OpenAI Paid Reddit $70M. Should You Be Worried?

Welcome back to another episode of Niche Pursuits News!

This week, Jared Bauman and guest host Thomas Smith break down major developments in AI, SEO, and content creation. 

They discuss everything from Reddit’s massive AI licensing deal and YouTube’s prominence in AI Overviews to the new SEO buzzword for 2025.

As always, they also share their latest side hustle updates and dive into some fascinating weird niche sites that are thriving in unique ways.

Watch the Full Episode

They kick things off by talking about Reddit’s AI licensing deals , and recent speculation about how much AI companies are paying for access to its massive database of user-generated content.

Thanks to some investigative work by Glenn Gabe, it looks like OpenAI is paying Reddit $70 million annually.

According to Jared and Thomas, this raises several important questions: How much more valuable is UGC data than previously thought? Will AI companies continue paying for exclusive access? If Reddit is double-dipping, are other AI companies (like Anthropic, the company behind Claude) being left out? And could smaller publishers monetize their data?

Do you agree with Thomas? Tune in to hear what he said!

Moving on, they discuss how YouTube citations in Google’s AI Overviews have increased by 25% in just a few months. This surge is particularly noticeable in instructional content, product reviews, and how-to queries.

Thomas explains that Google likely started its AI Overview rollout with text-based sources before shifting its focus to video. Since Google owns YouTube, it makes sense that YouTube videos would be prioritized in AI-generated search results.

What does this mean for content creators? 

Thomas asks an important question about topical authority. What do you think?

And last in the news section, they discuss “originality,” after Google’s Gary Illyes recently confirmed that it was “something we’re going to be focusing on this year.”

Jared and Thomas talk about what this might mean and how Google might measure originality.

Thomas suggests that Google may be using AI to compare content against existing information on the web, and Jared raises a major concern. Do you agree with their theories?

Check out the full episode to hear their discussion.

The next portion of the podcast is their Shiny Object Shenanigans. 

Jared goes first and talks about the Amazon Influencer Program. He compares his earnings from January last year and this year. How did his side hustle perform? Did he see growth or a decline? What does Jared think is happening behind the scenes? 

Tune in for all the details!

When it’s Thomas’s turn, he shares a new side hustle: a YouTube channel called Green Mermaid Review, dedicated to Starbucks content.

He shares his views so far, how some of his videos are doing, and his plans to monetize in the future. Could he have found an untapped niche?

Finally, they talk Weird Niche Sites, and Jared shares a calculator website, Unit Converters. This well-established DR72 site is dominating the rankings and getting millions of visitors per month. 

They discuss traffic numbers, the depth of the site, and guess how much it’s making from ads. Do you agree with their estimates?

Thomas shares his site, Open Snow, a subscription-based weather forecasting site. They talk about the number of indexed pages it has, what type of subscription models it uses, and whether or not traffic has grown.

Do you agree that premium content can work in a seasonal industry? Check out the episode to hear more.

And that brings us to the end of another episode of the Niche Pursuits News Podcast. We hope you feel better informed about the latest happenings in the SEO industry, inspired by the side hustles featured, and eager to create your own weird niche sites to find untapped business opportunities.

See you next Friday!

Transcript

Jared: All right. Welcome back to this week in niche pursuits news. My name is Jared Bauman. Hey, it’s been a couple of weeks and we haven’t talked about Reddit, but they’re in the news today. Little bit of deep diving by a podcast favorite here, Glenn Gabe, has revealed just exactly how much OpenAI is paying Reddit.

Now we know that they have a licensing deal, Reddit that is, with Google, and we know it’s to the tune of about 60 million. But what is OpenAI paying? To be able to use Reddit’s data. We’ll dive into that in a couple of stories that come out of that. There’s also been a big update in YouTube and YouTube videos as it relates to what’s showing up in the SERPs.

That’s some big news, especially if you’re a content creator, we’ll get into that. And then we’ll kind of wrap up by talking about this new buzzword of 2025, as it relates to Google and SEO. And that is originality. So we’ll dive into some of those topics and some of the things that were said by people inside of Google.

Of course, we’ve got our side hustles. We’ve got two weird niches. Uh, Thomas, you’re joining today. Your weird niche is, uh, very, uh, specific for this season, isn’t it?

Thomas: It is, yeah. And it’s definitely something that I, uh, have been hinting at starting for a long while. And I finally did it. So I’m super excited to share it when we get there.

Jared: Good, good, good. So let’s go ahead and dive in here. There’s a lot of different things to share, and I’m excited about a couple of these. We’re kind of navigating across a bunch of different topics and genres here, but let’s dive into the first one. So we’ve talked a lot about Reddit, and we’ve talked a lot about how Reddit’s getting their information, and a lot of that is coming from scraping and crawling the internet.

They made a deal with Google, which Spencer and I broke down when it happened, just exactly how much it didn’t sound like much 60 million. But when you look at their profit margins and you look at what that meant as they were IPO ing, it was kind of a big deal. Now, what we have here is a tweet on screen from Glenn Gabe.

I’m just going to read it, um, and then we can look at the article that he referenced. But here’s Glenn Gabe’s tweet, uh, just from, uh, let’s see, this was from, uh, today, this morning. Wow, this popped up really quickly. Um, rough math, but interesting. Reddit told ad week that it’s AI licensing deals make up about 10 percent of its revenue annual revenue for Reddit in 2024 was 1.

3 billion. So 10 percent is 130 million. Google says that Reddit, uh, Google sorry, pays Reddit 60 million. So that means OpenEye is paying Reddit about 70 million per year. Now that number has, uh, that number has been revealed, again, very interesting. And I’ll go ahead and switch the screen to this article that is, um, that, that he is referencing here.

And it’s AI licensing deals with Google and OpenEye make up 10 percent of Reddit’s revenue. Um, there’s a couple of tidbits that I wanted to share from this article, but first and foremost, kind of some, some back of the napkin math there by Glenn Gabe. And it does tell us a little bit more about where Reddit is getting their information and also how much they’re paying for it.

Thomas thoughts.

Thomas: Well, I think we never knew exactly what that number was. And Glenn did some really good math to figure that out to say, okay, well, process of elimination. If Google’s paying this amount, we know what the overall revenue is. A couple of things stand out. I mean, it’s a huge chunk, 10 percent and growing.

I’m sure of Reddit’s revenues coming from just licensing its data. And, you know, that tells me that’s probably going to be a bigger piece of where these UGC kinds of sites are making their money in the future because they own that conversational data that’s not available anywhere else. And they starting to see that it’s a huge asset for them.

So I wonder if that means they can run fewer ads. I wonder what that means for some of us too, if we’ve got big chunks of, of, you know, podcasts, for example, could that be licensed out? Is that a new way to generate some revenue? So that’s the first thing that stands out is wow, 10%. But also I think, you know, we’re finally seeing what OpenAI is paying to get their hands on some of this data.

And again, we saw it’s fairly comparable. To what Google was paying to get its hands on very similar data from Reddit. And to me, this really hammers in what we were talking about the last time I was on the podcast. And we talked about deep seek and our suspicions about where it might’ve been getting its data, maybe from open AI.

It shows these, these companies that are building these huge models. They’re not just kind of grabbing everything on the internet anymore. They’re paying a lot of money for exclusive access. So if someone’s able to come along and kind of siphon that off, that’s going to be a real challenge for them in the future.

Jared: It’s really interesting because this also opens up. I guess a can of worms that we already knew existed to be fair. But we know that, um, open AI is behind, you know, the company behind chat GPT. They’re paying 70 million a year for Reddit data, Google, uh, obviously probably for their Gemini product and what they’re using an AI overviews and these sorts of things is paying 60 million.

So I’m just, you know, they’re kind of going after the same data. Uh, they’re kind of going after the same amount and Reddit in essence is double dipping. Do you think, I mean. One question I had, and I actually mean this, I don’t know the answer to it, but is Claude not paying, you know, is Anthropic, the company behind Claude, are they not, or Cloud, I don’t know how to say it, I’ve been corrected many times here on this podcast by listeners, but are they not paying for this data, are they not using UGC data, does this 130 million that Adweek discussed, um, that Reddit’s paying, is that Yeah,

Thomas: I think maybe it creates a barrier for other people who don’t have tens of millions of dollars sitting around.

To get into this, but I wonder also, I mean, we’ve talked about this before, what happens because now Reddit people are starting to see it’s getting a ton of AI data, a ton of AI answers coming in there. People are using ChatGPT to respond. People have seen, hey, it ranks well, let’s load up, you know, old, old, uh, threads in our niche.

Five year old thread that hasn’t had any, any movement that ranks really well. I’ll just drop an affiliate link on the end of that. So what happens when that data gets sold back and the AI is kind of eating its tail at that point? Are we going to see a degradation in the quality of what’s actually coming out of that?

I don’t know how much longer Reddit’s going to be that kind of positive place. I also wonder, you know, we saw Reddit start to drop a little bit, or like not be quite as the darling child quite as much with Google. It’s the fact that now that data is not just going to Google, some part of that, and maybe, maybe that’s a little bit too conspiracy theory esque, but to me, it’s a little suspicious, hey, Google was getting all this data, and they had this deal, and so they suddenly read it ranked really high, and they were getting tons more traffic, that yields tons more data.

We saw it start to drift downwards a bit and now we learn, Hey, open AI has been paying for it too. Maybe Google saying, well, you know, it’s not quite as valuable anymore. Cause the competition has it. Let’s send them a bit less traffic.

Jared: Interesting. It’s so interesting to think about these things. And you could, if you’re listening, you might be thinking in the back of your mind.

Oh, I’m sure none of that really happens. Cause that’s exactly what I’m thinking. But I’ve been hosting this podcast and the news episode too long to feel like it’s not, this kind of stuff doesn’t exist. So who knows? We’re just guessing a bit like Glenn. You know, it was kind of clear about that as well.

But a couple other things from the ad week, um, uh, article, uh, advertising remains, right? It’s core revenue driver, despite some of these AI licensing deals we talked about, remember it only makes up 10 percent of the revenue. Most of the revenue comes from advertising. Uh, here’s some interesting juicy tidbits.

Yes. They might’ve dropped a little bit. Yeah. Yada, yada, yada. It’s a bit like Google’s market share. We talk about how it can fluctuate a little bit, but in general. They’re the king and when it comes to reddit like listen to this q4 revenue increased 71 percent year over year reaching four hundred and twenty seven point seven million ad revenue grew by 60 percent year over year and You know just read it such a popular spot for a brand to put itself nowadays because they’re getting tons of traffic They’re always been a go to place for people to go to share and talk and all that kind of stuff So even with reddit Maybe dropping a bit in rankings and we’ve seen that and we’ll see how that plays out.

They still are such a popular place right now and, uh, Their shareholders are raking it in for sure. Anything else on that topic before we move on to our next one, which is YouTube.

Thomas: I just think it’s another reminder that this kind of UGC content is valuable. And even if you’re not going to start a forum and like wade into that world of running something like that, there’s a lot of ways you can integrate these kinds of conversations into a traditional site.

I, for example, will find like a Reddit thread about a new restaurant for my site, and I’ll write it up. I’ll say, you know, this person said this. This is these are the opinions people are sharing. So there’s ways to kind of take that reference back to the thread. And build that UGC content in without paying, you know, 70 million to have access to it.

Jared: It’s very true. It’s very true. I mean, like I said, I’m excited to see the expanding role that some of these places will have. And, you know, I, uh, I know in future podcasts, I’m sure we’ll be talking more about this licensing model. Um, and, uh, I just wish that, uh, you know, open AI or Google felt like my website was big enough to license.

Stuff from it, but probably not quite as large as reddit if i’m being honest or it’s popular Uh, anyways, all right on to this next topic here. We’re talking youtube now. So, um This is an article in search engine land. Uh, and basically the idea here is, and we’ve been talking AI overviews for quite a while, obviously.

But YouTube citations in Google AI overviews have surged by 25%. Um, and so the basically here, let me, I’ll read you a couple sound, sound clips from this article. This came out yesterday. Google AI overviews more often cite YouTube for instructional content, visual demonstrations, verification examples, and current events.

Um, and so this is basically this is a study that was done by bright edge, which is an SEO platform talked about how YouTube citations and AI reviews grew 25. 21 percent since January 1st. Now, a couple of details about it. Um, this was the biggest surge for this cause it is industry specific. You know, we talk about this, I think last week with Spencer, how, um, a lot of what we’re looking at, we’re looking at data when it comes to stuff like AO, AI overviews, engagement, click through rates, stuff like that.

It is. Much more specific to certain industries or certain types of queries. And so in this case, the biggest surges of the healthcare industry. Um, but, uh, it also went into the, it broke down the growth and where it was showing up in YouTube citations. So instructional content had, uh, was up 35, YouTube was up 35.

6 percent with how to queries leading at 22. 4%. In other words, when you’re searching something for how to do something, uh, YouTube. Um, shows up in AI overviews significantly more, uh, 22. 4 for that specific query. But in general, instructional content, 35. 6%, which it kind of makes sense, by the way, a couple more data points.

And then, um, Thomas, we can talk about this because I know you’re super into YouTube these days. Yeah. Visual demonstrations up 32. 5 percent verification examples up 22. 5%. Interesting. It noted cited for product comparisons and visual proof. And then current events up 9. 4 percent stuff like breaking news, live coverage queries.

Um, a couple more things I can go through, but before I do, Thomas, um, this is interesting. I think obviously if you’re into YouTube like you are, this is probably good news from a high level. Why do you think AI overuse is now surging with YouTube, uh, in it rather than, you know, in the last year or so?

Thomas: My guess is they rolled it out first.

looking at websites because that’s sort of the traditional, you know, Google thing. They probably thought, okay, we’ll start there. They probably ingested all the websites and built AI overviews on that. I think now they’re starting to turn to video content. And for people who don’t know, they often don’t process a video as a video.

They basically take the text transcript out of that video. And then they process that as if it’s web content, essentially. So when you’re speaking in your YouTube video, that’s essentially like SEO, you can kind of work keywords in there. You can, you know, structure it in different ways. And that’s what they’re looking at.

So I suspect that they figured they’d start with websites and then they would pivot and it’s makes a ton of sense for them to do that because that’s the direction I’ve personally seen a lot of what would traditionally have been kind of a long tail keywords, the niche site things we would target, you know, how to do this.

How many of these do I need? You know, how many bathrooms are there on a 747? These kinds of queries that traditionally would have gone to niche sites. Now they’re in AI overviews. And if you can create a YouTube video that was sort of still in the SERP for those kinds of queries, and now it’s going to be in the AI overview as well.

So for YouTubers who are doing this kind of instructional content, I think it’s a huge deal. We were kind of getting almost pushed out a little bit by AI overviews. Now we’re back in the running. It sounds like for certain topics, you know, this could be a huge, huge traffic source.

Jared: I think there’s an interesting parallel.

If you look at the data that’s presented in this article and you think about the traditional affiliate sites, a lot of us had or still have, uh, but certainly the traditional kind of niche site, right around a topic. There’s informational queries. There’s product comparisons. Some of the stuff you’re driving traffic to and trying to get ad revenue for.

Some of the stuff you’re trying to actually get affiliate revenue from kind of recommending or comparing different products. If you look at this article, there’s a couple things. First off, uh, when we look at the industries, yes, healthcare is the biggest game. 41. 97 percent increase. But the second is e commerce.

Um, and again, the article talks about, hey, these are unboxing. Uh, demos, these are videos about e commerce products, right? So we’ve got this surge. The second biggest surge was in the e commerce space. And then what did we talk about just a minute ago in terms of by the numbers, YouTube’s type of query that increased in AI reviews.

And number one was instructional content, which is up 35. 6%. So in many ways, like If you take the model that you might’ve had online from a couple of years ago, that was working, producing instructional content, driving ad revenue that way, producing product reviews, driving affiliate revenue that way. Like it’s almost like what got rewarded is the bits and pieces of a traditional kind of niche website.

And now we’re seeing that rewarded in AI overviews, but through YouTube, through video content.

Thomas: I think it’s really refreshing. I mean, I. I love it because I like making those kinds of videos and I like writing about, or, you know, now making videos about a whole bunch of random topics. And I’ve seen that with my own channel that.

The idea of sort of site authority that we’re starting to see really strongly and brand authority and that kind of thing on niche sites that didn’t really exist. It wasn’t really a big factor, you know, five years ago or something like that. It’s still not that big of a factor on YouTube. So you can have a channel that’s monetized.

You can make videos about pretty much anything and you’ll get search traffic. Um, that’s an important distinction I’ll get to in a second, but you know, you’ll get search traffic. For pretty much all those videos and I’ve covered everything, you know, Swiffer, wet jets and, and a particular coffee chain that I’ll talk about a little bit later on too.

But I think, um, I’m starting to worry a little bit as a YouTuber. Is that gonna change? Is the, the same thing that happened to niche sites gonna happen to channels? And YouTube is gonna really want you to stay in your lane. So that’s one apprehension there. But I also just want to quickly put that 1 percent number in context, because they say, okay, let’s all, you know, caveat only 1 percent of YouTube views come from search, but you have to think the size of the overall pie on YouTube is just so big.

Like that includes every single person who streams their favorite song over and over and over again. It includes all the crazy viral, you know, shorts and videos and that kind of thing. And that’s a huge chunk of the overall traffic. But when you’re looking at how to videos or unboxings or healthcare related videos, I would bet that a much, much higher percentage comes from search.

And I know on my own channel, that’s very how to focused. Something like 85 percent of the traffic is from traditional Google search. So if you’re looking at that going, well, why should I care? It’s only 1%. It’s actually, I think for those kinds of videos, search is a huge driver. So if we’re getting a whole new traffic source within search, That’s going to be a big deal

Jared: And it’s interesting.

I don’t want to go too far, you know, rewind the tape too far, but it, you know, again, doing this every week. These are on my mind. So I went and looked into it a little bit in October and we didn’t talk about this on the podcast. I don’t think I remember it being a story that was on the list to try to do.

And we couldn’t squeeze it in that week. But in October, It was reported in search engine land, same spot, that YouTube citations and Google AI overviews surged 300%. So again, that was, and I pulled up the article here, YouTube citations grew in Google AI overviews by 310 percent since August of 2024 and 200 percent September of 2024.

And, you know, so it’s interesting that like, we’re seeing this sharp growth in 2025, but don’t forget that this comes on the heels of. Incredible growth in the hundreds of percentiles, the tripling, the quadrupling that happened in 2024. And so it seems if we look back on when AI overviews was launched in May, to your point.

Might’ve had zero YouTube over, uh, YouTube citations or very few, right. But as they’re kind of, um, building the model out and starting to use video, like we’re just seeing increase after increase, after increase, after increase. And so it just bodes more and more towards video, towards YouTube and towards what can come from it.

And it bodes well for the toaster guy.

Thomas: Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, when YouTube, I think, and when Google in general makes a change, there’s, there’s two pieces to it. There’s kind of the increase in traffic that you get, which is nice. But it’s also a signal, right. As to what they want and what they’re thinking.

And that I think here is the bigger piece because yeah, it’s a, it’s great to see these, these jumps in traffic to see probably more external traffic for the toaster guy and these kinds of, you know, demo centered and how to centered videos. But it also indicates that this is the direction that Google and YouTube within it want to go.

They want to be using video to answer these AI overview queries that relate to how to or relate to unboxings and that kind of thing. So it’s a signal to me that if you’re creating that kind of content, you’re on the right track. And if you did that kind of content for the niche site world and you feel comfortable getting on camera, it’s super easy to make this content.

There’s no editing required. You know, you just talk about a product. It’s very similar to, to your site hustle. You’re going to be sharing it a little bit, really just talk about a product, um, show, you know, what it looks like and how you use it. And you could be ranking as well as that long tail page would have ranked in Google on your niche site three, four or five years ago.

Jared: Right. Exactly. So, uh, okay, let’s move along. We got one more story. This is more on the very interesting front. And, um, let’s see here. I’m going to pull it up. Uh, always a bit of a struggle. So the title of the story is Google says, uh, uh, Google’s Gary eels. And I never say his name right. I apologize, Gary.

I’ve been doing that wrong for over a decade now. But, uh, Google’s Gary Eels focus on originality in 2025. Very short story. Um, there was a gathering in London, uh, run by, um, I don’t have the name in front of me, but it’s called SEO FOMO as a panel. And one of the attendees, Mark Williams Cook, shared a quote.

Uh, quote, originality is something we’re going to be focusing on this year. That’s going to be important, is what Gary Eels said. Um, and, you know, this is on a very small panel, by the way. It looks like there’s, there’s a small dimly lit room. Bunch of people are hanging out on stools, talking. Uh, uh, it looks like almost like in a bar or something like that.

So just kind of a, a gathering, but Gary was there at that and was discussing that, not much more to the story, except that Google is apparently going to be focusing on originality. I saw somebody make a comment that was, uh, you know, like, is this going to now, are we going to have Ito, right? Eat being, uh, E E A T.

We’ve got the expertise. We’ve got the experience. We’ve got the authority. We’ve got the trustworthiness and now we’re going to have originality. Is, you know, is that someone’s going to get added? I think though, from a high level, it’s worth talking about. And we don’t know if this is where Google is going to go.

Uh, they have been known to say things and then go different directions. Sometimes we theorized when they say what they want, it means that that’s where they’re trying to go. Doesn’t necessarily mean that they’ve figured out how to get there yet. It makes sense in a world where AI is at play. And where they’re moving more and more towards AI, originality does seem to be the only antidote left, but at the same time, how is Google going to figure out how to reward originality and are they even going to try to award originality when what they really are rewarding is stuff that AI can replicate and surface?

It’s a high level topic. It’s confusing topic, but I’d be curious to open that can of worms and maybe discuss a little bit. 2025 is originality the new way to rank in search?

Thomas: I think that this is basically another way to say, show me that you don’t want AI content without telling you that you don’t want AI content, right?

Like, this is, they’re not going to come out and say it because there’s a kind of AI content that they are fine with. And they have Gemini, so they’d like you to continue to use their AI tools. But I think this is, again, as you hinted at, a response to. To the kind of influx of AI content. And I think the way that they will approach this, just kind of putting on my data scientist hat for a second, is to look at how much your content, whether it’s video or images on your page or text differs from kind of the consensus that they’ve identified.

And we heard before, we talked a little bit about this, that consensus is something that they’re looking at. Kind of the, the way that, uh, everybody else is covering a topic is significant and they’re measuring that. I’m wondering if now they’re going to start to look at how much your content on a mathematical level adds new information, things that are surprising to the algorithm, things that aren’t covered in that kind of average of all of the existing content, and maybe that’s a signal that they’re going to start to reward.

And, you know, by the way, What creates the perfect average of consensus, exactly what everyone else is saying, it’s AI because it’s ingested all this data. And so what it returns is, you know, what, what we already know everything we know about a topic. So my guess is that what they mean by originality is they’re going to look at your content.

They’re going to compare it to what an AI system would output. And they’re going to see how much of it differs and how dramatically, how much of it is basically teaching their algorithm and thus their users, something new information gain, basically. And if you are doing that, then they’re going to reward that.

Jared: Help me process through this because I think it’s almost the ultimate catch 22 for Google if they don’t if publishers like us Stop producing content because we’re getting outranked by AI overviews by Google’s AI stuff We’re not getting traffic. So we have a natural Reaction over time where our industry of publishers starts to go away because we aren’t having our content showing up in places like Google anymore, right?

If we don’t produce content, they stop getting original content. And if they stop getting original content, then they stop having as much to build their AI models off of. And so they need fresh content to continue to build their AI models. But if they continue to build their AI models and push fresh content down to where it doesn’t rank, then.

It’s almost this circle jerk, if you will. And so how does Google reward you and I for creating original content when their goal is only I’m theorizing only to get the original content so they can make their AI model better. And thus proliferate it more.

Thomas: I think they want to make the AI model better, but I do think that they’re starting to see everyone can get AI content everywhere for free, basically, at this point.

You can get it from DeepSeek. You can get it from Claude. You can get it from, you know, all their, all their competition. And so people want something that is not that, because they can get it somewhere else. And yes, there are some people who come and get it from Google, perhaps without even knowing. They just put something in Google.

The AI overview pops up. They have no idea what it is. Like, Oh, Google told me the answer here. It is, but a lot of people know they can go to these different places and get that content. And so they don’t want that. They want from Google something different from that. And more to the point, Google seen their market share dip possibly because, well, you know, you don’t need to go there for the average of all content you can.

Very easily go to deep seeker, go somewhere else. So my guess is they want to pivot towards originality. Yes, to have more data to train, but also because it is a differentiator. They see it as a potential differentiator. If people see, okay, if I go to Google, I’m going to find that incredible blog from someone who really knows.

I think what it means for our industry though, is that we have to kind of keep going down this new path we’ve taken, if that makes any sense, we had all been using tools that standardized our content to what everyone else was saying, literally looked at the top 10, you know, ranking things and pulled out the keywords and said, okay, write the same article.

And we optimized in the same way, the same kinds of headings, all this kind of stuff. And I’m not saying that’s necessarily what caused the big drops we’ve all seen, but I think everybody started down this path of originality, original photos. We’ve got to do the things that we said we did. We’ve got to get pictures of the product we’re reviewing, et cetera.

And I think we have to continue down that path. I don’t know for sure that it’ll be rewarded, but that seems to be what Google’s hinting at here.

Jared: You know, we’ve seen so many times where they’ve told us what they want, especially around this topic of EEAT. And then obviously we didn’t get rewarded with that at the same time.

If they can figure out how to reward content creators for originality, well, then maybe that is what they want and maybe that is what they’ll do. It certainly stands to reason they would reward for originality over some of the other things. So, you know, that makes sense. At least, at least the concept makes sense, right?

We know why they want original content. We know people want original content. Yeah, it makes sense. So I don’t know. It’d be fun in a year in 2026 to kind of rewind the clock, come back and look at this and see if we saw any, any evidence of originality playing itself out right now. Just kind of a comment at an SEO gathering in London.

Super interesting to dive into though. Glad it was shared with us. And it’s fun to think more and more about it. And again, I think it makes sense whether they can figure it out. I don’t know, but I would, I would love that if, if, if I could rank my content. Because it’s original, that would be a win. So I think I can park it there for now.

And we’ll see how it goes throughout the year of 2025. Absolutely.

Spencer: Hey everyone. Spencer here, founder of niche pursuits. Are you adding a new internal link pointing to each article you publish? You should be ever find it time consuming and a bit overwhelming. Remembering what content you publish and deciding which anchor text to use can be a real headache.

What if there was a better way? Well that’s exactly why I created Link Whisper. Simply click add inbound internal links and Link Whisper will scan your site in seconds and suggest the most relevant links with appropriate anchor text for your new article. Now simply check the box next to the internal links you want to add.

And Link Whisper will add these links for you. No need to go into each article, edit, and add the link. It’s already done. No more manual internal link building or guesswork. Just efficient, accurate linking that saves you time and improves your SEO. Transform your content strategy with Link Whisper. Start linking smarter, not harder.

Use the coupon code podcast for 15 off, head over to lakewhisper. com and use coupon code podcast to get 15 off.

Jared: Well, it’s about that time. Um, you know, Thomas, I tease every week, like what new side hustle do you have for us someday, you are going to have to circle back and just give us an update on all these side hustles that you’ve, that you’ve launched.

Um, but, uh, until then we’ll have to, we’ll have to wait to hear about your newest side hustle. I know. That, uh, that I can see on the agenda. It is something new, folks. It’s, it’s, it’s yet another new side hustle. Um, I’m going to give an update on Amazon Influencer. Month of January. Um, January’s in the books.

And I, last time that I talked about Amazon Influencer, I was talking about how amazing January was going compared to the January before that. And I was just seeing these amazing numbers. As a matter of fact, by the middle of the month, I had already earned more than I had earned. In January of 2024, right?

So a year prior. Um, so final numbers for the month and it came in at just over 2, 700.

Thomas: Nice.

Jared: Uh, last January, 2024, I made just under 1, 500. So it did not finish double. Um, but it, it came pretty close, right? So it’s, it’s very interesting because, um, I’m very happy with January from a high level. However, if you are doing some, you know, math there, you will know what I’m about to say, because what happened is at the end of January, my traffic, my clicks and my earnings fell off a cliff.

Now, again, I don’t spend a ton of time like dissecting what’s going on, you know, did Amazon change something? They’re always tweaking stuff. We’ve seen this over the years, at least a year and a half to two years I’ve been in the program. They’re always Dialing one thing up down one thing back So I’m sure there were some changes made, however, around January, like 24th or something, man, my clicks and thus earnings kind of dropped off a cliff and they have not come back.

It’s been very, a very slow first half of February. I’m, uh, I’m going to be embarrassed to share my February numbers at this rate, uh, because as they, they’ve like turned the spigot almost off. I saw someone say that they completely changed how these videos are, are showing up, um, for some people and stuff.

So, um, it’s good news, bad news, but we’ve been here before. Uh, and so it’s one of those things where, um, it, it, what it does is it demotivates you to make videos. It really does, uh, during these times that it’s so bad. What I’ve done in the past is stick through it and I’m going to do that again. I’m going to do it.

I’m saying it publicly here so that I don’t talk myself out of it. Um, I’m going to count on it, you know, kind of rebounding like it’s done many, many times before. Um, and, and that, but so good month of January, good month of January. Uh, I only ended up making about 20 videos in January. So to make 2, 700 from that is a huge win.

Uh, February, not looking so good, but we’re going to keep making some videos for February and hope that

Thomas: it rebounds. Do you have a sense of what drives it? Was it one product that kind of fell off or anything like that? Where you get it? Cause I know in the past you’ve had. Some big winners and that’s really driven a lot of it or some high value products.

Or was it like you’re saying, just, they maybe made a tweak to where things are showing up.

Jared: Great question. Um, I did a little bit of math on that this morning, thinking that you might ask me something along those lines. So if I go in and look at my, my top videos, right, you can go see which ones are getting the most views.

It’s all the same videos from last month. So it’s not like I fell out of the carousel for a bunch, but then when I go look at the number of clicks and I look at like the last seven days with the clicks compared to like something maybe, um, in January. Uh, when it was doing well, they’re like half of what they were.

And so something I think happened to like the way they’re doing videos and the way they’re doing influencer videos across the board. It’s not like I specifically lost a killer carousel that I had and now I’m not getting that anymore because the views. And the videos that they’re corresponding to are roughly the same.

It’s just the fact they’re not getting as many views and that’s not as many clicks and that’s not as many sales.

Thomas: Gotcha. Yeah. I mean, we’ve seen this in the past. They always seem to make a tweak around like the 20th of the month. So we’ve seen that happen many times. I don’t know why that is. I think people speculate that maybe there’s a certain amount allocated for these videos and if it’s approaching that at the end of the month, maybe they dial them back a little bit internally.

We don’t know. It’s a total black box in terms of what Amazon does, but, um, I hope it comes back up for you. I, it’s probably comforting to know that, you know, a lot of people have seen that. Mine have not been great in general, but they didn’t drop. If anything, weirdly, they seem to be a little bit higher towards the end of last month.

So I don’t know. I, I had done a lot of sort of experimented with more vertical video content. I’d done a lot of vertical videos and just because I’ve been using those for my YouTube channel for shorts and putting them on there too. So I wonder if there’s some pivot happening there, if I’m seeing maybe an increase.

With that, and, and I don’t know what your formats are exactly, but maybe, maybe they’ve pivoted a little more towards the vertical side of things. I’m not sure, but yeah, I hope you, I hope you start to see some recovery there.

Jared: We’ll have to see. I mean, like you said, it definitely corresponded to that 20th, right?

20th month it dropped, but it didn’t correspond with it going back up in February. So, uh, it’s tough to see. Um, I mean, it’s a side hustle for a reason, right? And so, you know, good times, bad times. I’ve been really impressed with it, so I’m going to keep going, um, in the interim. We’ll have to see how it goes.

Uh, Thomas, what do you have for us on the Side Hustle world? Something new? Something shiny? Um, very shiny, I have to say.

Thomas: Yeah, so this is one, again, that I’ve really been thinking about. This and, and my, uh, my weird knees. These are things I’ve been really thinking about for a little while. And so this one with, um, uh, my new, new kind of direction here grew out of my YouTube channel.

And out of my website. And so it’s something again, that I’ve hinted at on both of those platforms. And it is. Green Mermaid review. So if you’re thinking of what that could possibly be, and thinking of what I might have talked about in the past, um, put it together. Where would you find a Green Mermaid?

Well, you’d find a Green Mermaid on a Starbucks cup. It’s an allusion to the Starbucks logo. And again, that’s something where I’ve seen this weird trend, both in my website, Bay Area Telegraph, which is primarily about the Bay Area, And on my YouTube channel, which is primarily kind of product unboxings and reviews, that if I make a video about Starbucks, reviewing a drink, talking about some kind of news, or write an article about Starbucks, it takes off.

And I don’t know why. I have no idea why I’m considered to be the authority. I know why I’m considered the authority on toasters. That’s obvious. Um, but, you know, I don’t know why I’m considered to be an authority on Starbucks, but for some reason, this has always happened. And, um, I’ve just seen that it’s easy content to make.

There’s not a lot of it out there. There’s not many people covering it. I shared a weird niche site a little while ago. Um, that was Yeah, exactly. It was, was a Starbucks. It kind of went away. It’s no longer there anymore. So it seemed like there’s, you know, some room in this area. So I decided I was finally going to do it.

And I launched this new, totally experimental brand, Green Mermaid Review. Um, I basically launched in two ways. So I created, and this kind of shows you where I’m, I’m thinking in terms of this kind of content. I created a YouTube channel first. So it is youtube. com slash at green mermaid review. And that’s very similar to the play that I was using with toaster guy, except that’s something I don’t expect to go anywhere at this one, I think actually has.

Some solid potential long term. So it’s basically a short form, vertical videos. It is all centered on Starbucks and I’m trying out all different formats. I’ve done seven shorts so far. Um, they’re a mixture of, again, like a new drink reviews, reactions to trying a new drink for the first time. Um, kind of like hot takes about Starbucks topics.

Yep. There was a change where now baristas are required to write. a little cute message on your cup. So I did a kind of reaction to that, a hot take on that. Um, all kinds of different stuff. So I have seven shorts. As of yesterday, I think it’s actually higher today, but I had 3, 821 views on those. Started this channel like four days ago.

So I’m pretty happy with that so far. And I’m even happier. I did one long form video, which is about a two minute horizontal video reviewing the midnight drink, a new drink they just released. And that is yesterday had like 14 views. I think it’s up over 20 something views. Again, not huge, but for something that’s this new and to start to get traffic and actually watch time has been pretty good on that long form video.

It makes me think there’s definitely demand here. It’s definitely interest if I can grow my subscriber count and really create more of this content. Then I feel like there’s definitely potential, um, and also that there’s interest in the long form is really encouraging because that’s where you can actually make money on, on YouTube.

The shorts really get a lot of traction, but they don’t tend to earn a lot. You can get kind of sense for for hundreds of thousands or thousands of views on them. But with long form, I’ve seen my other channel that you can do really well with it. So, yeah, I’m excited to, to build this out. I think there’s strong potential both on the shorts and on the long form to get into the kind of AdSense thing on, on their YouTube partner program and earn.

And the other thing that I did was register the domain. So greenmermaidreview. com. That’s basically just a placeholder at the moment. But I’m planning to start a site around that that’s going to be kind of Starbucks news. And again, these reviews kind of pulling in the video content, adding some text to it and kind of building out a site again with original stuff, original video, original photos.

So yeah, that’s my newest, very shiny object there.

Jared: I am looking at your shorts right now. I got them pulled up. I, um, uh, let’s see the most popular one right now at 1200 views, Starbucks. Nespresso pods and 60 year old china cup from my grandma. It’s a nice china cup there Yeah, little espressos a little afternoon espresso there.

Um, and I mean, it’s uh, it’s got 11 Uh, it’s got 11 likes. It’s got two comments. Uh, I mean, wow, you are off with a bang here So what’s the long term goal? Like what would you say would be great in a year for this? Project to be at.

Thomas: I would love to be in the partner program and have the long form videos monetized.

And I think that this still has, this is one of the few areas that I could see potential to still rank and get organic traffic just because I’ve seen it done with that other niche site that basically had closed down. And I think for this kind of stuff, again, if Google is hinting that they want to reward originality, this is something where I can be on camera.

I can have selfies of me holding, you know, cool looking Starbucks glasses and that kind of thing. I would love to see organic traffic coming in, and I would love to be, you know, in Mediavine Journey or one of those ad networks. Long, long term goal here, I think it could be a great content site. But I also think this would be something that would be fantastic to build up and then eventually sell to somebody who wants to kind of take it and run with it because everybody drinks Starbucks, you know, it’s content that’s fairly easy to write.

Starbucks is all around you. You know, I was just thinking, all right, I’m making this. It’s very interesting. I’m using my grandma’s cup with this newfangled in an espresso pot. It takes me 10 seconds to record a short and there’s another 1200 people who know about the brand. So that’s where I’d love to see it, a site that’s ranking at least to some extent, a YouTube channel that’s monetized in the partner program and to be in some kind of premium ad network.

Jared: Well, I just did an incognito search in YouTube for Starbucks midnight drink review, which by the way, it auto populated for me. Uh, I show your horizontal video is number three. So, you know, Hey, and it’s up to 24 views. So a brand new fresh off the press. The number one video is vertical, by the way, is a short, but it’s a, it’s got 12, 000 views just published eight days ago.

So to your point, clearly interest here.

Thomas: And also Starbucks is constantly rolling out new stuff, which is another reason I like this niche. I think there’s some niches where it’s really hard to find new topics to talk about. Yeah. And it’s very hard to find news kinds of topics to talk about. But Starbucks is always coming out with new stuff.

They’re always rolling out new drinks. Um, oftentimes they’re creating, you know, controversy or doing something that people don’t like. So I’m thinking that this is a direction that I can go, is to do this sort of news content. And there’s always going to be something new to talk about. And then I’m wondering if I can kind of relate it.

Back to your, uh, side hustle that you’re sharing here. There’s a lot of Starbucks related products, right? Like, I don’t know if you’ve reviewed any of that kind of stuff, but you’ve got the espresso pods. They’ve got all different kinds of coffee. They’ve got

Jared: a lot of mugs that they also sell on Amazon, by the way.

I’ve noticed. So, uh, Starbucks every year has new mugs and a lot of that ends up on Amazon. I don’t know if it’s from Starbucks or whatnot, but I’ve reviewed quite a few mugs that have ended up on, uh, on Amazon.

Thomas: So will this be maybe another feeder that I could use into. Sharing that kind of, that kind of content on, on influencers, I’m influencer channel, or is that something to sweeten the deal?

If in a year I put this up for sale and it’s somebody could use it to create an influencer account and start to produce that kind of review content. Yeah, it’s very new, but I feel like again, ToasterGuy is mostly just for fun. I’ve still been adding to it. It’s still getting views amazingly. Um, but I don’t think there’s, you know, huge long term potential there.

We’ll see. Uh, could be, you know, the next breakout hit. This one, I really do feel like it ties into what I think Google wants. And I’m hoping I can keep sharing updates and we’ll see how, you know, how it turns out here.

Jared: Well, good stuff exciting to see always fun to see how you put those things together.

So happy, you know, share them I mean, I haven’t checked back into the toaster guy in a while But I hope you do give us an update on that and all your other side hustles you’re working on I’m gonna transition now into some weird niches and like I teased at the outset yours is very seasonal related Mine is absolutely not seasonal, but I’m sticking I’m back to I’m off the Disney theme here So maybe I’ll come back to that but I did a couple weeks at Disney but back to the calculator theme Before I I do dive in Um, uh, as I’m pulling it up here, uh, just a reminder, we had a really popular podcast go live and interview go live this week.

Not sure if you had a chance to catch that Thomas, but we interviewed niche site lady, her first ever. Podcast interview. Um, and we had that go live. That is going fantastic in terms of watches, views, YouTube, the downloads, the listens on the podcast platform. Really fun. Tons of comments. I think last time I checked, 50 or 60 comments.

People questions, uh, asking questions. Uh, she’s popping in and answering them. So if you haven’t had a chance to watch or listen to that interview we did. Make sure to go check that out. That was just released a couple of days ago, but, uh, yeah, Thomas, do you have a chance to listen to that one?

Thomas: I did. I started at, I haven’t finished it yet, but it is already a fantastic interview.

And I’ve been following her for years. I’ve written back and forth with her on her newsletter. And so to actually hear directly from her and some of the stuff that’s working. It’s yeah, it’s, it’s great and you just see that same personality that comes through in her tweets come through in the interview.

So yeah, I’m really enjoying it so far.

Jared: Yeah, very interesting when you kind of read her emails every week and then you can listen to her like, Oh my gosh, it’s the same person. So anyways, definitely wanna go check that out. Um, I’m gonna try to start teasing more about the podcast that we interview. Uh, here in the new segment.

So, um, you know, just trying to take that for a test drive, but I’m wanting to do that more and more because I think that, uh, there’s a lot of correlation between what happens on a Friday, what we talk about the news, the side hustle, the weird niches, all this stuff really does core correlate to some of the interviews that we do.

Um, uh, so anyways, okay, let’s get into some weird niches. We know this is a favorite segment for a lot of people. Um, certainly one of the people who always want to talk about my weird niche today. Is a calculator website of sorts, and it’s called unitconverters. net. Um, this site, it, you know, I have it up on screen, but if, um, if you’re, if you’re not watching, like, I’d say for a calculator website, it’s pretty darn clean.

Um, it looks pretty professional. It still has that kind of like, uh, Windows, you know, feel to it, but it’s clean. It’s organized. It’s got a color scheme going for it. I mean, heck, you know, what, what, what, what more could we ask for out of a calculator site? And it kind of does a lot of what you would imagine.

It converts different units of measurement. And so, um, they’ve organized this very interestingly. And I wanted to spend a little time with this. They have tabs for the different types of units. So we’ve got length. We’ve got temperature. We’ve got area. We’ve got volume. We’ve got weight. And we’ve got time.

So these are all sorts of different. Calculator or conversions that you can make. So what I have right up here is let’s go ahead and I’m going to do from meters to, uh, let’s go to miles. Um, and so what’s cool about it is like I’ll put in a thousand meters and it just updates in real time. So that’s really cool.

That’s 0. 62 miles. If you’re wondering out there, but what I love about this in the U. I. S. And again, if you’re looking, you can see this, but it actually calculates every unit of measurement that it converts right there for you. So, like, um, I don’t even know how to say this. Thomas 1000 meters is 1. 057 e to the negative 13 light years.

So, you know, and it does it all right here in front of you. 1000 meters is 3280 feet. Um, uh, it has a drop down, uh, or sorry, a, uh, find the units to convert where it, where it gives you, um, uh, more options. Um, and then if you scroll down below the fold, it has, I mean, every single one off where they’ve built an actual page for an HTML page for the different one off calculator.

So this, you’re, when you’re doing like the meters to miles, it’s all existing inside of the homepage, but you can come down here. And then find this, you know, unique, uh, variation, if you will. And it actually has its own, here you go, miles to kilometers, kilometers to miles. And if you click on that, it has its own URL and calculator specific for that.

And of course, it’s loaded up with content. Um, and, uh, and whatnot. So this is a very interesting site. I’ll really quickly share the AHREFs behind it, because I think that’s also fascinating. This is a DR 72, and it is getting, uh, according to AHREFs, almost 3 million in estimated organic traffic. Um, it’s absolutely, it’s absolutely bonkers.

If we look at the two year chart, it’s really pretty much, it’s had a little blip, but it’s been growing. It’s been untouched by all the updates of the past couple of years. Um, this is what’s fascinating when you look at, Oh, and I just got logged out. Okay. Well, darn, I can’t show that, but it’s got a lot of pages basically.

And so, um, a lot of calculators and so it’s getting a ton of traffic. I do have my notes here. Let’s see, where did I find this? It must’ve been from similar web. SimilarWeb is estimating 4. 5 million monthly visitors at an average of 1. 55 pages. And if you do some math on that, and I didn’t see, um, I’m gonna go back here and share this screen if I can, but I only saw a very minimal amount of ads.

And there was only one ad that I found in the upper right. Uh, here, let me pull it back up. Uh, yes. So here we got this ad up in the upper right. Um, but really, you know, that’s about the only ad I see. So they’re probably in the lower end of earnings. And they probably could be earning a lot more if they wanted to put more ads in.

It is a nice experience. But even with that kind of traffic with only one ad, I mean, I would estimate 20, 000 to 25, 000 a month in terms of ad revenue. Um, yeah, okay. I kind of went on and on there. Uh, I love this site. I think it’s so cool, and it’s huge. What are your thoughts on it?

Thomas: I love that it’s a net, and it’s making like 25 grand a month.

Like, they couldn’t even get the com for this. Like, you’d think they could go back and buy it, you know. I don’t know who’s doing that, that site. But I just love that it’s a net. It has that Old school, like one, one color variation. So we got like white and then different greens. And I think I count six different greens on the homepage here.

Just slightly different, just enough to like keep you guessing. I really love that it just does what you need without a lot of extra fluff. So you put in the, for people who aren’t looking at it on the screen, you put in one unit. And it just pulls up all the different things with the answer of what that converts into before you even ask it to and you can you can go in there and it’ll put it put whatever if you choose, you know, inches instead of kilometers or whatever.

It’ll highlight that and bring it out, but you don’t have to kind of wait or wade through anything. And I think a lot of calculator sites. Want to drive more page views. So they make you click a bunch of times in order to get the answer. So I really like that it’s just surfacing the answer. And I think with a site like this, that’s essential because what’s your differentiator otherwise?

I mean, these are super simple calculations. I’ve got to think they’re just doing them in JavaScript. They don’t even need any kind of stuff happening on the server side. They’re just doing basic, basic math, basically, to do this. Um, so how do you differentiate yourself there? I think just having that Fast interface and not making people wade through a bunch of other stuff.

I bet that’s why they’re doing so well.

Jared: I finally, I was able to, while you were talking to log back into Ahrefs and get this pulled up. And so it’s got 10, 713 index pages. I mean, just an insane amount of calculators. All right. They’ve got a calculator for everything here. Um, and if you’re watching on screen, I mean, you know, the weight and mass broken up into silos here, by the way.

Which I think is super interesting. Um, the length silo seems to be, have the most, I have most of the popular articles in it. Um, but you know, number one keyword pounds to kilograms. They rank number two for that. And that’s a 335, 000 searches a month keyword. Whew, that is, um. That is a lot of traffic for, for one site here.

So anyways, what a, um, what a cool little calculator site. This is kind of the holy grail of calculator sites. Um, and even though, like you said, it’s probably a programmatic sort of thing. Like they’ve done such a good job at it, but you know, 11, 000 pages. That’s, that’s no joke.

Thomas: That’s yeah. I wonder if they’re creating, yeah.

Are they, are they building those by hand? Are they creating that programmatically? Are there some kind of database? And it pulls it up and says, okay, you know, combine this one with that one and make a new HTML page out of it. Or did they literally go through? Cause each one has content. It has all, what is a kilometer?

Where did the kilometer originate? All that kind of stuff. So on the one hand, it is a super simple site on the other hand, they’ve done a ton of work to build this so they it’s deceptively simple on the front end. But when you think about it, okay, for 11, 000 pages, I have to build that calculator. And I have to do the research, the keywords, get them in there, the history of these units.

What does this unit mean? They’ve done a really good job of it.

Jared: It’s a good site. It’s a lot of work. Obviously we can think of ways they might be able to make it a little bit quicker, but still big site, a lot of work didn’t look how long it’s been around for, but it looks like it’s been around for quite a while.

So

Thomas: if you built that in, in this day and age, I think you’d be deliberately going for that retro look, which I’ve seen people do, by the way, create, you know, old school, HTML sites to see if they rank better than stuff built on WordPress. But I suspect this one has just been around a long while. Yeah.

Jared: All right.

I’m gonna pull yours up, walk us through it.

Thomas: Yeah. So this is one that I had actually discovered a little while ago. And it wasn’t really relevant to my life and to the season. And then, um, given where we’re at now, um, here in California, we’re about to get hit by a giant snow storm. Um, and I am actually right after we finished recording here about to drive into the mountains, right into that snow storm.

So I felt like this was the perfect time. And I’ve also hinted at the, the kind of strategy that this site is using, which I think is really awesome. It is open snow. dot com. And it basically does snow forecasts, snow reports and forecasts specifically for ski destinations all over the world. I believe it’s at least in the United States.

And so if you’re looking for the snow levels when the snow storms are going to arrive, all that kind of stuff is super clean. Interface and you get forecast. You get expert commentary about, you know, what’s going to happen with the snow. And I love that they’re doing that. But also their business model, I think, is really smart.

So they’ve got sort of like a free version here. But then you can also upgrade and pay for access, and it gives you a bunch more data. Like, if you’re an avid skier, I think they have, you know, all kinds of data that you can use to, to plan your trip. And again, like meteorologists going in and providing their, uh, their info.

But they have this trip plan, which I think is, again, super smart. How often do you go skiing? You probably don’t want to buy a yearly subscription in order to have access to something like this. But if you’re about to go on a ski trip, sure, why not? You know, I paid a bunch of money for my ski trip. I’ll fork over 15 bucks to have great snow report.

And so this is like a, I think it’s a two week plan. Yep. Everybody gets access. Yeah.

Jared: I happen to be on it when you talked about it. It looks so

Thomas: perfect. Yeah. Trip plan. So you get four people. 20 bucks, you don’t have to commit longterm and you can get all these snow reports. So I can imagine, you know, if you want like really good snow data and you don’t, you don’t go skiing that much, you can just pay that and get access.

So it’s such a clear business model. And again, you know, I’ve seen this trend where the stuff that works well. Are sites that basically do less, right? Like there, there’s so many weather forecast sites out there that are totally free. And it’s almost a commodity. Like you can go to National Weather Service, you can go to weather.

com, you know, you can get a widget for your WordPress site that creates a weather report. And it has all the data, dew points and rain forecasts and all this kind of stuff. And here they’ve taken that and gone. just to one thing. It’s just snow. And as a result, they’re just doing super well. So it’s a dr 69.

Um, according to h refs, as when I checked, uh, it was getting about, I saw 135, 000 organic. They’re now saying about 90 right under 90, 000 organic. But think about how many of those people would potentially convert to a paying customer. So it’s not just a content site, there’s a sort of paid service of getting these reports.

And if you look at what they’re ranking for, it’s all, um, well, a combination actually, of like Snow Report plus A ski town, essentially Tahoe, you know, Colorado, uh, all that kind of stuff. But they have a ton of branded traffic through all of this open snow, open snow, Colorado, open snow, Tahoe, open snow, Wasatch, I don’t know how to pronounce that.

Jared: Look, I mean, yeah, to your point, like, look at this. I was just talking about that calculator site had a lot of pages. This has 15, 000 pages. You think it’s just a one page website.

Thomas: Yeah, and it’s, it’s literally like everywhere where you might find snow. And I was looking at the reports and it looks like they literally have, I don’t know if it’s You know, a couple meteorologists on staff, but they go and they write up these updates or like, this is what the weather forecast says.

But this is what we think is going to happen. You got to be careful in these places. This is where we’re going to get the best snow. The powders looking great here. They really like go into it in detail rather than just kind of regurgitating the same info you’d find elsewhere. And again, like, they’re just so niched down.

The thing I love about it too is look at the seasonality of it. It’s like it just every year and you’re looking at a two year thing here. Yeah. But, um, it’s, it tends to drop off and then just come, it’s going to come back off, you know, as you get into the snowy season. So we have, yeah,

Jared: we have a two year up right now.

So you basically get three ski seasons and look at the traffic from two years ago, 2023. You know, it was estimating that 75, 000 or so at its peak, look at the traffic last year, 2024, it got up to about a hundred thousand. Right. And then, you know, just like what you said, we were up to like 150, 000, just a couple of weeks ago.

It has dropped off a little bit since then. Um, but to your point, like the seasonality, but look at how much it’s grown. It’s, it’s doubled basically from age reps in the last two years.

Thomas: Yeah, and this is probably, you know, they don’t have to worry about ads. They’re clearly monetizing effectively through offering like a basically a freemium model.

You get a free set of data and then you can upgrade. And again, if you’re going on a ski trip and you plan this for months or years. You’re probably going to be fine with paying an extra 20 bucks to have access to these super detailed forecasts. So, yeah, I love it. And then when I heard you and Spencer talk about how I find niche sites from my real world experience on the last podcast, I thought, all right, I gotta, I gotta, you know, get this one out here.

So it felt like the perfect fit. Um, I hopefully it will be useful to me as I, you know, drive up into the mountains in a couple of hours, right into the teeth of this snow storm. Did you buy the, uh, the 14

Jared: day pass for it? Or are you going to just try to go with the freemium model?

Thomas: I’m going to start out with the freemium.

I am not an avid skier. I just, you know, want to go up there with my kids and see the snow. But yeah, you know, uh, ask me again next week if we get stranded by the side of the road and as snow drift and I need to know when it’s going to clear, uh, you know, I might be forking over that 20 bucks.

Jared: You know, it reminds me a lot of an app I use very consistently, which is, um, all trails, you know, that’s for hiking.

Um, but I mean, I, it looks so similar. In so many ways, I wonder if it’s even by the same person or the same brand or the same company, obviously this is not, these are big, these are big things now. So they’re not just single people, but. Um, yeah, it has a lot of crossover there. So great, great weird niche. Um, uh, wow, that hour flew by.

I said every single week, but sure enough, it did. Fun, a fun week in the news. You know, we had Reddit, we had Google, we had a whole number, we had YouTube, which is Google, but you know, we talk about different than Google, right? A lot of different, interesting topics, certainly a lot of interesting things for content creators.

I hope you enjoyed this week’s news, side hustle updates and the weird niches. Thomas, uh, until I see you again, have a good weekend. Enjoy your trip to the snow. Hopefully we’ll, um, I would not be surprised if you come back with some crazy snow related side hustle as a result of your weekend, uh, uh, your weekend trip here.

Thomas: I will be on the lookout. Absolutely.

Jared: All right, folks, have a great weekend. We’ll see you again next week for this week in news. And in the meantime, stay tuned for our weekly podcast that our interviews and they go out every Wednesday. Bye now.

Source