Yelp Sues Google. What This Means for Small Publishers
This week Jared and guest host Thomas Smith take on all the latest news on this episode of the Niche Pursuits News Podcast.
If you want to find out about the latest in SEO and content creation and get inspired by their business adventures, keep listening!
They kick things off with the big news that Yelp is suing Google
, after the antitrust lawsuit opened the door for them and others. What’s Yelp’s gripe? What kind of domino effect could this create?
Listen to find out what they think about the lawsuit.
Watch the Full Episode
Moving along, they talk about a new lawsuit against Google for its “inappropriate” business practices, the infamous Walker Memo, and how Google is almost two separate companies in one, at least for the purposes of this lawsuit.
Thomas talks about the questions he expects to arise from the case and what important information publishers have been able to glean from these larger cases.
The next topic they talk about is data coming out about HCU-hit sites reporting some kind of recovery, some of them recipe sites. They talk about Retro Dodo and Housefresh. How are they faring?
Do you agree that Google has made a final decision about niche sites? What kind of recovery do Jared and Thomas expect? Tune in to hear the full discussion.
Then they take a look at some of Thomas’ sites and discuss their traffic trajectory, one of which is up 417%, and others that are all but dead.
Find out what they think about his sites and their performance.
Moving along, they dive into their Shiny Object Shenanigans.
Jared goes first, talking about publishing his content from Weekend Growth on Medium. After one week on the platform, he has 4 articles published and earned over $100.
He talks about his approach to using this new platform and Thomas, who already has a Medium side hustle, talks about the potential on Medium and shares useful insights as well.
When it’s Thomas’ turn, he talks about his newsletter side hustle, which was inspired by a previous episode of the Niche Pursuits Podcast.
His newsletter, which was launched just two months ago, and he just crossed 1000 subscribers, almost all of them free. He reveals how he’s getting free subscribers, how many emails he’s sent so far, and how he’s monetizing it.
When it comes to Weird Niche Sites, Jared shares Sportern, where you can shop all the looks you see on TV.
How did this DR57 site do in the Google updates? And what unique business model are they using?
When it’s Thomas’ turn, he shares Backyard Chickens, a DR72 hobbyist website with some very surprising stats.
What are they doing that Google likes? What do they estimate the traffic and earnings to be? As Thomas says, if you create a site around a topic that people care about, you can build a business.
And that brings us to the end of the latest episode of the Niche Pursuits Podcast. We hope you enjoyed this week’s episode and you’re feeling informed and inspired.
See you next Friday!
Transcript
Jared: Welcome back to this week in niche pursuits news. My name is Jared Bauman, and we’ve got some stories for you. Of course, this week to go over first and foremost, Yelp is suing Google and many think that this is only the beginning of the lawsuits that are headed Google’s way. We’ve got a story on the ad tech antitrust and the trial judge is blasting Google.
For its business practices as Google’s latest lawsuit kicks off. We’ve got a story on mid journey that, uh, our cohost here broad, and we’re talking about the August core update, and we’ve got plenty of stories today on those HCU hit sites. Of course, we’ll get into our side hustles. We’ll get into weird niches.
And today I’m joined by Thomas Smith as a cohost Thomas. Welcome back.
Thomas: It’s great to be here.
Jared: It’s great to have you. I don’t know when the last time you joined us, but you have hosted a new segment with me before. So hopefully it’ll be like slipping right back into where you left off. Um, I have to say that, um, my weird, uh, sorry, not my weird niche.
My side hustle today has a lot to do with you and some of the things that you’ve been talking about lately. So I imagine you’ve taken a sneak peek at that, but, um, Uh, before we get into, uh, before we get into the news, uh, I just wanted to let everyone know that, um, uh, we’ll get to our, uh, weird niches and our side hustles here in a bit.
We go through the news for the first half of the podcast. So let’s go ahead and break into our first story here. And in our first story, Yelp is suing Google. Now this is all spinning out of the antitrust lawsuit that where Google was determined to be monopolistic. This came down, um, a month or two ago.
And as a result. Uh, it has really opened the doors, the floodgates, some would say for lawsuits coming. I’m going to go ahead and read here a little bit. Yelp has decided to sue Google following the landmark antitrust ruling against them. Yelp, a platform known for writing reviews of local businesses, have long been critical of Google’s dominance in the search market, particularly in how Google has allegedly favored its own local search, uh, services over competitors in Yelp.
So this antitrust ruling has opened the door for other companies like Yelp to pursue legal action against Google. Um, Google did dismiss Yelp’s claims stating that they are not new and that they have previously been rejected by the Federal Trade Commission or the FTC. Uh, Thomas, this is perhaps opening the door now for not just Yelp, but so many others to, uh, you know, press charges against Google now.
Thomas: Yeah, I think, you know, people were wondering what’s going to happen out of that antitrust ruling. Is this one of those kind of slap on the wrist, you know, 100 million dollar fine, which for a company like Google is basically a slap on the wrist and then things just go on as usual. Um, or, you know, is this something that’s going to be a bigger problem?
And if so, how, you know, is there any chance Google is going to be broken up into individual units? Um, I think a lot of that is still kind of open. We don’t know what’s going to happen, but this was something, I don’t know, many people saw coming that almost the government has pointed out this weakness.
And then all of these competitors are going to potentially come in and pounce in a way that they didn’t feel empowered to before. And as, as Yelp’s pointing out here, you know, they’ve been saying this for a while. They’ve been trying. To get, um, regulators involved in this for a while. And now I think they’re, they’re seeing their opportunity.
And I think this kind of mirrors a problem that a lot of niche site creators have or small publishers have of, you know, you’re in Google’s results, but you’re often competing with Google’s own contents, right? Even more so with AI overview. So, you know, we feel you’re paying Yelp. Uh, I don’t know where it’ll go.
You know, obviously I’m not a legal expert there, but it’s just interesting because it. It seems like this is a pretty tangible result from that initial ruling.
Jared: It’s interesting because when you read about Yelp’s allegations, which I have on screen here, and to the point that the author of the article was making, like this is, it seems pretty obvious.
This is only the first because really when you read these allegations, you could just replace Yelp with, uh, Any number of other categories on the web that compete against Google. Uh, you know, here it is, I’ll read it verbatim. Yelp’s complaint accuses Google of engaging in anti competitive content, including, uh, number one, self prefacing its own inferior local search product over competitors.
Number two, driving traffic and revenue away from rivals like Yelp. Number three, making it harder for competitors to achieve scale. Number four, increasing costs for rivals. Number five, limiting consumer choice to grow its marketing, its market power. I mean, you could say that about travel, about airlines, about real estate, about, uh, e commerce products.
I mean, it feels like you could say this about almost any industry and Yelp’s just the first to get to the, uh, to get to the lawsuit.
Thomas: Yeah. You know, and I think it’s, anybody could make that argument. You could also see it from the other side and say, It’s kind of, it’s Google’s playground. Like they got to kind of set the rules.
So to what extent are they really kind of pushing other people out or how much is it of it is, you know, if Yelp wants this traffic, then they have to create a product on their own site and bring in those users. So I can see it both ways that once you open that door, you know, does that mean Google has to listen to everybody’s thoughts on where they should land in Google?
And, you know, if that’s the case, I’ve got some thoughts I’d like to share about my own sites. Um, so I, I can see it from the other side, but I think again, that’s where before it would have been easier to just dismiss that as complaining. Now that there’s this ruling that says on a technical and a business standpoint.
There’s this, you know, alleged monopolistic practices. It kind of empowers people to make that argument with a little more force behind it. Again, I don’t know where it’ll go, but it’s sort of like, well, get in line. Yelp. You know, everybody, everybody would like to have a word with Google about their search rankings.
Jared: Can you imagine if someone could actually sue and win? Against Google just for Google, making the results worse.
Thomas: What publishers would have a
Jared: field day.
Thomas: Yes. We would all, we would all be joining. You’d all agree
Jared: that, well, maybe we can’t all agree that results have gotten worse, but I think we, you and I can agree maybe a few of the listeners.
Um, yeah, fair point. We don’t know where it’s going. Why is it a big deal? Because of what it means because of what it could mean because of the, uh, um, I just lost my word, my analogy, but the, uh, what could fall the domino effect? There we go. The domino effect. This could create, right? We don’t know what the monopoly, the monopoly ruling is going to mean for Google, but perhaps something that we didn’t see coming, at least in our small little, you know, non legal brains, what we didn’t see coming was lawsuits as a result of it.
We’ve been so focused on, Hey, is Google only broken up? Hey, are they going to have to do various things as a result of this? Well, this, this story isn’t about Google. This story is about Yelp. Suing Google now. So interesting, but the domino effect is what I think the story really is here. Who knows where this will go with Yelp, but certainly this opens the door for everyone, so many to get in line and just, you know, put their hat in the ring at suing Google now.
Thomas: Yeah, I think it will definitely open up. Other doors. I imagine Yelp. I mean, it’s only been a couple of weeks since the ruling. They’re probably ahead of it because they’ve been making this argument for a while. And I think they filed formal complaints and things before. So again, they probably smell, you know, smell an opportunity there, but.
I’m sure there are other people who are now, or there are organizations that are now kind of scratching their heads going, huh, you know, maybe this isn’t just something where I complain, maybe there’s some action I can take on it. So I’ll be curious to see what else comes along. Absolutely.
Jared: Well, we can move on to the next story.
And of course it involves Google again. It’s not necessarily Google in the best light again. So we do have a new lawsuit that has kicked off that we knew about. Um, we knew that this was going to be going to be coming and it’s one about their, they’re calling it here ad tech. Um, I’ll, I’ll, I’ll, I’ll leave it at that.
So, so, so as I don’t try to misjudge it, but basically they’re already. Um, coming into the forefront in terms of their again, and I, I quote poor, poor business practices via the judge. Um, and so, you know, this is basically what it says here in the article I have up here and from search engine land, um, during the pre trial motion hearings, judge, uh, Leone, uh, brink Emma sharply.
Criticized Google for its handling of privileged information. Labeling the company’s actions is quote, absolutely inappropriate and not proper end quote. The court singled out the so called Walker memo containing what she referred to as quote, incredible smoking guns, end quote, as evidence of potential wrongdoing.
So the Walker memo refers to a 2008 memo by Google’s chief legal officer, Kent Walker, who created a Quote, communication with care policy. This policy. Oh boy. Uh, this policy advised employees to switch sensitive litigation related chats to history off mode Automatically deleting chats within 24 hours according to court documents And it goes on and talks about this But again this trial one of the most significant antitrust cases in decades It comes It really could continue to reshape the way that large media, large tech companies end up, um, um, kind of ruling the web as it were.
I, and I mean, I suppose it’s no surprise, but at the same time, it’s like, you know, the trial begins in, in, in less than two weeks. It’s hard not to imagine. That the results from the previous trial kind of aren’t making their way into this trial, at least in the minds of everyone who’s coming to the table and the minds of what Google is bringing to the table for their arguments and the minds of the opposing side, I just, I, it’s just crazy to think about what could spiral from all this.
We’re still waiting to see what happens with the monopoly trial. And then we’ve got this one with the ad tech coming here.
Thomas: Yeah, you know, I think we in this industry tend to think of Google as this monolithic thing. You know, it’s all Google. It’s Google ads. It’s Google. It’s YouTube. It’s, uh, you know, the traditional Google search results.
And what’s interesting here is the government’s involved in this seem to be breaking it into almost these 2 companies from the get go to say, there’s this whole search arm. And, you know, that’s going to be treated in one way where they’re surfacing information. And then there’s this whole other dominant advertising arm that is basically the whole online ad industry at this point, minus some kind of on platform stuff like Facebook and, and, uh, Amazon ads and that kind of thing.
But in terms of, if you want to go out and buy ads in search results, it’s going to be Google, or it’s going to be through AdSense, you know, appearing on publisher websites. Even if you’re going through a third party like Raptive or Mediavine, they’re still using Google’s ad tech to serve ads. They’re still using Google ads as the dominant bidder in that auction.
And so I think it’s interesting because we tend to think of Google as again, just being this one big thing, but it’s actually two, as I understand it, two different cases, almost two different companies in one. That they’re looking at here and yeah, it seems like the judge is not not thrilled with the way that they’ve handled some of the evidence coming up to this point.
That certainly doesn’t doesn’t set you up. I think, you know, to be in a good place coming into it, but it really does raise that point of that. We’ve, I think, talked about in various other contexts. Is it okay? Or what does it mean that the company surfacing all this information in a way? That’s supposed to be fairly impartial.
Also is serving all these ads alongside it. And what does that mean about the choices that are getting made? What does that mean about features like AI overviews? And, you know, the ability to just sort of show ads against content that’s appearing right there on the syrup instead of on third party sites.
Uh, these, these are the questions I anticipate coming out of that case, but, uh, certainly, yeah, it sounds like there’s some animosity, uh, coming into it just from the get go. I think
Jared: you bring up a couple of good points. It’s interesting because obviously this story and these antitrust stories are relevant to us because predominantly the people listening are involved in online marketing, they’re content creators, they’re web publishers, and Google is such a big part of that.
But the reality is like we as web publishers, as content creators, We have very little connection to the things that are actually getting discussed in these, in these lawsuits, right? Like, they’re, they’re, they’re so much bigger than the things we’re involved in. They’re so far removed, really, from the complaints that we have about Google and even about AI.
And yet, we’re all paying such close attention because, ultimately, these very big, Decisions, lawsuits and cases have rippling effects and ramifications for what does impact us. So it’s almost like watching, you know, a couple sets of parents fighting about topics you don’t understand about big, big worldly topics that don’t affect you as an eight year old.
But you know that at the end of the day. Hopefully mom and dad can figure it out so that your world goes back to normal and your world goes back to the world you like. That’s, it’s a bit what it feels like here because much of this stuff to your point is so much over the heads of what most of us deal with on a day to day basis.
Thomas: Yeah, you know, but I think we’re, we’re gleaning little bits of information, even from the initial antitrust case that would never have been revealed. Otherwise, I mean, the, the kind of primary relevance or importance of of click data and customer interaction data, um, on on, uh, how things are ranked. I think the, some of the leaks around the whole kind of algorithm that, or at least the parameters of the algorithm that Google is using for ranking that sort of tangentially related to the antitrust case.
So I think there’s a lot of stuff that comes out of these things that is directly relevant. You know, that tells us as people who are trying to recover from the HCU, which I know we’ll get into in a couple of minutes, uh, you know, trying to figure out what to do with our own sites. Learning the click data has been a significant for a long time, learning about all these different sort of boost systems and the importance of new content, all these little tidbits that kind of fall out of these bigger cases, that stuff we can actually take action on.
So that’s what’s exciting to me is to see what gets revealed that wouldn’t have been revealed without that. That pressure of the case.
Jared: I’ve gotten a few more good words I can use at parties now. You know, like if you really want to sound like a nerd, you can drop canonicalization at a party and people look at you like, Hmm, must be smart.
Now I can drop nav boost. And they’re like, Ooh, is that like a rocket ship? And it’s like, no, just it’s in the world ideal. And don’t worry about it.
Thomas: Saying syrup to people who aren’t in this industry.
Jared: Like, is that an energy drink?
Thomas: Yeah, exactly.
Jared: Well, you, you touched on it. Let’s, let’s kind of put some of this, uh, Uh, lawsuit and suing stuff behind us, at least for now, it won’t go away.
We’ll be talking about it, but let’s talk about what’s actually happening right now. Real results in the SERPs. And that’s this Google core update. This is week three. The core update launched, you know, just over two weeks ago. We brought it to you two weeks ago that it was happening, but with little, very little data.
Aspirations about what might come last week. We did have a week of data and we were sharing basically that, Hey, we are seeing results for specifically sites that were hit by the helpful content update and the fact that they are getting movement, some positive, some negative, but just to see movement.
Upward movement was really kind of a little bit of a victory, uh, for, for, for people. Um, so let’s go ahead and dive into where things are at now. Two weeks in, we’ve got a lot of information. Thomas, you brought some information from your own websites that were hit. So this is gonna be very personal for us to go through here.
Um, first and foremost though, and again, I apologize. I’ve got, I was telling Thomas before we hit record. I think I have the most tabs. Open that, uh, we have ever had open, uh, in any one, uh, podcast. I can’t guarantee that, but it sure feels that way. Uh, so, okay, first off, let’s go ahead and get into some of the finer points of this story.
So Glenn Gabe, here is a tweet from him, uh, earlier today, I believe. Uh, and he is looking at a subset of 390 sites impacted heavily by the September helpful content update. And as of time of recording, 81 of them have surged back to some extent. And we do have some screenshots here. These screenshots look very similar to a lot of the screenshots we’ve been seeing.
A lot of the screenshots will show. Again, the first screenshot was what it looks like if you zoom in and you see this kind of extreme growth. And the second screenshot is what happens if you zoom back out. And this kind of thing that every single HCU site that’s recovering sort of seems to be doing with the exception of a few.
Which is definitely having recovery, but nowhere near full recovery. Um, and so, you know, that’s something that, that Glenn has, um, has tracked. Uh, here’s a, a post by Lily Ray and she says, here are specifically six helpful content update recoveries among small recipe sites. And she goes on to say, and, and many more where this came from.
She overlays, Systrix data. Uh, in terms of visibility, and you can see the different colors on the screen. You’ve got red, blue, green, yellow, brown and orange, and they’re all going up, right? But again, to what degree? The red looks like it’s going up the most as it relates to where they used to be in terms of traffic, and some of the other ones, much less so.
Um, Here are a couple of ones we’ve talked about on the podcast. We’ve got retro dodo. Um, and we talked about them last week and last week when we recorded, it was August 22nd and so you can see her in the graph that they’ve gone up about double at that point, right? From an organic traffic recovery of from 35, 000 organics per month to about maybe 61, well, they’re now up to 76.
So we’re getting to the point where they’ve. Almost tripled their traffic since the update happened again, retro Dodo, one of the sites that was very vocal about the update. And, uh, one more, uh, one more to share Thomas, then I’ll take a breath and let you, let you try it in here.
Thomas: Jared, do we have the graph up?
Cause I, I’m not seeing it on my side, but I might just not have it in my software.
Jared: Let me let’s see here. I might have messed that up. Hold on one second. Uh, yeah, it’s supposed to be up right now. Um, and so, you know, maybe it’s not coming up. I’ll try to reshare it. Let me try to restart the screen share. Um, uh, and then we also have, and while I’m pulling that up, we have, of course, house fresh and house.
Fresh is one of the ones that also is vocal about it, but in a very different way. Okay. Uh, you know, obviously, Retro Dodo. Here we have Retro Dodo back up in front of me, so I apologize there. Thanks for catching that, Thomas. Um, uh, and then let me go ahead and move over here to House Fresh. So, House Fresh is going to also be showing Recovery.
And, oh man, I don’t think Let me stop sharing and start again, folks. Uh, we’re, we’re doing this live. Um, Housefresh is interesting because they also were very vocal about it. But in the case of Housefresh, what you’ve got here is a much more dramatic recovery. So with RetroDrodo, we were talking about like what, 3x in terms of improvement of organic traffic?
And, uh, here we have Retro, uh, Housefresh. At 16, 40 organic traffic right before the update. And they have now gone up to 16, 660. So almost a 10 X increase for house fresh. com. So, uh, some more to talk about here. First, Thomas, let’s talk about your thoughts on where HCU hitsites are going, and then we’ll get into your sites and some of the, some of the data and actually inside Google Search Console screenshots you brought us.
Thomas: Absolutely. Yeah, I’m an open book, so I’m happy to share that later. Yeah, I mean, what I’ve seen so far with it is, um, basically it’s, it’s gone one of two ways for most people. It seems to be kind of, Um, yeah, going at least for niche sites. So some sites, as we saw, have seen either a full recovery or about half of their traffic back.
And we’re only partway into this update. I think the last one took what, like six weeks or something. So who knows how long this is going to go. Um, but you know, so far so good. And it wasn’t subtle. It was like, you woke up one day and your traffic was much higher than the day before. And then it’s just sort of, as we saw with the graphs, you know, it’s going up.
But there’s definitely a set of sites that got kind of the nail in the coffin treatment, where they had, you know, gotten a hit last, maybe even, you know, March last year, then another hit for the HCU. And then, you know, March this year, they got even further down, and then, you know, this just sort of dropped them to zero.
It was like, you know, the final, final decision. The sites that maybe didn’t get, didn’t get culled in that, uh, you know, set of manual actions that we saw before. Um, But, you know, basically survived that and, and then just kind of got their traffic pushed down to essentially zero. So that’s what’s been interesting to me is that it definitely feels like Google has kind of made a final decision on these niche sites.
And either you’re at, at that sort of winning trajectory, we’re going up and who knows how much further that’ll go for certain sites, you know, fingers crossed, it goes much further. Um, but then some other sites have just really gotten the rest of their traffic, you know, the little tiny bits taken away and, you know, it’s hard to judge how many have been wrongly put in that second bucket.
The ones that I’ve seen in the 1st bucket seem to be mostly sites that probably shouldn’t have had their traffic taken away in the 1st place. And now we’re kind of getting at least some of it back.
Jared: It’s interesting because last week we talked on the podcast about yes, there’d been that first week bump But for most of those sites from what we could see in ahrefs and some other screenshots that were shared It’s starting to slow down a bit fast forward now two weeks so another week and Many of those sites that you talked about that we just shared are continuing to go up and so I think that’s encouraging because Last week we talked about most sites we’re seeing most sites that were recovering.
We’re seeing 10, 15, 20 percent recovery. Well, that’s continued for most of those to go up throughout this second week. And so now sites are seeing, like you said, 25, 30, 40 percent recovery with the exceptions of a few that have seen 100 percent recovery, but most Are continuing to recover. And so if you’re fast forwarding, I mean, I’m now I’m just wishful thinking, but if you’re fast forwarding, we’ve got another two, three, maybe four weeks left of this update, if things continue to go the way they are, you could be seeing more than a 50 percent recovery for a good collection of sites that would be.
Very good. That would be very normal. It’d be very normal that if you lose out in one update, that you experience a good chunk of recovery in another future update. The question though, is how many of these sites that were hit and are now improving made substantial updates and how many of them, to your point, Google just got it wrong, they didn’t do anything and they’re now recovering.
Thomas: Yeah. I mean, my suspicion is that it’s more the latter, you know, that there was some choice to like, to basically demote a chunk of sites. And that they, um, maybe just painted the, painted the circle a bit too big. And, um, they drew a bit
Jared: outside the lines. This is my toddler household.
Thomas: Yeah, mine too. You know, they took down some sites that really didn’t deserve it.
Um, and then took their time to figure out, you know, what, what that distinction was, and then, you know, sort of set about putting those back. I think the, the more pessimistic way to look at it would be, Oh, there’s all this antitrust stuff happening. Maybe they were like, huh, you know, maybe we should boost some of these small businesses.
Maybe we should encourage more competition in the market. And that could be a reason, but whatever the reason is, it’s. Fairly unequivocal. I think for most sites, it’s going 1 way or the other. And the question now is just how much further is it going to go? Like you said, is it going to be a full recovery?
A partial recovery? You know, or sometimes it’s going to go up and dip back down again. We just don’t know. But it’s definitely feels like. They are making some choices and that they are maybe reversing some, some poor choices that were made before.
Jared: This would normally be the time in the podcast where we talk about the inevitable Reddit, but instead we’re going to talk about some of your sites.
So thank you for bringing something other than Reddit for us to talk about. I’m getting tired of talking about their graphs going off the charts. Literally. I’ve got a chart that I’m going to pull up in front and this is from a Google search console screenshot of one of your websites. Maybe start walking us through some of the screenshots we’re going to look at.
And if you’re watching on YouTube. Bear with us. It looks like we’re having a little bit of trouble getting the screenshots and articles to load right away. So I’ll be able to get those up, but it might just take me a sec.
Thomas: Yeah. So this is, um, this is one of my sites. It’s called Bay area telegraph. That’s the URL there.
They’re telegraph. com. It’s a local news site for the San Francisco Bay area. And, you know, it was something where I felt like I was doing a good job with it. It was all original photos, original reporting. You know, we had a good audience. Got hit by the HCU. It didn’t ever get a huge amount of traffic. It was a fairly new site when the HCU came along, um, about two years old.
It was getting, you know, probably 15, 000 visits from, from organic. Um, and then the issue hit it fairly hard. We ended up down around, um, You know, maybe 20 to 40, uh, visits a day from Google. And it was sort of on these pages that didn’t really make a lot of sense, like things that weren’t really related to the core of the site.
And then, you know, lo and behold, uh, this update comes along and you can see the trajectory that’s happening now, or it’s just sort of up, up and to the right at the moment. And again, fingers crossed, like, I’m hoping that we’ll get back and maybe exceed where we were previously and get up to, you know, a thousand clicks a day from, from Google, uh, organic.
But this is what I mean when I say it’s, it’s not subtle, you know, you can see we’re kind of going along like, Oh, things got a little better in late June, early July, and then, you know, it’s like these little spikes and then boom, this big thing. So, yeah, this is, this is very encouraging to me as the owner of that site to see this starting to happen.
Jared: I mean, that’s probably what a five to six X, uh, improvement in traffic.
Thomas: Yeah. I calculated it’s up, I think 417 percent so far. Yeah. So yeah, pretty, pretty solid, uh, you know, recovery there.
Jared: So, um, I have to say that you’re, it’s not the only site you’re sharing with us. That’s winning. Let’s move on here. I’ll pull up the Ahrefs screenshot.
I don’t have the search console of this, but I do have, uh, this, the Ahrefs DIY life tech. com.
Thomas: Yeah. So this is an older site. I’ve had this for a while. Uh, it’s actually hosted on, on medium, interestingly, and it’s more like product reviews and tech articles and that kind of thing. And it was, uh, it has a lot of affiliate kind of content on there.
And it definitely got hit, um, I think more so in, in March. Interestingly, I believe it was getting, you know, uh, yeah, coming up there. Um, and now it’s basically almost back to where it was in March and climbing back up towards where we were last August. So yeah, pretty solid there. And that’s more, the other side is local news.
It’s much more, uh, kind of photography based. This is more of your traditional affiliate type of site. And so it’s encouraging to see that those kinds of sites, good content, you know, really solid content probably didn’t deserve to get hit in the first place, but you know, now it’s coming back up. So it’s nice to see two different kinds of sites, you know, coming back.
Jared: This is interesting too. We talked about it a bit last week. I’ll just reference it again. Marie Haynes, you know, uh, at the time had shared, Hey, like, I’m wondering, cause I’m seeing a lot of the sites that are recovering followed a pattern of getting hit by the HCU, but also getting hit by that March, 2024 core update.
And seeing correlations that their traffic recoveries were actually Almost directly related to what was lost in March and not the HCU from last September. It’s interesting to see, to your point, you said like kind of back to where you were roughly speaking around March. So, you know, uh, don’t know if that theory continues to have those legs, but it was something that Marie Haines shared and we always like to kind of share her perspectives here.
Thomas: Yeah, I think I’ve seen with both sides. It’s sort of one that got hit in the HCU, one that got hit in March and, and both, you know, are on a positive trajectory now. So yeah, again, very good to see. And I think those deserve it. I also shared a couple of sites of mine that got the nail in the coffin treatment.
And this is, yeah, I
Jared: was going to say, here’s one up here, Thomas, and this graph is not as encouraging. I’ve got the one year up here folks. And if you’re not looking on screen, um, just imagine about the worst looking graph you can think of over the last
Thomas: year.
Jared: So,
Thomas: yeah, so this site, I think the site deserved it.
Um, this is a offshoot of the DIY life tech site. This is basically just my YouTube videos. I have a YouTube channel that’s continuing to do super well, um, through all of this stuff as YouTube usually does. And I tried to basically create a site where it was essentially just the YouTube videos. And then very short kind of bullet point content around what was discussed in the video and, um, not like original photography.
I just use screenshots from from the videos. I thought maybe this would be helpful for people to have a way to read it. In addition to looking at the video and initially, Google seemed to agree and it got good traffic. And then I guess they must have just figured it was duplicate content after a certain point, and it just got crushed.
And so I’m not sad about this 1. I don’t, you know, I think it probably deserved it because. It is very much the same info as what’s in the YouTube videos, but it’s interesting to see. This definitely is the nail on the coffin side of things. Um, and then the final 1 that I have is a site that actually.
Spencer had originally mentioned this idea, I think, on Twitter, like, 2 years ago, and I thought, oh, this is cool. I’ll make a website that is just. TV commercials, talking about TV commercials, kind of a traditional content site around TV commercials and a lot of like roundup articles, the funniest ads from the eighties and all that kind of stuff.
And again, it started out doing great. It seemed like people liked it. Um, and then it ended up just getting, just getting hammered in these updates and getting the final nail in the coffin treatment with this one. So, you know, I think overall. I feel good about this update. I didn’t feel good about HTU. I felt like the sites that I had that got hit didn’t deserve it.
And with this one, I feel like, you know, things are coming back to an equilibrium. The sites that I worked hard on and that have put a lot of energy into it and have all original content and that I think are genuinely great have started to make this significant recovery. And it’s almost like Google telling me, don’t bother with these other sites, which in a way is sort of freeing, like, you know, kick those out of the portfolio, put your energy into the stuff.
I’d much rather have that than this sort of ambiguous. You know, moving along with no real direction. So I’m happy about where it all landed.
Jared: Well, man, you are a breath of fresh air here. I’ll tell you what, someone happy. What the heck’s going on around here? Uh, long may continue. Congratulations. Yeah, I know.
Well, I’m being somewhat dramatic, but no, I think, um, it would be wonderful if call it a large swath or a majority of site owners could have the same reaction at the end of this update, right? Where they can look and say that progress was made on websites that deserved it. And, um, it was another milestone for Google to kind of help weed out sites that don’t belong and don’t deserve it.
And, you know, to some degree that’s a win overall. And if that can continue, I think plenty of site owners and content creators would be very happy with it. Um, we’re going to pause on the news there and move along. Uh, we had a couple of the stories we wanted to get to, but. That’s the, that’s the nature of these, uh, these news weeks is, you know, uh, some of these articles and these stories just got added this morning.
So, you know, you kind of have to, to go with it as the news comes in. We’ll, we’ll pause there. Obviously we’ll continue to track Google’s core update. We are at two weeks through it. They said at some point it would be around four weeks. We’ll see if that holds to your point, Thomas. Last one was six, seven, eight weeks.
So we’ll see. We’ll continue to talk about that next week and in the weeks to come. Let’s move into our side hustles here. Um, and, uh, you know, we’ve got some interesting stuff to talk about. I’ll go first. I tease this. In my weekend growth newsletter earlier this week and it got a bunch of response. So it, it almost told me like, okay, I need to talk about this in the podcast this week.
Um, I have started publishing on medium and I’m here to say that Thomas, you were the inspiration for this. As a matter of fact, a couple of weeks ago, I interviewed you for an upcoming episode of the podcast on your success on the platform medium. It’s another place that content creators can go to. To publish their work and make money.
That interview comes out next week. We did not know and time out that you were going to host this week and then be on the podcast next week. That’s just kind of the way these things work out. We record many weeks in advance, but, um, I was so inspired by the stuff you shared on the podcast interview. And that’s the great part about being the host folks is I get about a three to four week head start on all you guys on some of these interviews.
But anyways, I started publishing some of my weekend growth content. And, um, you know, you were very nice to help me out with some of my questions beyond what you talked about in the interview, but a lot of it was what you shared in the interview. Very basic best practices that I was following. Well, it’s so interesting.
I’m here to give you a little report. I’ve been on medium for less than a week for one week now, one week. I signed up, I think one week ago today. Um, I had now have, um, four articles published. I published one this morning. So for my notes say three, but I published one this morning. So four articles, um, one’s brand new.
Um, my articles have just under 1500 views. I have. 38 followers, but I think the big storyline here is I’ve made over 100 in my first week with articles on medium.
Thomas: That’s awesome. Yeah, I mean that’s talk about a side hustle that can ramp up pretty quickly if you play your cards, right? Um, I yeah, I I’ve been writing on medium as you know for a long while and so i’m always really excited to see other people Come over and Congrats.
I mean, that’s awesome. A hundred bucks from a side hustle in the first week, plus the exposure you’re going to get from some of these. I mean, one of your articles. People really need to go and read it. It, it really hit home on a, on a deep level. It was a really like an inspiring thing that you got out there and share it.
So in addition to all that, you know, you’re writing awesome stuff.
Jared: You know, I mean, it’s interesting because, uh, there’s a platform for writers to go to medium. And I think that that’s, this isn’t to take away from that. There’s a platform where. Uh, much like the, I feel like, and you correct my wrong, but almost like the old days of blogging where you just went and you talked to like an audience and you’re like, Hey guys, here’s what I’m up to today.
It’s, it feels a little bit like that. Obviously you’ve got to tie it around a topic that is of interest to people. You can’t just blog, but it does feel like a place where people go to hear authentic voices and Unique perspectives to some degree, the way blogging used to be, but there’s also so many opportunities to repurpose content, especially for people listening, right?
Like a lot of people listening, we’ll have sites that didn’t recover to the degree yours did in the HCU and then subsequent updates. And they’re sitting on two, three, 400 articles. And much of that I’m learning would do really well in medium. Um, much of that and maybe tweaked a little bit, right? I certainly have taken my weekend growth content, the three articles I’ve published and tweaked them a bit.
Um, before I published them, but it to me feels a lot like taking content I’ve already published and just finding a way to repurpose it to the medium audience. I think that that’s what I’m learning about this and I’m very excited to continue pursuing.
Thomas: Yeah. I mean, for people who haven’t maybe used medium in a long time, and we’ll talk about this so much more in the, in the interview next week, but, Basically people pay and there’s over a million people paying now to be media members.
They pay for the content on the site. If you come along and supply them with great content, you get a portion of the money that they’re paying. And it’s like, it’s the everything that Google and SEO writing and all of that. Isn’t it’s the antithesis of it. It’s sort of like if you take the best parts of a newsletter and then combine it with a platform that instantly finds you a paid audience.
If you’re generating content, that’s really high quality. That’s essentially medium in a nutshell at this point. And so, yeah, as you alluded to, it’s super freeing to write for it because you’re writing in that conversational authentic style you would for your newsletter. You’re just like having a chat with a friend, essentially sharing your real, real life expertise.
Doesn’t have to be keyword optimized. You don’t need to have headings. You don’t need to be like worrying about, is this my H3? Or, you know, how is it? Are there even
Jared: headings in Medium?
Thomas: I haven’t even found them. Sort of, like. There’s like bolded stuff basically, right? Like. There’s like three functions in the, in the Medium editor.
That’s basically it. And it’s just like, you put the words down on the page. People are there to read the words. They’re there to pay to read the words. They’re super engaged and you know, you get paid to do it and you’re reaching this audience that gets to know you over time and you’re really new there.
But if you keep publishing, not only are you going to get the money from it, but you’re going to build this audience. It’s going to keep coming back and commenting and wanting to know more about what you do and want you to know more about your agency. And, you know, it’s like you, you build this audience that.
Is easy to monetize through their platform, but also really gets to the point where they care a lot about what you’re sharing.
Jared: Thomas has been very modest. He has just shy of 50, 000 followers on medium. So he knows what he’s doing. Uh, obviously the podcast will go out next week on Wednesday. Uh, I wouldn’t have teased it so heavily if I hadn’t had such an Initial success.
And the fact that you’re here and we have it next week, I’ll be sharing my results from the first week and kind of going in depth on that in my weekend growth email next week. And it’s just going to be a medium week next week, but why not kick it off this week by sharing some of the results? So it’s amazing.
I, I, I just can’t help but wonder, and let’s get you on air saying, how much do you think I’m going to make in my first month on medium? What do you, what do you think? What do you think?
Thomas: I think you could easily make like 250, 300, maybe a bit more in that first month, if you keep on this trajectory. Um, we, again, we talk about next week, but the boost program on medium is super powerful.
It’s something that can like 10 X what you end up with from a story. You got a story boosted in the first week, which is. Really awesome. I mean, a lot of, a lot of people struggle to do that. Um, but if you can keep going with that, keep publishing other stories and maybe get one more boosted, you would easily be at that, you know, 200, 300, maybe even a little bit more, um, in, in your first month on the platform.
So yeah, I’m, I’m super excited. And then there’s also all these long term impacts to partner program. Money is nice, but there’s so many other ways you can monetize. I mean, that’s even like. I’d say that’s probably like my number three way to monetize on medium. So there’s, there’s, there’s a lot of different ways to take that, the passion that that audience has and, uh, and turn it into, you know, a big add on or even your, your main business.
So, yeah, I, that’s my guess as to where you’re going to land, but. I think, you know, you could end up higher. You could end up also building, you know, some relationships on there that turn into leads turn into other opportunities.
Jared: Well, long, uh, long, long, the long play is what I’m in for. So we’ll see how it goes.
I do think I’ll be, um, putting some energy towards this. It feels very natural to my newsletter. It feels perhaps natural to other content I’ve created for websites. And it feels like something To where I can expand upon something I’m already doing so I’ll continue to talk about that obviously big tease for next week But so excited to have you on I’ve done the already heard the interview folks and it’s really worth your time.
So With that let’s turn over to your side house. So which isn’t medium Although folks if you want you did talk about meeting the last time you hosted As your side hustle, I think so. Um, that was probably the first tease to medium, but, um, but you’re not talking medium today. So side hustle, bring us up to speed on what you’re working on.
Thomas: Yeah. So this was actually, um, inspired also by, by somebody here at the podcast, uh, Ryan Sneden’s Naptown scoop interview. And so, you know, he shared on that interview for anyone who, who missed it about this newsletter that he’s created for Annapolis, Maryland, and he has like 20, 000 people on the newsletter.
It’s a local news type of thing, sends it out every day. It’s he’s got sponsors in there and doing super well. And I thought, you know, I’ve got my Bay Area Telegraph site that I shared before I had tried to build a newsletter, but it was sort of the whole Bay Area, which is huge. And I heard that interview and thought, you know, I could take this and apply it.
And what I really took away, one of the big takeaways was make it as area specific as possible, like the smaller, the region, the more people care. So I chose one region of the Bay area where I happen to live. It’s called kind of the nine to five. That’s the area code for it. And I just leaned into, I’m going to create this newsletter and publish super local stories.
Like, you know, the community center is having an event, you know, come out on this date and that kind of thing. Recruit people to join this newsletter. I’ll do daily emails, see what people think of it. And it’s just done super well so far. Um, so I launched it about two months ago, right after that interview.
And it kind of existed in some form, but I just, you know, that really gave me like lit the fire to lean into it. Um, I just crossed a thousand subscribers on it. All local to the Bay Area. Um, almost all free. I did experiment with, um, using some Facebook lead ads, which worked well, but honestly, I was getting so many free subscribers to the, to this newsletter that I just, I didn’t feel like I needed to pay.
How are you getting,
Jared: how are you getting free subscribers?
Thomas: So my strategy, I write stories on my blog, which is the Bayer telegraph one, but then I also republish them on other local sites and I’m tied into, Some, uh, big aggregators, like smart news, MSN uh, news break, that kind of thing. And I republish on like patch.com, which you’ve probably seen, you know, every, every city has their patch.
I put these out on Nextdoor anywhere that people are hanging out local, like parent Facebook groups and that kind of thing. I’ll publish these hyper-local stories and all the stories are basically. Like, here’s something happening in the community. A new restaurant is about to open and I’ll have a photo of the restaurant.
I’ll have a little story about it. And then at the end, it’ll say, Hey, you know, do you want to know when the restaurant opens? You want to see our review when it does join nine to five news. And there’s a convert kit. I’m usually in line, sometimes a modal, uh, sign up for that. Some of them, there’s a external link from some of those platforms that goes to a landing page.
And it’s basically like a tease. You’ve got this future story. You get to know what’s going on in the community. Yeah. And yeah, what I found is stuff that people would never sign up for. If it was even just the whole Bay area, much less like. A random niche because it’s so local. It’s like what’s happening on their block.
They care deeply and they get engaged. And then my open rates and click rates reflect that. So, um, I’ve sent in the last, um, about 90 days, I’ve sent about 40, almost 46, 000 emails, so daily emails. Um, I get probably like one or two unsubscribes every couple of days. Almost nobody drops off the list. Um, the open rate right now is about almost, almost coming up on 60%.
Wow. And the click through rate is almost a 20 percent click through rate. So 10 percent raw rate, but most people actually click on more than one story in each newsletter. So the, the kind of aggregate rate is around a 20 percent click through. Um, so. Yeah, I mean just super high engagement and then the way I’m monetizing it is a little bit different actually than what Ryan was doing.
And that, that’s sort of where I think, um, I, I saw like opportunity or something I do differently. So his approach to monetization was to bring in sponsors, like, you know, the orthodontist’s office or whatever, and they would pay to sponsor. And that makes perfect sense for him because he’s at 20, 000 people.
Like that’s a, that’s a pretty big list. I’m growing, but you know, right now it’s at around a thousand. Um, so basically, uh, my strategy is a little different. I send people to my own site. And then I monetize with the kind of traditional media vine, um, and some affiliate marketing stuff on those articles.
So it’s probably lower earnings per email send, but it’s totally scalable. Like I could, I could have a hundred thousand people on this newsletter and given the populations of the cities I’m covering, that would probably be reasonable for a couple of years from now. And, you know, if I’m getting 20 percent clicking through and I’ve got 20, 000 people clicking, you know, do you do the math with a 30 to 40 RPM, which is what I’m getting with Mediavine because it is all people in the super, super local, super lucrative part of the country.
Um, it, you know, starts to add up, like every email could be generating substantial revenue just through that. And if I want to bring on somebody to, you know, go out, like, I don’t, I don’t like the way it’s going. Cold calling and like going around to local businesses just sort of doesn’t fit my personality, but if I wanted to bring somebody on or, you know, just sort of like, just do it, even though I don’t like to do it and bring in some sponsors, we could probably be generating a couple hundred bucks, you know, per, per email a little bit too, in addition to those clicks.
And then the final thing I’ll say about it is what’s really interesting to me. We ended up with these. Super passionate, like super fans, I would call them that have started sharing all of the articles that come out on the newsletter with their own friends and communities on Nextdoor and Facebook. So like, there’s, there’s one person who, uh, this, this woman that I have no idea who she is.
She just likes the content. And every time it comes out, she shares on her Nextdoor and it’s like 3000, 4000, 11, 000 views. And screenshot and goes, you know. Cool. I got 3000 this week. I got 11, 000, you know, so obviously it’s a knock on effect of you put the content out. Yeah. Maybe each, each, uh, you know, 200 clicks a day at this point, not massive earnings from Mediavine, but then you count in the people who reshare it and the boost that it gets there, uh, it becomes pretty substantial.
Jared: I think the big question, I would have so many questions right now, but one question, how’s that, how much time do you think you’re spending on this? I mean, is it as labor intensive as it sounds, or are you just like a whiz kid and can kind of get through this stuff really well, because you know, your neighborhood, you know, your area so well.
Thomas: Yeah. I mean, so the newsletter itself is actually fully automated. It comes in from convert kit. I have an RSS feed automation set up with some customization. So I basically have a section of my of my site where I’m already going and doing this reporting. I’m at my day job is as a professional photographer.
So I’m out in the community and, you know, shooting photos on a day to day basis. Anyway, it’s easy enough to spin up an article there. I publish it under a particular tag each morning at about 5 a. m. Uh, it pulls down all the new articles under that tag, loads them up into a, uh, template. I’ve got other stories, other sections.
Again, this came from the Naptown Scoop, you know, concept of like local events and, um, you know, big news in the area and, um, civic news and that kind of stuff that’s preloaded in there that I swap out about once a week. But otherwise, the new stories get pulled in automatically loaded in there. I have, um, I think 30 minutes at like 6 in the morning when I’m up anyway to go in and change the subject line if I want to, to make it a little more compelling for the day stories.
If not in 30 minutes, it goes out automatically with a generic, you know, today’s top stories in 5 type of headline. So if I don’t want to do any more work on the newsletter on a given day, it just goes as long as I publish a new story, which I do almost every day anyway. Um, and if I want to go in and like tweak it or add a product link to something, you know, Amazon associates, now you can put that into an email.
I can do that too. So it’s basically like as hands on as I want it to be. That usually bumps the click through rate or just let it fly. And, you know, every morning at six, it sends out the email for me.
Jared: Unbelievable. Unbelievable. So cool. You’re right. That could, I mean, that interview is a couple months old.
So, people can really cement in their minds how far you’ve come in, geez, uh, two months. I mean, sky’s the limit for you. And I could totally see what you’re talking about because I’m trying to think of someone who lives in like, the Concord area of the Bay Area. They’re not going to go to a new restaurant that opens in San Jose.
You know, like forget about it, but that is all the Bay area. Right. So, um, it’s interesting to hear how you niche down. It’s interesting to hear that. What is populated, you know, population density and you’re kind of you’re nine to five.
Thomas: Yeah. You know, there’s probably at least 150, 000 people, um, maybe up to 200, 000, depending on which sort of city is just a little bit outside that we might report on.
Um, so yeah, there’s definitely, if we could capture, I think, uh, I think Ryan had captured almost 20%. Of the Annapolis market was my recollection, maybe even a bit more. So if we were to reach comparable numbers there, yeah, it wouldn’t be unreasonable to have a hundred thousand, maybe a bit more people on this list in a couple of years.
Jared: Well, congratulations. Good share. And, um, I’m sure people are going to be listening to that whole part on repeat about how you automated a lot of that. Uh, I know I’m going to go back and listen to that again, because only about 10 percent of that sunk in. So, uh, Hey, it’s. Time for weird niches. Um, uh, uh, I’ll go first.
This was shared. Uh, I kind of a funny story. Um, uh, we did a little meetup with some people with a little like SEO content creator meetup a couple of months ago here in the San Diego area. Uh, and I met someone who runs a San Diego kind of brand, Instagram account, content creators. So they’re, you know, doing stuff on their website and, um, anyways, this was shared with me by them.
And this is, this is kind of a funny niche here. Okay. So I’ll pull it up on the screen. The website is spottern. com, uh, dot com. All right. So it’s spottern. com. I don’t get the analogy. I know it has to do with spotting something and the idea. Basically, I’ll read the kind of tagline to you. Uh, it’s watch it and get it.
So shop every outfit, uh, shop, every outfits and products seen on TV series, TV shows, movies, and music videos worn by your favorite actors and people. Now they do a great job with the visual here. I will say. Um, so what they have here on the screen and it does change every time you load the site, but they’ve got a picture of a metal, a metallic jacket.
Plus they got a picture of the celebrity Katy Perry. Plus they got a picture of American idol and they have equals a perfect match. And then there, they have a way for you to go buy that exact metallic jacket that apparently Katy Perry worn, um, on American idol. And so, I mean, they have. Hundreds of articles where you can go and find and you can search.
So they give you a search prompts like jacket plus Penn Bagley plus you. Uh, is that a show or maybe a movie? Um, let’s go take a look really quickly. Uh, at, um, at their AH rest and again, let me see if it’s, it’s not sharing. Boy, sorry folks. We have some problems here with, uh, with our screen share. And I gotta do all of it individually, which makes it even more cumbersome.
But if you look here, They are a DR 57. Now they haven’t done too well in the Google updates. Um, uh, the HCU, the March core update. Actually, it looks like it’s something in April there. We did see some of that March core update hit in April though. Um, wasn’t too kind, but there’s still ranking for 227, 000 keywords.
And it’s interesting when you go in and look at the keywords they rank for. No, man, I get logged out of Ahrefs. It’s the bad day around here. Here we go. Um, they rank in the top 10 for and I guess a lot of people are really searching this kind of stuff. Jesse Pinkman outfits, um, juice world outfits, Jack Reacher outfit, uh, Franklin Saint outfits, uh, Fast and Furious outfits, the Grinch shoes.
Um, and so they really, again, There’s a lot of these keywords that have like X, Y, Z outfits. And it’s, I had no idea, but they are, they are doing a good job of creating content around these specific outfits.
Thomas: I think it’s just such a smart, you know, affiliate play. Cause I’m assuming when you click those links, it’s gotta be, you know, it’s gotta be an affiliate link.
It would be a huge missed opportunity if it wasn’t.
Jared: Well, I’m glad you asked. I’ll pull one of these up on screens as you keep talking about it there.
Thomas: Yeah. Cause you know, I, I know from, from running a photo agency. That’s, you know, 80 percent of the value of a given collection of photographs is the people in it, right?
People love celebrities and the big driver of value is celebrities. And if you’ve looked at any like image search data, it’s always like Justin Bieber and Taylor Swift. And it’s the it’s the thing that people care consistently the most about. And so if you kind of mash that up with shopping, Then, you know, all of a sudden it’s, it’s like this perfect, perfect match.
So yeah, I think this is, this is super cool.
Jared: Yeah. Here’s, uh, some sunglasses worn by Laura Kinney in the movie Logan. And you can see here, they’ve got a link to buy the product where the UI can be better, by the way. It’s just, uh, couldn’t really be better. I can’t think of how much more they’d make. But if we look in the bottom left, we can see what really does appear to be an affiliate, um, affiliate link there.
So I do think they are monetizing a lot of this with affiliate, um, site structure looks pretty good to be honest with you. I bet they, they do a really good job just because of the way they structured their site. Um, here’s, what’s interesting. I’ll just kind of finish on this, this site, by the way, I looked it up and, um, I can, it’s been around since 2012.
So it has been around for a long time. Uh, this is not a new site. And. If you look at the about page here, um, you can see that, uh, let me scroll down. How does it work? Thanks to you. Everybody is welcome to contribute on Spawtern. Join us, spot an item seen on screen, share it. And get fairly rewarded. Spotter is betting on collective intelligence.
It’s so fascinating. So first off, they’re getting a lot of this or all of it, you know, who knows how much from user contributions. Second off, in order to do that, in order to participate, you’ve got to log in. You’ve got to create an account. Now they can market to all these people. So you’ve got an audience of people that is clearly very invested in what you basically sell, because you’re selling kind of affiliate and content stuff.
But. And then you’re making them log in. So then you can kind of remarket to them and share all the outfits that other people are finding. What a brilliant business model.
Thomas: Yeah. You get all your content for free, other people to do the, do the heavy lifting of finding it, and then you monetize and you know, it’s, yeah, again, it’s, it’s stuff people care about deeply.
They want to, you know, choose the item that their favorite celebrity, or even just click through. I mean, I imagine this is one where. There’s a lot of people who click through to see the 2, 000 jacket and then they end up buying, you know, the, the 20 pair of socks or whatever from some, you know, super high end fashion house and you still get the commission.
Yeah, uh, I think that’s, that’s an awesome, uh, combo of like UGC, uh, And e commerce and affiliate and celebrity content. Yeah. Uh, very cool.
Jared: Or the flip side, they click through just to see what that 20 pair of sunglasses looks like, and then ended up buying their TV from there. You know, there we go. Yeah, absolutely.
Probably happens less than what you said. Um, cool idea. I love what you said. You know, we always turn to pick apart, like what could people learn from this? They’re fun. They’re funny, but like, what can you learn? But I think you said a good point, like celebrity stuff. Interesting. Like when you can tie something to celebrities, like you’re going to pick up.
Just so much search volume as a byproduct of celebrity, whatever, you know,
Thomas: yeah, people, people care deeply. And there’s always news about celebrities too. It’s always fresh. They’re always doing something interesting. It’s grabbing people’s attention. So there’s always a reason to surface, you know, celebrity content again, if it’s somebody popular.
Jared: Well, what have you got for us here in terms of weird niches?
Thomas: Yeah, so mine is very different from this. What I’m bringing here is backyardchickens. com. This is a hobbyist website for people who keep backyard chickens. I have 12 at the moment, so I discovered this organically through my hobby. And, you know, you look at this site, uh, at, at first and it’s like, okay, this looks like, you know, something that was probably built in like the early two thousands, maybe it’s had a little refresh, but it’s not like your modern web design.
It’s, uh, you know, it’s sort of looks like something that we probably all would have built at that time period. So it’s easy to start to dismiss it. But then if you start to look at the stats, 507, 000 members, I was just
Jared: looking at that
Thomas: 1. 5 million forum threads. You know, it, it, it starts to be like, huh, you know, is this real?
And then you plug it into hfs, oh yeah, I gotta do that. And you know, you see it is a, uh, DR 72. Um, it has 400, or, sorry, 341,000 back links as of the last time I checked. And it gets, uh, 429,000 organic traffic. So this site is a behemoth. I mean, this is huge. And, um, you know, that’s just the traffic from search people searching for these chicken related, uh, queries and look at growth on from strength to strength.
Like every update is just searches higher and higher. Yeah. Um, and I think the reason for that. Is they basically inadvertently are doing everything that Google wanted. Um, we suspect anyway, that Google one, like they have a super engaged forum, you know, 1. 5 million posts from like 500, 000 people. So they have that UGC content, probably a ton of user interaction, a ton of time on site.
And this is how I discovered them, um, through a, uh, a Facebook group. They have a massive Facebook group where you can go and like, you can ask a chicken question. You know, if you have a chicken injury, I’ve had it like two in the morning, you can post a photo and within 20 minutes there will be, you know, multiple people writing back and telling you how to, you know, how to fix it and how to make your chicken better.
So it’s, it’s amazing the community and all of the things like community forum posts with all the UGC. You know, presence on a, on an external platform, strong brand, you know, those are the things that Google seems to like in this most recent update. And you can see like, they probably didn’t mean to do it, but oh my gosh, are they doing well with it?
Jared: So here’s a couple of things that are fascinating. It estimates an Ahrefs that we have up on screen. I think we have up on screen, right? Right, Thomas? Yeah. Yeah. Uh, got to ask right now. Um, it estimates 442, 000 organic searches per month. We know probably higher when you look outside Ahrefs and that’s, that’s, that’s a good amount of traffic, right?
But then when you come here to top pages, look at this, they’ve got, uh, Darn near 100, 000 pages, just a couple pages shy of 100, 000 pages, but look, only one page gets like more than 2000 visits a month. So they’ve really, to your point, like the man, the reason why they must look so good to Google is they have so many pages that add value instead of the predominant number of websites where, you know, it’s the 80, 20 rule, 20 percent of your content drives 80 percent of your traffic.
Yeah.
Thomas: Yeah. And there’s just, I mean, it’s a, it’s a. It’s a topic, a hobby, where there’s so many different things you can talk about that it would be hard to cover it comprehensively, even with AI, if you were trying to do that, to write your own content and here they’ve got, you know, years worth of people like me going and asking chicken questions and sharing original chicken photos and, you know, creating this content for them.
It seems to be monetized with display ads. It seems like they also have, you know, some sponsorships and affiliate stuff. So I figure, you know, that amount of organic and then think about all the traffic they’re getting from the Facebook group. From people who just come back through direct traffic to check what’s new in the forum.
Yeah. It must be getting millions of visits a month
Jared: easily. A minimum, I would say. Right. Yeah.
Thomas: Oh yeah. I could see you even more than that from social. So yeah, I mean, they’re, they’re probably pulling in, you know, 30, 30 to 60, 70, maybe even more a grand per month, just from the ad revenue tack on the affiliates.
It seems like they do some sponsorships, maybe some of their own products. You know, it looks like a, like a forum site out of 2007, but this is a, this is a serious business and who knew, you know, chickens anything people care about, you can create a profitable, uh, brand and presence out of,
Jared: well, that’s a great, great, uh, find.
It’s hard to call that an itch site, but it’s, uh, it’s, it’s certainly about a niche, right? Like raising chickens is a niche. I mean, you wouldn’t call that a. Anything but a niche. So, um, Hey Thomas, good to have you on. Good to have you back. Uh, we’ll all talk again here in a couple of days when you come back as an interview where instead of co hosting, you are in the interviewee seat.
Um, uh, where can people follow with what you have going just as we kind of close out here?
Thomas: Yeah. The best thing is you can find me on, on X at Tom Smith, five, eight, five. You can email me Tom at Gato images, G A D O images. com. And yeah, feel free to reach out with your questions about medium or about the newsletter.
You can also go over to Bay area telegraph and join up the nine to five news, if you want to know what’s going on in the community, or if you just want to see what I did with that newsletter,
Jared: Awesome. Hey, everyone. Have a great weekend. Thanks again for listening. We’ll be back next week to talk, I’m sure about core update, more news as it relates to content creators, digital marketing, online marketing until then have a great weekend.
