomas, this flew by kind of like we thought it would. This was a very packed, uh, a very packed news segment. And I have to say, this is the last traditional news episode of the year. Spencer and I next year, we’ll be on next year, next week, we’ll be on with more of a.

End of year news episode. It’s going to look different folks. It’s not going to be your traditional and, um, uh, weekly news podcast. We’re going to borrow from some of the things we did last year that we really enjoyed, add a few new things this year, but it will look different. So this really kind of closes out 2024 puts to the books.

52, well, 51 weeks of news episodes of 2024. We did one every single week. We hope you enjoyed them. Thanks again. Join us in 2025. Thomas will be here. So everybody else, and we’ll be excited to bring back all the great news episodes in 2025, but join us next week with Spencer and I, as we kind of have a little fun and look back on 2024, have a great weekend, everyone, and enjoy your holiday season,

Thomas: happy holidays.

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 want to 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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If you use coupon code podcast at checkout, you’ll get your first month for just 1. Go ahead and give it a try. Come join me, Jared, and lots of other digital entrepreneurs inside my private group at community. nichepursuits. com. And be sure to use coupon code podcast. I’ll see you on the inside.

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