Google CEO Reveals the Future of Search + Google Bard Now Creates AI Images

Welcome back everybody to the Niche Pursuits News Podcast. Join us as Spencer and Jared tackle the latest headlines about Google, SEO, AI, and content creation. 

Get inspired hearing about progress with their side hustles, and learn about some weird niche sites and the unique strategies they’re using.

The first news item up for discussion is Google’s own reporting on the future of SGE

during its recent earnings call. Although Spencer and Jared have hypothesized in the past that SGE might hit a dead end, this call confirmed Google leadership’s commitment to, and belief in, this new tool. 

The company is investing heavily in SGE and expects it to be extremely useful and popular in the future. Spencer underlines the diversity of results using this feature, where the first 10 SGE results are different from the first 10 organic search results, and Jared shares a few highlights from the article about the breadth of search and Google Assistant.

How do Spencer and Jared interpret the CEO’s comments on SGE? What do they think about his comments about long tail searches? What did the company have to say about publishers? And how did its ad revenue perform?

Check out the episode for their take on these questions.

The next topic up for discussion is Google Bard’s ability to now create images. What happened when Spencer played around with it? What happens if you use them on your website? And how good are the photos it generates? See the images it created for Jared and judge for yourself!

The last article they share features a podcast guest, Brandon Salt, who asked for help on Twitter when his traffic tanked. Surprisingly, Danny Sullivan from Google Search Liaison answered him directly and their exchange was highlighted in an article on Search Engine Roundtable.

What do Spencer and Jared think about Danny’s response? Is his feedback useful and do they agree with his comments? What do they say about embedding videos? And what advice do they give to publishers who like to update their article dates each year?

As for their Shiny Object Shenanigans, Spencer once again spoke about his experiment where he’s to grow his Facebook page and drive that traffic to his website.

How does he run a Facebook likes campaign? What does it cost and entail? He recently launched several campaigns and he shares the results and a little bit about the strategy. 

How many likes does he have at the moment? And how would he use this strategy to get into the Amazon Influencer Program? Listen and find out!

When it’s Jared’s turn to talk about side hustles, he shares the latest on his efforts to land public speaking gigs. He has discovered that there are more opportunities than he had anticipated and he talks about his plans going forward. 

Both he and Spencer share an update from their Amazon Influencer side hustle. How did they do in January? What do they expect in February?

Moving on to their Weird Niche Sites, Spencer shares his site which, unlike the usual sites he shares, is not a content website. Weather Embed is a SaaS tool with a very simple website that is very niche as it’s specifically for embedding in newsletters. 

Who might use this type of tool? Who might have built this tool? And can it be used beyond newsletters? How do Spencer and Jared think people could use this for their businesses?

He doesn’t know how much they’re making and it barely gets any traffic from Google Search, but it is a very cool, very niche website.

Jared then shares his Weird Niche Site: IMCDB, an internet cars movie database. It’s essentially a Wikipedia of every car that was ever used in every movie.

Although the site is not very user-friendly, it is extremely extensive and includes information and photos about all the cars.

It’s a classic, old-school directory with a DR of 68, it ranks for 95k keywords, and it gets around 32k organic sessions per month. Which keywords are getting the most traffic? What kind of affiliate program is it using? Listen to find out!

And that wraps up another episode of the Niche Pursuits News podcast! Thanks for joining us, and we hope that you’re feeling informed and inspired to keep on building, creating, and publishing. See you next week!

transcription

Spencer: Hey everyone. Welcome back to another episode of this week in niche pursuits news. And, uh, we do indeed have a lot of news to cover. Uh, Google just recently came out with their earnings report. And so there was a lot of really interesting tidbits from that earnings call and then a couple of interesting things that have just come out, brand new tools and, uh, yeah, some other interesting things, but of course, to talk about it with me, I’ve got Jared.

Jared, how you doing today? Oh 

Jared: man, always a good day. We’re talking Google in the weather. It seems to be a trend these days on the, uh, on the weekly podcast. And we’re talking about a lot of growth today. 

Spencer: That is true. A lot of Google, a lot of weather. I know you guys, uh, in California or, you know, getting drenched on right now, trying to survive out there.

Jared: It’s, it’s pouring rain. No one knows what to do with themselves. I’ve got myself a cup of tea here. I mean, I’m really trying to settle into this rainy day lifestyle that you talk about. 

Spencer: That’s right. That’s right. And, um, you know, I didn’t plan for this, but I happen to have a weird niche site that is related to the weather.

And so stick around for that. Um, we will indeed be talking about weather quite a bit. But, uh, let’s start off with some of the Google news, shall we? Um, you know, Google just had their earnings call on Tuesday, I believe, two days ago. And, uh, I actually listened to the earnings call just because I thought, you know what?

Maybe, um, Sundar Pinchai is going to talk a little bit about SGE AI. Maybe they’ll mention some things of how they’re organizing their SERPs and some things that we might apply. And sure enough, they talked a lot. About a lot about and things that are coming out and, um, over at search engine land, they did a pretty good job of kind of summarizing that call.

And so I, I just wanted to hit on some of the things that, um, that were mentioned. So, um, I will just simply say that. After listening to the call, generally the, the thought that I had coming away with this is that boy, maybe they are not getting rid of SGE or search generative results. Uh, we’ve kind of hinted at, Hey, maybe they changed some of their language and some of their docs that makes it sound like, um, it’s not going quite as well as they thought.

And that may still be the case. We don’t know, but certainly the CEO and. All of the leaders there at Google are talking like SGE is something they’re investing heavily in. They expect it to do very well in the future and they have no plans of slowing that down. I don’t know how many times SGE. Was mentioned, but it was a lot, uh, during the call.

I believe it was actually, uh, maybe the first big item that they talked about. Uh, they lead in with a couple of things, you know, their earnings and other things. But then they talk about different business units. I believe that SGE and ads, uh, using AI for ads were the first two, uh, items that they talked about.

So. It’s on Google’s mind. Uh, it doesn’t sound like they’re backing away from, uh, SGE. They’re investing in it more and more. Um, and there’s, you know, a couple of quotes maybe that I’ll just read, uh, from the CEO, he said, uh, we are already experimenting with Gemini and search where it’s making our search generative experience or SGE faster for users.

We have seen a 40 percent reduction in latency in English. In the U. S. I’m happy with what we’re seeing in the earliest days of S. G. E. Um, and this was an interesting point that they touched on and talked a little bit more than just this quote. But he says, uh, we are improving satisfaction, including answers for more conversational and intricate queries.

As I mentioned earlier, we are servicing More links with S. G. E. and linking to a wider range of sources on the results page and will continue to prioritize approaches that add value for users and send valuable traffic to publishers. Now, of course, we’ve talked about this and looked at examples, but within the S.

G. E. Results, you might get 10 links and those are not the same 10 websites that are in the organic results. So that’s what he’s talking about. A very diverse. Um, a wider range of resources that are being linked to in, um, SGE. Uh, and then, yeah, I mean, overall, you would expect nothing different than the CEO to be very positive, but he says, you know, they feel very good about the progress that 24 is, uh, going to be very strong, both on search and the underlying AI progress, including the model.

So they’re very excited about what’s coming ahead in 2024. And so that was kind of the overall tone and theme, at least as it related to SGE, that they’re excited about it. They have a lot of plans. Um, he did qualify some of his statements saying that, you know, execution is key. They certainly need to execute on a lot of their plans, and there’s certainly some technical challenges that they’re still overcoming, but they have a very positive outlook.

So maybe I’ll pause there and see if you have any thoughts on. All of that, Jared, 

Jared: uh, well, first off, kudos to you for jumping on earnings call. You’re taking this podcast to the next 

Spencer: level. That’s right. That’s right. You got to step up your game. If you want to 

Jared: keep up here. I mean, I read an article on it, so I don’t even know if I’m qualified to comment on it.

You’re here. You’re listening to the earnings call. I mean, next, next month, you’re going to end up having an interview with, uh, with the CEO, you know, and just, there we 

Spencer: go. If you’re fired, Google, you know. Yeah, 

Jared: we’re available. Um, I thought there was a lot in this and certainly as it relates to some of the stuff we’ve been talking about, I think it’s possible for what we talked about last week, which is SGE not doing well to exist in the same world of what we’re talking about this week, which is that the CEO of Google can be very pleased with where they’re at with SGE because I think that he does drop a lot of breadcrumbs here about how SGE is only like a small part of the overall vision and picture of what they have for, for, you know, kind of generative AI.

Right. Right. I thought that at least this is the first time I’ve had it. Hit me in the face so hard, at least again, from reading some of the quotes and stuff. Um, he talked a lot about the breadth of search. Few people understand the breadth and how we, our task is to really utilize generative AI going forward to fully encompass the breadth of search.

Um, something that he mentioned that I’ve seen Marie Haines mentioned actually quite a bit is the fact that assistant Google assistant will be, um, very complimentary is what the, uh, he said yesterday, but just a bigger part of things going forward. Almost eluding, and this is what the article talks about eluding that.

Um, AI in Google’s mind becomes more of an assistant to you rather than just a query based response. Um, and again, I don’t want to breathe too much into that, but that’s just some of the things that seem to come out of this and, um, and then he said, think about the future and maybe go beyond answers and follow through for users even more.

So again, that’s kind of piggybacking off what I just said, like, so it seems like. SGE might not be going well, and at the same time, there’s still so much more for it. I feel like you can almost have both sides. 

Spencer: Right. I agree. Like, they are certainly not backing down from the notion that they’re going to invest heavily in AI assisted search, whether it ends up being the SGE is that final product, or if it’s more implemented, like you said, as an assistant, some sort of agent, it kind of talks about here of like it.

It just makes it faster for you to find the information that you’re looking for and where that ends up exactly, right? We’re, we’re still maybe in that transition period a little bit, but, uh, that quote that you did allude to just about the breadth of search, I found it really interesting. And there was a little bit more than just what is kind of summarized in this, and I wish I could find that direct quote, but it just always kind of, um.

It kind of always makes me happy whenever the CEO of Google talks about the long tail of search, right? That’s always been my like joy in life is finding long tail keywords and he had, you know, a couple of great sentences related to that. Basically, that’s what he’s talking about is that when people underestimate the, um, the breadth of search, he says the amount of queries we see constantly, uh, on a new day and to clarify new queries that they see every day.

So they’re still seeing a lot of new queries that they’ve never before seen in the past, and he talked about that, uh, in the sense that it’s a little bit of a challenge to train an A. I. Model because they’re seeing new queries, new types of queries every single day. And when the CEO talks about the breadth of search and new queries and how.

This long tail is of search. Like I, I don’t know, I get excited about that all the time of like, Oh man, there’s like still this opportunity. There’s long tail keywords out there. There’s untapped potential. There’s going to be a new opportunity tomorrow that didn’t exist today because people are searching for new things all the time.

So, um, that was really just fascinating to me. One 

Jared: thing I thought was really interesting, I’d love to hear your take on it because it does dovetail in the back of, uh, what most analysts considered to be poor earnings results, especially from the ads department, and I thought that he talked a lot about ads, and I think for people that listened to this podcast, I, I, I pulled a line out that I thought was really interesting to me and I thought was.

Really positive. First off from a high level, I think he talked more about publishers in this call than I’ve ever heard him talk about publishers before. Um, I don’t think I’ve ever heard them talk about how they actually care about sending traffic to publishers, at least as it relates to generative AI, not saying they don’t care about it, but to hear it publicly, uh, maybe, and maybe it has been said before, but I can’t remember one, but moving beyond that, he talked about how they’re trying to work ads into.

And they’ve been experimenting with that. We’ve talked about that a lot here in this podcast. What are they going to do about ads in SGE? Because at the end of the day, they’re an ad company. And he said, we’ve also found that people are finding ads either above or below the AI powered overview helpful.

Um, and to me, that suggests Basically that people are, are still scrolling past a lot of that AI stuff to get to the organic results and thus the ads that are below those, those AI results. So yeah, just another little feather in the cap about how like, um, there’s, as there’s opportunity for those of us who, who, who rely on content from Google, just as much as there’s a potential challenges ahead.

Spencer: Yeah, exactly. And, uh, there was a line, uh, on the call that he said just that they are doing their best to send both qualified leads to, you know, businesses that are advertising, and they’re still trying to send that valuable traffic to publishers. They want to find a good match of, you know, providing great answers, providing great lead source, but still sending.

That valuable traffic to publishers us at the end of the day, right? What website creator? So they definitely mentioned publishers and the importance of publishers. Um, so, so that’s good. Um, and then, um, the other. Brief point that I wanted to make that part of the reason that the Google stock actually went down is like you alluded to, uh, they missed their, uh, ad revenue projections or, uh, ad ad revenue grew, right.

But the way stocks work is that if, if they miss the analyst estimates, right. They came in less than, I don’t know what the number is, but whatever the analysts estimated, they came, came in a little less, the growth wasn’t as fast as wall street wanted. Um, and so the stock has come down 

a 

Jared: little bit. I was going to ask you about that.

I know you have a little bit of a banking history, so you’re probably a little bit slightly more qualified to talk about it than me, but I read the headline to prepare today. I was thinking this would be a good topic. I knew their earnings report was coming out and I was like, Oh man, they missed their earnings report.

Oh my goodness. They’re losing money. And then I dig in. Oh, no, they grew. They just didn’t grow as much as they were supposed to or hoping to grow. So I’m like, well, that makes it a bit of a difficult thing to talk about. At least for a non expert in that kind of space like myself. 

Spencer: Right, right. It’s just kind of the way that Wall Street works, right?

All these analysts put out projections, like here’s what Google is going to do next quarter. And they say, you know, it’s going to be whatever, a dollar 63 earnings per share. And, um, and so they come in at a dollar 62 earnings per share. Like it’s still, they made billions of dollars, but it wasn’t quite as good as what wall street wanted.

And so the stock might come down a little bit. Uh, and, and one other thing that was a slight negative, uh, you know, for, for analysts at least is that the capital expenditures that Google had specifically As it related to AI, um, was much bigger than anticipated. So they’re spending a lot more money making, you know, capital expenditures, right?

That can be all sorts of things, new servers, new, new technology teams, et cetera. Um, that’s increased a lot. And again, on the call, they said that is because of AI and how much we’re investing in AI, we’re building out this huge infrastructure and we expect this, these capital expenditures to be high. For the foreseeable future.

Um, and so that’s part of a reason why the stock is down a little bit because boy, they’re spending a lot more money than we expected. And wall street’s like, you know, is this a good idea, right? Is this going to really pay off their investment in AI, but. That that’s the case. That’s the strategy for Google.

So 

Jared: not to not to bring it to a close, but almost tie it to last week of it. Because I feel like as I read this article, I think from the energy in your voice, I feel like being on the call maybe gave left you with a similar belief. Like it just feels like what a. Cool mission for Google going forward and look at all this opportunity and all this, um, just really cool stuff.

If you’re like a technologist to be working on trying to figure out these big goals and challenges that the CEO alluded to, and it dovetails so. Interestingly, the last week where we featured a big, big story from an engineer about how awful and how demotivating unmotivating of a place it is to work and how there’s no leadership and no one knows what to do and everyone’s looking around each other for answers and it’s just it’s very hard these days to understand what’s going on.

If I didn’t listen to last week’s podcast, I would have no idea. That there’s the other side of the coin, because this is such a kind of positive approach that Google has from a senior leadership level to next year. 

Spencer: And can both of those things be true, right? That’s what you kind of have to find out as, as the average listener, because of course the CEO and the leadership team are going to come out very positive, strong forecast, you know, we’re doing all these things and we’re going to have great payoffs in the future.

But, um, will, will that be the case? I don’t know. You know, when I. Again, from an outsider looking in, my own perspective is that a lot of times, at least in recent years, Google has always kind of played ketchup or copied other, um, products, right? That the people have, it’s like, well, oh boy, the iPhone is just crushing it.

So we better have our own phone. So we got the pixel, right? Uh, uh, Facebook is crushing it. We better have our own social networks. So they tried Google plus and other things, right? That didn’t end up working. Um, And it feels like AI could be that similar pattern, right? Large companies tend to do this as they see an upstart.

Oh, open AI is just crushing it with, with, um, AI and having their own chat bot. So we are going to show that we’re a part of that and we’re going to invest heavily in that. And so, um, so is it true leadership? Are they just copying what they see or other people doing? Uh, but they have the real dollars and the real teams.

To truly build some of these things into a reality. And so even if they are second or third or fourth to the AI race, they still might be the, the overall winner at the end of the day in five or 10 years. Um, so, so we’ll see, but, but that does lead us in directly into our next story here that just today, uh, was announced that Google barred now can create.

Um, 

Jared: speaking about coming in second by a wide margin. 

Spencer: Yeah. Yeah. Mid journey, you know, has been, been doing this for a long time and open AI with Dolly three, right. Has been doing this for a long time. Yeah. Uh, but, uh, now directly in Bard you can, uh, create images. I mean, that’s, that’s basically the long and short of the short story story is that, um, I believe this uses their, Oh, what model is it?

Uh, Uh, the, it’s called the imagine, uh, Imogen two powered by Imogen two. Anyways, that’s their model, uh, that they are using. So here’s just some examples of images on the screen that these were provided by Google, right? This is kind of their press release. Like a, here’s some barge generated images. So they’re pretty cool.

I mean, this looks like a real plate of chicken wings if you ask me. Uh, yeah, 

Jared: I agree. That’s the one I’m looking at right now. Yeah, 

Spencer: no, that’s, that’s good looking 

Jared: plate of wings right there. Unlike our, uh, unlike our weird niche site last week where the, the lighting wasn’t quite right. Sorry, pro photographer speaking here, but the lighting is spot on in those chicken wings.

Spencer: Yeah, it’s good stuff. Um, and, uh, I, I did play around with the tool a little bit. Um, and it, I mean, it, it did okay. Right. These, these tools are very hit and miss. Um, you know, one of, one of my queries. Uh, it, it said, sorry, we can’t create an image on that. I don’t think it was any You were always 

Jared: breaking Bard.

You and Bard have a thing. 

Spencer: Bard and I are not off to a, you know, a good, you know, good start here. I, I think it was something like an angry politician walking down the street of, of New York City. That should be easy. And it said, no, sorry, we’re not going to do that. So, uh, maybe I did something wrong, but the other images I asked it to create, it did create.

And I know you actually, um, have some examples here. I did. 

Jared: I mean, I was reading this article preparing for the podcast this morning. Um, uh, just in the morning while having my cup of coffee. So I asked it to, to, I. You know, I try to get into I tried to get into seeing how well it would do if I gave it specifics, right?

Like a lot of the press for the examples are like, show me a dog surfing. It’s like, well, okay. I mean, you know, uh, that’s broad. What do we do if we get specific? You know? So I asked it to give me. An image of a cup of coffee, but I want it to be in the early morning. I want it to be with warm sunlight pouring in through curtains.

I want it to be in a breakfast nook style table. I thought it did a very good 

Spencer: job. Yeah. Yeah. I’ve got a couple of your, uh, shots here and, uh, it, yeah, it did pretty good. And, um, what’s cool is that, I mean, Google Bart is free. Yeah, right. I mean, Google Bard is free. And so, um, right now it’s just chat GPT plus that will generate images.

Uh, and then of course, mid journey now is a premium tool only in the past. A few months ago, you could do free stuff, but no longer. It’s only a paid tool. Um, so Google Bard is one of the few I, you know, offhand, I don’t know of any others, but Google Bard is free, right? So if you want to generate AI images, it’s free.

Go check it out. It’s brand new today. 

Jared: You know, you must have triggered their offensive content, uh, limitation with, uh, the politician where I think that maybe, maybe right. Everything politics nowadays is offensive. 

Spencer: Yeah. And, um, you know, as I understand it, it won’t generate images of specific people. It won’t.

They have a named 

Jared: people filter. Uh, whatever. Yeah. 

Spencer: But yeah. Yeah. So I won’t name names, but, you know, maybe an angry politician in New York City will, you know, pull somebody up specifically. Okay. In their database. And I said, no, we’re just not going to do that. I have no idea. I think I know what 

Jared: you might be alluding to.

Well, you know, I 

Spencer: don’t know. I don’t know. Of course not. Of course not. No. I, so, um, so try it out. I’ve only done a handful and, uh, it does generate images. And, um, yeah, so it’s, uh, I don’t know, it’s, it really is kind of a fascinating world we live in. I mean, even just about a year ago, right? Was this even really a thing?

Maybe a little longer than a year ago, but not much longer. No, no. Like you couldn’t even generate images with AI. 

Jared: I don’t know if imagery was, I mean, we’re recording this obviously at the very end of January, beginning of February, you know, and I don’t, I don’t know where we’re at on the imagery side of things.

Certainly chat GPT had been out for a couple of months, but imagery did. Follow and again, we’ve had, you know, we’ve had AI before chat GPT, but I think, you know, what we’re really talking is a landscape shift of its public 

Spencer: use, right? Yeah. So, um, so that is big news, you know, for publishers, you might be able to use this on, on social media.

Uh, I don’t know, Pinterest, uh, maybe even, you know, in your blog posts, I will say, and I don’t know what this means exactly. Yeah, you saw that I was going to bring it is. It is, uh, all images, uh, created by Bard are marked. With the, uh, sent I. D. Digital watermark. Um, I don’t know what exactly that is other than they are traceable.

They do know that, hey, this image was generated with a I specifically with barred. So if you’re using it on your website, How does that impact your website? I don’t know. Other than Google knows that Google bar created it. Yeah. I don’t 

Jared: know much about it either, but, but they know that’s exactly right. So, you know, just something that you should be aware of, right.

You should know, you know, influences your decisions on its use and where you use it and that sort of thing. 

Spencer: Yep, exactly. So, all right. Now, um, we have one other news story that is kind of interesting because it involves somebody in the niche pursuits community, right? It’s somebody that has been, um, you know, on the podcast and is, um, known among niche pursuits listeners, right?

And so, uh, this, uh, Brandon, um, um, Saltamachia? Did I say that right? We just 

Jared: called him Brandon Salt on the podcast for that 

Spencer: very reason. Random Salt. Let’s, okay, Brandon Salt. Uh, that’s easier. Yeah. And, uh, he had, um, boy, his, his website, Retro Dodo, is, uh, been hit hard by the helpful content update. And A lot of his new content that he’s been publishing or trying to update, it will kind of get indexed and do okay, and then a week or two later, it just, it drops out of the index or isn’t getting any traffic, right?

And so it seems like all his articles are just kind of getting penalized for some reason. And so he posted this just publicly on, um, on Twitter. You know, asking for help. Does anyone have any explanation, uh, to why some of our articles are not showing up in the SERPs at all, right? It left in an article, it pops up, and then it drops and disappears again.

It’s frustrating. Uh, and then, wouldn’t you know it, but Danny Sullivan, he jumped in, the official Google search liaison, he jumped in, and he actually provided some very specific feedback, which, uh, is It’s pretty cool. I think so. Um, and we can go through all of this, but I don’t know. Any, any thoughts before I jump into the specifics here?

Jared: Well, you know, I mean, it’s, uh, uh, there’s been a lot of stuff like we, I think it got left off the agenda, but there’s just been a lot of stuff in terms of Danny’s, uh, Uh, I don’t know if a new found approach or just that he’s acting a little differently on Twitter these days. I don’t really know how to sum it up.

I mean, uh, a week or two ago, he had a very ominous reply to a tweet that basically it was using a GIF. Go, go get him, Danny. I love, I love that Google is all about the GIF replies. Sweet. Yeah, it was basically saying like a massive update is coming and it’s coming very soon. We haven’t. Being able to prioritize that as a topic here on the podcast to talk through.

But, um, that’s not something I don’t think he’s ever hinted at before done. It’s certainly not that kind of charismatic sort of a way, but I don’t think we’ve seen a response from him like this on Twitter where he actually kind of analyzes like almost like. Uh, does a 10 minute deep dive of what he sees as being off on this.

And again, overall, it’s really encouraging that he’s willing to wade into some of the challenges that we see, like, Hey, how do I evaluate this? And again, like you said, whether right or wrong or whether it makes sense or not, or whether we know what to do with it and all those questions outside of all that, it’s just kind of nice to see him getting into more details rather than staying very, very high level.

I think that’s been a frustration all of us have had over the years is like. Sometimes the high level responses don’t help us very much. 

Spencer: Yeah, no, exactly. And so for him to take a specific example because, right, we always kind of, uh, poke fun at him for saying, Oh, you know, create helpful content for humans.

Well, in this, he tries to go through and provide again, uh, a very specific example. URL. Uh, and then Danny comes through here and says, okay, here’s a few things that generally might not be, uh, helpful, right? Uh, and a lot of it Yeah, he’s 

Jared: right about right. He’s I wouldn’t say most of it. I can’t I can’t remember anything He said that I didn’t think was true.

Spencer: Mm hmm. Yeah, a lot of it kind of came down to okay Brandon had updated the article right and so it’s got a new date of you know, January or whatever and then there’s There was several things like he’s reviewing. Um, what are the decks called? I don’t know. Um gaming decks here. Here we go again Yeah, there we go steam deck, right?

We’re starting to wade into fuzzy waters here. Don’t dig a hole again Spencer Just keep it steam decks. I do know what a steam deck is. Okay good

But a lot of the steam decks were referenced in the article and they’ve not even been released yet. Like it was kind of a, the, the article is 10 steam deck alternatives and some of the steam decks hadn’t even come out yet. Right. When they first published the article and well now. Some of those steam decks that hadn’t come out now have come out, but the article was never updated right to, to kind of included that.

So, um, that was a lot of it. Like the timing it’s like, okay, well, if somebody is reading this article and it talks about a steam deck that hasn’t even come out, why is that included? Uh, and if it has come out, why don’t you have any information about it? Right. So, um, anything else that you kind of noted in Danny’s response that you thought was interesting?

Jared: I thought it was interesting. His. It, it, it, it, he almost kind of walked you through his discovery process specifically as it related to the videos. And I was very intrigued by that because I’ve always been intrigued by Google’s relationship in their online, you know, in how they evaluate an article as it relates to video, right?

Like how much do they correlate what’s in a video that you embed? How much do they understand that it’s you, that’s your account that’s doing that video or if you’re embedding somebody else’s. How much influence does it have? We know what video does to time on page and to users, but what do they do when it cuts?

And I’m not saying that he revealed the algorithm here, but he definitely kind of walked you through like, he’s basically kind of like, yeah, this article did not seem to have much original content. And then he kind of said the first time I realized you knew what you’re talking about was when I actually looked at some of your videos, I just thought it was interesting, you know, like that, that’s, I don’t know if that, uh, has any indications to how a bot works, how their algorithm works, but I did.

I think that was interesting and it certainly gives people food for thought for how they think about what they do with video and where they place it. 

Spencer: Yeah. Yeah. Danny basically kind of said, Hey, kudos. You seem to be like an expert after watching your videos, you do have hands on experience from your article 

Jared: is what he kind 

Spencer: of said from the article.

I don’t get that. I don’t see that expertise. So just embedding a YouTube video, even if it’s a view, maybe isn’t providing enough signals. Is that kind of. Yeah, you know, that’s certainly one aspect of what I’m taking from what Danny’s saying. And I 

Jared: talk to clients, I have people that we do website reviews for or that will even get into like content plans and helping them out on a monthly basis.

And, you know, a lot of the times the examples that get used for the helpful content update specifically are for people who don’t have very much expertise and Google’s trying to take them out. But I will tell you, I look at a lot of websites where people have lots of expertise in their field and they have done a bad job of showing That to Google on their website, right?

And so I see a good amount of that. And, um, uh, you know, in this case, the expertise was in the video work and perhaps and I don’t know anything about steam deck. So I wouldn’t be able to tell you, but perhaps not as much in the content. On the webpage as well as much, you know? 

Spencer: Right. Yeah, exactly. So, um, again, yeah, kudos to Danny for jumping in and kind of responding to some of that.

Um, you know, if people want to dive into this, I think it’s an interesting Twitter thread that, uh, people can read through and kind of, uh, at least see how Danny is thinking about content. And of course, if that’s how he’s thinking about content, right. He’s taking that to the search team and they may implement.

You know certain things or at least he has a little bit, uh, of an inside knowledge of how Search works a little bit better than the general public. So it 

Jared: does seem that Danny really does not like it. If you update your publish date and everything in that article is not 

Spencer: current. Yes. I’d say that’s what he harped on the most.

He did indeed. A lot of things felt out of date. Yeah. And so make sure that’s congruent with what you’re doing. So for those of 

Jared: you who change your title every year to 2024 review. I’m not saying it’s not to do it. I’m just telling you, I don’t think Dan is going to like it. 

Spencer: Yeah, yep, exactly. I don’t think he’s going to like it at all.

All right. Very good. Um, so I think that covers, uh, the news. I mean, they’re actually, we had double the number of topics on our, uh, uh, sheet, but we must move on. We’ve ended up with. 

Jared: We ended up with a Google trifecta this week. 

Spencer: We did. All Google, uh, this week. SGE, 

Jared: Bard, and Danny Sullivan. It’s a, it’s a good, it’s a good mix of Google 

Spencer: topics.

Yeah, you know, so, so maybe, with my side hustle here, my shiny object shenanigan, I’m gonna not talk about Google. What? Uh, and so, we’re gonna change it up. So if people are sick of us here, you know, talking about Google, we’re going to talk about something else here for a second. Um, so I’ve got a, yeah, my, my shiny object, uh, shenanigan here is the same as last week in terms of topic, right?

I’ve got this, uh, Facebook page that I’ve been trying to grow. Um, and I, of course, a website associated with that, again, the overall goal. Is to get as many followers on the Facebook page. We post content two or three times a day, which we should probably rent that up. But, um, those posts linked to our website.

And so a certain number of people click the link, they go to the website. I make ad revenue. That’s the business model, right? And so I’ve been diving a lot more into Facebook, trying to get things, uh, to do well. Uh, this week, I actually am playing a little bit more around with, uh, just engagement overall in the past, almost all of our posts are just articles to our website that they get engagement and some do really well and some don’t do very well.

But you can do a lot more like just sharing images that don’t link to anything or just posting a question that doesn’t link to anything just to get more engagement with the end goal of being, if you get more and more people engaging with your page, the next time you do post a link, more and more people, a higher percentage of your following.

We’ll see that link. So that’s, that’s the goal. Um, the one kind of cool thing that I just wanted to share is that in order to build up a Facebook page, like the common practice is to run a lot likes campaign and you can get likes on Facebook for relatively cheap, right? The, my goal has always been between five and 10 cents.

Per follow follower, uh, per like on the page. And so I just started, uh, three since our last podcast, I started three new likes campaigns. Um, one of them was getting likes it likes, I want to say 16 or 17 cents a like. So I just, I just, uh. Killed that one. The second one I started was either 11 or 12 cents.

I’m going to let it keep running for a couple more days just to see what happens. And then this third one, and I’m going to just share it on my screen here. Uh, since that’s, you know, interesting, uh, I don’t think I’m revealing anything, but, uh, this last one is at 7 cents, uh, per like, uh, and so I, it’s only been running for two days, but it’s in my, my, Golden zone, right?

Between five and 10 cents a like that I’m happy with, right? I just had 10 per day as the spend. So you can see I’ve only spent 18 and 42 cents in two days, but it’s gotten me 264 followers or likes at 7 cents a like. And you can kind of see some of the stats, you know, for post engagements, reactions, um, and, and then the, the demographic breakdown, right?

Uh, of everything. And I, I will just say that. I spent hardly any time, right? Like you find an image and you write. It’s like two sentences, like one is like a sentence about the image. I, I won’t say the exact thing, but you know, you can get the idea, right? If it’s, uh, if it’s two puppies playing together, like, I don’t know, this is probably a bad example, right?

But, hey, do you, do you love, you know, cute pictures of puppies, right? And then the next sentence is, Like our page. If you want to get more cute pictures of puppies, right? Type thing. And that’s all it is. And they can click the click the likes campaign. Um, and so that’s how I’ve been building the page. And then of course, there’s a lot of organic likes and things that happen, uh, over time, but that’s just a little bit of progress on my page.

You know, I’ve tried out three campaigns. I’m going to try and start doing more like trying, you know, one or two new campaigns almost every day until I’ve got maybe. Three or four ads running that are all in that five to 10 cent light campaign and try and build up the page even faster. And then hopefully actually get to profitability, uh, quicker, uh, than, than, you know, just letting it go on forever.

So, so that’s my quick update. Um, hopefully people find that somewhat interesting, you know, it’s just a little side hustle that I’m working on and a little progress each week. 

Jared: It’s so interesting to see, like. You know, certainly a lot of stuff that, uh, people will talk about involves large budgets and you hear these large budgets being spent on ad campaigns or different things, but I mean, you’re, you’re spending 18, right?

Like on this one, you’re trying out a couple. So fair enough. It’s, it’s more than that, but I mean. That’s a very approachable number for anyone. Even someone just trying to get a Facebook page off the ground. Like it’s not long after you can, you can, you can get started with a budget like that pretty quickly, you know?

Spencer: Yeah. And one other point that I’ll make. That will tie into my previous side hustle of Amazon influencer program. I hear from so many people like, what if I’m not an influencer? I can’t get approved to the Amazon influencer program. And I’ve always said, well, why don’t you just start a Facebook page, run a likes campaign.

I think you only need about a thousand followers to get approved. Like here I am right at 264 followers in two days within a week. You know, and spending a hundred bucks, 150 bucks, right? I have a Facebook page that probably can get approved to the Amazon influencer program. Right? So, and 

Jared: figure out how to tie it together and you can actually use that Facebook page and maybe, maybe with your Amazon influencer videos, maybe not, but yeah, then now you actually have more of an engine to drive traffic.

Spencer: Exactly. Because that one of the perks of the Amazon influencer program is that you are allowed to, to paste your, or put your affiliate links on social media, on Facebook. And so it’s totally legit. The Amazon associates program is not legit, but the influencer program, you can paste your affiliate link in your Facebook page that you built up.

So, um, 

Jared: You should be building a social following of some sort for some business, some side hustle of yours in general. And then the influencer program gives you yet another way that you can monetize that. Like if you didn’t have an influencer program right now. I influence your account right now. Like that 18 would not only be going towards building you a Facebook page that will eventually yield you profit.

It would also be helping you build up towards getting an influencer account. So now your ROI on that 18 and beyond is even. 

Spencer: Right, exactly. Now, the caveat to all of this, right, is that you have to actually be active on the Facebook page. You need to post a couple times a day, but it doesn’t have to be complicated, right?

You can post a one sentence question. You can post an interesting image, right? Just to make sure you have some interaction with that group, because Amazon will look at the actual interaction of the group as long as it’s In addition to followers are people commenting and liking, but it’s not that it’s not that hard, right?

If people spend 30 minutes a day, even, uh, or maybe even less, just depending on what it is, you can probably get a page to a point where he could get approved like a couple of weeks, a month. Right. So anyways, that’s just a little, uh, I don’t know, just sharing what I’m doing and a couple other thoughts, uh, as it relates to that, but, um, I’ll keep sharing my progress here to let people know how, uh, the page is doing.

Jared: What are you at in terms of total number of, uh, followers or like, likes? I mean, what 

Spencer: do we call it? Yeah, it’s just over 45, 000. Jeez. Yeah. Yeah. So I’ve run likes campaigns on and off for a year, you know, um, at this point. Yeah, so it’s getting there like I’m gonna double it. What the heck, you know, let’s get to a hundred thousand Start to start to get serious about this thing.

Oh, 

Jared: that’ll be a good update. Okay. Okay, very good. 

Spencer: Yeah What do you got for us Jared? 

Jared: Well last week I shared that I have a goal of four public speaking events And you know Uh, I had, so a couple of things, uh, from that I had, um, uh, one person reach out to me and invite me to speak at their conference after hearing about it here on the podcast.

Does that count? Does it count if I, uh, if I, if I get the benefit of the podcast to pad my numbers? I, 

Spencer: I can’t see why that doesn’t count. Are you saying, well, maybe you should increase your numbers. 

Jared: I’m just saying like, it’s, it’s like having an advantage, you know? Yeah. Why not? Um, I don’t know. So they’re going to send over details.

I did get a couple other people reaching out about some other speaking opportunities. I had somebody reach out to me and say like, oh man, I get asked a lot to speak and I can’t do it all. And I speak about similar topics. Maybe I’ll refer you. So. Um, uh, good response so far to that. And, uh, that kind of has me, you know, doubly motivated.

Um, I did, uh, very simply just ask one of, uh, uh, our other people that work at 201creative to go out and research, um, uh, a list of top of conferences that are happening in the next 12 months that would be a good fit for the different topics that I might want to speak on. And so now I do already have a list.

It’s about 54 conferences. So many conferences. Did you know that? Wow. I know that many that are very like niche dependent, like there is a furniture conference. Were you aware of this? Uh, and we have several clients in the furniture business. And so speaking to furniture clients about marketing would be a topic I could talk about for, for example.

Um, and so I, I think at first glance, 54 seems like a lot, but then when I start thinking about it, I’m like, there’s probably way more than 54 and I just need to find better ways to kind of, uh, give my, um, assistant like a little bit more prompting tools and things like that to find even more of them when you kind of drill down, there’s like Say SEO conferences and marketing conferences like, um, like HubSpot.

I talk about how I, um, have gone to inbound a lot and I like that conference at the general marketers. But then there’s conferences for like every industry known to man. Um, and, and each of these, uh, people come to them who are professionals and you know, one of the topics or two or three of those topics at that conference might be on marketing that kind of business.

So there’s a lot of opportunity out there and I’m only, I feel like skimming the 

Spencer: surface on it. Yeah, no, I agree. There are so many conferences for everything, everything out there. So, 

Jared: so more to come, but I’m still at my one, uh, conference book. These things take a little while. You don’t just kind of, you know, exchange three, three, uh, three emails and call it a day, but I’m still at one, but making progress towards my goal of four, maybe make a knock on my goal of four here.

Sooner rather than later, but, um, mm-Hmm. , uh, let’s see. Spencer, I didn’t hear from you on your January numbers from Amazon influencer, but I am prepared to share mine. Go right 

Spencer: ahead. I’m curious to hear 

Jared: they are as bad as ever

Uh, uh, a couple things. So, so, I mean, we knew they were gonna be bad, right? Like everybody listening knew that you don’t even have to have any experience in the Amazon influencer program to know that January is gonna be bad. I’ve never had a January in the Amazon influencer program and I knew it was gonna be bad.

I didn’t have to ask anyone. We just know January is. Got to be bad on a consumer driven shopping platform, but, um, so I made 1, 486. 67 down sharply from over 4, 000 in December, uh, quite a bit down, more than, um, uh, clicks on my videos were down just over 50 percent from December shipped items were down just under 50%.

And so what that meant. Is that I actually had a higher conversion rate in January than December. And that actually kind of surprised me. 

Spencer: That is interesting. It’s not 

Jared: dramatic, but it’s a couple of percentage points, one or two percentage points higher from December. I would’ve thought conversions conversion percentage would have been off the charts.

It looks like the reason so many that we make so much money in the month of December and Q4 isn’t really because, uh, it’s just cause so many more people are buying. It’s not necessarily because we’re converting better, I guess, if that makes sense. 

Spencer: Right. There’s just so much more traffic on Amazon. Yeah.

Jared: Um, and so what it came down to, as I drilled in is it came out of the shipped items, revenue, as they call it. Um, so the amount of revenue from the items that my videos influenced, um, a purchase on that was down 67%. So what it really means is that a lot of what I talked about coming out of November and December that I realized is, Hey, in this Q4 time, people were buying expensive stuff.

They’re buying luxury stuff. They’re buying things that maybe, you know, they don’t. Need, but they want, um, uh, you know, this kind of stuff, right. That they bought more expensive stuff because my shipped revenue was down 66 percent when my shipped items is only down by less than 50%. Right. So the amount of money people are spending per product dropped quite a bit.

Spencer: Yeah. Well, how do you think, uh, February is going to go? Like, do you think there’s going to be much of a, a change? Uh, do you have any sort of thoughts or projections going forward? 

Jared: Well, I’m not going to get myself into the hot water. Google does by projecting what their revenue is going to be. And then having to have their stock price demoted and dinged because I don’t need Jared stock getting dinged even any more than it already has.

I mean, you’re, 

Spencer: you’re trying to speak. You can’t, uh, you know, my stock price is going up. 

Jared: That’s right. Um, I mean, if I were a betting man, I’d say February is going to look a lot like January, you know, and I haven’t really been doing much, right? I did end up uploading eight. Eight videos in January. Okay. All right.

But, um, yeah, so, uh, so yeah, uh, I, I, I, I don’t have any broad plans to get back on that video train. I am going to do videos in 2024. So it’s not like I’m just letting it go, but, um, but, uh, but I don’t have any immediate plans to make more videos and I don’t see consumer trends changing much between February and January.

So probably more of the same for February. No, 

Spencer: I think that makes sense. I, um, uh, didn’t come prepared to share my earnings, but I was just a little above where you were at. I was, I was 1, 650 ish. Okay. Something 

Jared: like that. Which pace is almost the same considering you were up on me in December too. Yeah.

Yeah. Actually by a lot by actually, no, you were way above me. 

Spencer: Yeah. I was, I was about 6, 000 for, for December. So how fast I fall. Yeah. Uh huh. You know, 

Jared: You’re the peaks and valleys and I’m like the steady Eddie kind of thing. If it, if there is a steady Eddie and right influence your 

Spencer: program and like, like I talked about in, in December, I had one product or type of product in particular just exploded.

So I think that’s a big reason for that. So. Anyways, that’s, that’s, uh, that’s my short update, but, um, no, that’s, that’s good to hear. Amazon influencers still, um, still moving along. It doesn’t sound like you’re going to publish a thousand videos, uh, this year. I don’t plan to publish another thousand videos, uh, this year either, but, uh, still, still an awesome program.

And I will be curious to see how long the videos. Continue to perform well, right? Do they start dropping out more and more? Do they stick around? Are there several that last for years? I big question mark. 

Jared: Yeah, I agree a hundred percent. I mean, it’s going to be a fun year to look at from a totally different perspective than we did last year.

Spencer: Yeah, I agree. Well, maybe we will go ahead and jump into our weird niche sites since we only have, you know, another 10 minutes or so here, so we’ll go ahead and share our weird niche sites. One that I found is a little bit different. It’s, it’s very niche. Uh, but it’s not so much a content business, you know, a lot of times we cover, uh, content businesses that are doing well in Google, getting a lot of traffic from Google.

Uh, this is not the case. And as I teased in the introduction, um, you know, I do plan on talking about the weather. And so, uh, the niche website I’m talking about is weather embed. Com embed, like you embed something into something else. So weather embed.com and it, I mean, it really is more of like a SaaS tool than, um, you know, a content business.

You come to the homepage, I mean, it’s very simple. Yeah. It’s like one sentence. Uh, okay. Weather embeds for newsletters is the headline and then the sub headline. Instantly generate a weather forecast image, customize your location, customize for your location and customize branding. And it gives an example of, I mean, it’s just a seven day forecast basically, uh, in, in an image that tells you the temperature, is it rainy tomorrow?

You know, that sort of thing. Uh, for a specific city. And then the pricing is anywhere from 5 a month to a hundred dollars a month, depending on how much customization you want to do. Um, how many views you might have. And I just, I find it very interesting. I mean, you have weather overall as a niche, right?

Uh, and then, uh, you have, um, you know, where you can look up weather. As sort of another niche, like this is weather just for newsletters. And it’s only a tool that you embed in a newsletters, right? It’s not like, it’s not even a website that you click on and you go look at the weather. No, it’s like you embed this little widget in your newsletter.

That’s it. Like it’s, it’s super niche. Um, and how much money they’re making? I have no clue. Uh, you know, I tried to do some Googling to see if I could figure out, you know, if they have a bunch of customers or anything like that. Um, I don’t, I don’t have any idea. Um, they give use cases, right? So the type of customers that might do this, and it makes a lot of sense.

You got hotels, right? That’s in their newsletter. If you’re planning to stay at your hotel, you want to know if it’s. Sunny in California or is it going to be a torrential downpour and you got to cancel your trip to Disneyland, right? Uh, so that weather in bed might be really important or an Airbnb or a sports team.

Is the weather good enough to, you’ve got the big game, the playoffs coming next month and you’ve got this weather in bed. Every time you get that newsletter, you’re like, okay, we’re still good to go. So I can see, um, for, for large businesses like hotels and things like that, it can be a pretty cool widget.

So, um, I did pull up the Ahrefs graph. Um, I don’t have it pulled up here now, but I looked at it previously, it’s like, essentially no traffic, like, from search, like it’s Um, I looked at similar web and, um, it was maybe three or 4, 000 visitors a month, right? That was just coming from a variety of sources. So not a ton of traffic.

I don’t, again, I have no idea how big this business is, but a very interesting, kind of weird niche, little tool niche website. So 

Jared: I mean, when I first, this just speaks to the power of being in the niche versus not like when I first heard it, I think who is going to want. To, uh, have a weather embed tool in their newsletter, you know, but when you look at the use cases, all of a sudden, you’re like, oh, yeah, of course, that would make sense.

Right? Um, they could use a little bit of work here on the originality of their landing pages for hotel and for Airbnb and why not? Uh, but. It feels like this is a little niche business that could purr along now. I don’t know because there’s no information here about the founder or about anything, but I’ve got to imagine that this looks like it comes from somebody who built it, like who maybe has a career or history in the hotel space, right?

Or in the travel space. I noticed if you look at the bottom, they support and they have some of the big newsletters like MailChimp and constant contact and they have Revenate and I’m like, what is Revenate? So I went and looked it up. Revenate is hospitality specific solutions that hotels bank on. And so, you know, yeah, this is really almost built to work with solutions that a lot of these hospitality places are already utilizing is what it looks like to me.

Spencer: Yeah. Now, uh, here is one little, uh, interesting tidbit of information that I didn’t notice before we started recording here. Um, if you click on, uh, what was it that I clicked on? Some of the examples. I clicked on the use case of hotels. They actually have a whole paragraph here. Um, for SEO optimization, I was going to mention that paragraph.

It says, um, when it comes, yeah, when it comes to SEO content around weather forecasts can naturally incorporate location based keywords, thereby improving your local SEO performance. I guess the assumption is maybe they’re embedding this on their website, right? And then have content related to that on the website, not just newsletter, right?

Unless it’s some sort of web based. Newsletter. Um, it says this approach can aid your hotel and ranking higher and search engine results when potential guests searched for accommodations in your area. Additionally, engaging content like weather forecasts can increase the time visitors spend on your site.

A key factor in improving your overall SEO So there you go. It’s an SEO optimization tool. 

Jared: They might want to change whether embeds for hotel newsletters, because I, you know, it’s, I understand what you’re saying. Like maybe there’s some different ways to use it, but newsletters and SEO don’t typically 

Spencer: go together.

Not typically. No. Right. So, um, I just thought it, yeah, 

Jared: it is. I, I actually, I also liked the line above it. I thought that was a little bit more on point of strategic marketing tools. You know, they’re like, Hey, you’re a hotel. And you use this in conjunction with say promotions, it can really be a powerful one, two punch.

And I’m like, Oh yeah, that’s good point. Like it’s gonna be hot out. You promote your pool. It’s gonna be cold out. You promote your indoor restaurants, you know, and you kind of use these together hand in hand, if you can kind of create some synergy there. Like that, that’s, that’s, that’s a good use. 

Spencer: Yeah. So, you know, at the end of the day, I don’t know how much money it’s making.

I don’t know how successful the business is, but it’s, um, maybe just just an idea or sparks an idea for a listener out there of maybe not an exact replica, but what’s a very niche tool that you could use? Maybe it’s for newsletters. Maybe it’s for some embedding, right? Is there something else you can embed for websites?

Some little tool that, hey, you can charge people monthly. to use your little bit of technology. Um, so maybe there’s some ideas that come with this, but, uh, that’s, that’s my weird niche site. I 

Jared: mean, again, to me, it maybe makes a little bit of money until you start to think, well, maybe he’s, uh, you know, pun intended, maybe he’s embedded in the hotel space.

And, uh, so, you know, he might like speaking of a conference, like these hotel. Groups probably have conferences. I could see him with a little booth in the corner and you know, it’s like, Hey, you know, brand awareness and 50 bucks a month for a newsletter, your size and bam, you come home from the conference with a, you know, 10, 20, 30 grand of, of, of monthly recurring revenue.

Spencer: Right. And maybe you sign up a hotel franchise. Right. And then all of a sudden it’s 50 bucks a month per location or something. Right. You know, you just signed up 200 hotels and it’s like 

Jared: Holiday Inn Express is like, I’m all over this, you know, and that’s, that’s a huge contract, 

Spencer: right? Exactly, exactly. So you land one or two of those big contracts with something like this and absolutely you’re doing really well.

Jared: Well, my, uh, my topic is quite a different direction, my weird niche here, so. Okay. Uh, we all know IMDB, right? Internet Movie Database, I believe is what the acronym stands for. Well, did you know that there is an IMCDB? I did not. Uh, Internet Movie Cars Database. That’s the website that we have today. It’s imcdb.

org. Did 

Spencer: you give me the link to 

Jared: Craigslist? Yes, hello2004. 

Spencer: Whoa. Internet Movie Cars Database. So, is that what I think it is? So yeah, this 

Jared: is a, like a Wikipedia of every movie and every car that was used in every movie and I don’t know if it’s every way but I mean that’s certainly there’s a lot of them in here whoa and wow it’s really interesting it’s not very user friendly I I really wish it was um You know, like you can kind of go down the movie route or you can kind of go down the car route and it all breaks apart fairly quickly and I don’t like if you’re just listening like I don’t mean that like they didn’t do a good job in conceptually I just mean like there’s a lot of cars in the world there’s a lot of movies in the world and trying to kind of parse it all together it just doesn’t user from a user experience doesn’t do a very good job of it but if you start digging deep and just go like Mercedes Benz and then like the model you know and then you go like oh let’s see the c class and then we’ll do like the car Like you can just start to see like every and they have like screenshots from every movie of when every 

Spencer: car was going to say, like, when the car is on the screen, they’ve got a screenshot.

So that’s a lot of 

Jared: work. That’s what I mean. This isn’t just like a listing, like, Oh, the Aston Martin is mentioned in fifth gear. Okay, cool. No, they got like a screenshot of when it was used in the movie. And like, you can actually see the, the, the image, uh, of that. I mean, who’s doing this. 

Spencer: I don’t know, but that is a lot of work.

And I mean, it’s not just like the Aston Martin. Like I had to click on the model, right? Like the, the Lagonda, right. And it’s got, I don’t know, apparently like 20 movies. 

Jared: It’s, it’s, it’s really, I mean, you know, they have all these different filters you can do. I mean, you can see in the upper right there, Spencer, they had display options and, um, you know, all sorts of different things that you can, you can kind of, you know, uh, they have star ratings.

I didn’t know what exactly what the star ratings are. I was there. To the car or to the movie or to their own stars. I’m not really sure. Um, you know, but there’s a lot of data here. This is basically as classic old school directory as you can get. Right? Yeah, 

Spencer: it is. So I think the stars are like, how much is the car in the movie?

Oh, this, this is vehicle used by a character, uh, or in a car chasing. And then one star is like. Background vehicle 

Jared: got it. Okay. So yeah, if you really want a prominent Aston Martin, Lagonda scene, you, you go for the three stars. That’s 

Spencer: right. Right. You know, fast and the furious, right. You’re getting a bunch of five star.

Oh 

Jared: yeah. Anything that’s in that, in a race, right. Uh, let’s see here. My computer lagged a bit. I’m going over my notes. So specs that people always like to hear. This will surprise you, Spencer. If you didn’t cheat and look at the notes, D R 

Spencer: 68. Whoa. Yeah. You didn’t see that one coming, did you? I didn’t out of left field.

It 

Jared: looks like a DR 6. 8. If you look at the site, uh, let’s see, ranks for 95, 000 keywords, uh, only about 32, 000 organic sessions a month though. So really. Just again, broadly looking from at websites all the time, like when you have 95, 000 keywords, you should be getting a little more traffic than 32, 000 monthly page views.

Mm hmm. Mm hmm. Oh, that, that screen has 25. 

Spencer: Did you see what type of pages are getting that traffic? Yeah, 

Jared: it’s, it’s really interesting. So you’re not going to learn much from, uh, going to top pages there. They have over. Uh, like 000 pages. But if you go into keywords, you’ll actually see some of the keywords that they’re ranking for.

And they’re really interesting. You know, it’s basically like people are looking for specific movies or what I found more often, like the car they were using, it’s like the bad guy’s car, um, independence day vehicles. Um, uh, uh, you know, there’s a couple other ones like Harry and the Henderson’s car, right?

So like, Hey, I saw that car in the movie. And I don’t know what card it is. Like I liked it or I thought it was interesting or I wanted to tell my friend about it, like, Oh, that’s an Aston Martin, uh, Lagonda, you know, I didn’t know that, you know, so that they’re ranking for all these queries that I never even thought would exist.

Spencer: Yeah, that’s really interesting. Um, man, just again, talk, talk about how niche you can go with these search queries, right? um Right and and new search queries being created right a new movie comes out next week All of a sudden you’re gonna have all these search queries for oh, what’s you know? Whoever driving in this new movie 

Jared: so uh monetized with ads, obviously you can see the ads there I’m not over the top but you know, definitely some ad placement on the sites.

Um And, um, I thought this is interesting. It also links on every one of the, the, the, uh, the, the detailed pages to the movie where you can watch it. So it’s like, go watch this movie on Amazon and all these places. And it’s using what looks like an affiliate program called just watch. com. Um, so if you, you know, kind of hover over, let’s see, I should have given you a link to, to watch the movie on, right.

Um, there you go. Where to watch this movie on what is that Roku? 

Spencer: Okay, there we go. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. And 

Jared: so, yeah. And so it’s got this, and I don’t know anything about just watch. com, but I went to just watch. com and it looked basically like, you know, one of these kind of shell affiliate, you know, uh, you know, uh, places where they can track, you know, your affiliate commissions, uh, from referrals and stuff like that.

So I don’t know if they get a lot from that, you know, I don’t think that. The search intent of the user intent is quite, you know, like, Oh, I want to go watch that movie now that I saw this grainy image of a, you know, like, I think it’s the other way around. Like I watched this movie and now I want to see what card it, but you know, they certainly have some different ways to earn revenue from the site.

Yeah, 

Spencer: now this is just interesting. Do you know what year this site was created? 2004. 2004, 2004. Okay, and this is the original design. It hasn’t changed a bit. I haven’t updated the design. Um, it’s so fascinating, like it has to be somebody’s passion project. Like they love movies, they love cars, let’s put them together.

Um. It’s 

Jared: great. If, um, just to put it in perspective, if you go down to the footer, Spencer, that’s how I learned that it was, um, it was started in 2004 because of the copyright date. Oh, there you go. At the very bottom, the very last thing it says, page generated in 0. 005 seconds. Okay. Such a 2004 thing 

Spencer: to do.

Yeah, that’s right. Just need my visit counter here. Exactly. My, 

Jared: my TeoCities visit 

Spencer: counter. Mm hmm. That’s exactly right. So, man, I love it. This is a good one. Um, yeah, something I never would have sort of thought about or certainly didn’t know it existed. People are learning a lot about us, like, that I’m not like a movie car buff, you know, and other things, but, um 

Jared: I’m not gonna ask you what car you drive, I actually don’t know, but you and I probably have similar car tastes, I’m just gonna guess.

Spencer: Yeah, yeah. 

Jared: I doubt it’s not a mastermind to share our car. It’s not publicly. It doesn’t, it’s not going to make it look better. We’re both 

Spencer: family guys. 

Jared: Okay. So speaking of my stock going up, we’re going to, we’re going to stop talking about this. That’s that’s sort 

Spencer: of, yeah. Informs our decisions on some of that, uh, for sure.

So what, what, when my kids have moved out, I’ll have much cooler cars. I’m 

Jared: sure. Yeah. Yeah. Let’s just say that you weren’t searching for. Your car in the movies, uh, on screen just now. 

Spencer: Although maybe that’s my next interesting query is who’s driving this, you know, family vehicle. All right. Uh, well, very good.

Uh, great share. Thank you everybody so much for listening. We’ve covered the news, a lot of Google news, new things coming out. Um, you know, we’ve covered our shiny object shenanigans. And of course our weird niche sites. We appreciate you guys listening in. If you are listening to this podcast, leave a review on iTunes or Spotify or wherever you are.

Uh, give it a rating and review so other people can find it. But other than that, thank you so much for listening. 

Jared: Thanks for being here, everyone. We’ll see you next week.