Welcome back to the latest episode of the Niche Pursuits Podcast!
This week, Jared Bauman and guest host Thomas Smith take on the news as usual, they talk about their side hustles during the Shiny Object Shenanigans portion, and then they share some Weird Niche Sites they came across.
Jared and Thomas dive right into the first topic: Google penalizing publishers guilty of site reputation abuse. That includes Forbes, CNN, and others.
Jared talks about what’s been going on and shares some of the stats, and goes into how it affects small publishers and the SERPs.
How much is the collective lost traffic estimated to be worth? Do you agree with their theory about AI Overviews and also the big players’ future plans?
Table of Contents
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Moving along, they talk about Perplexity’s plans to include ads. Jared talks about what this will look like and Thomas compares it to SearchGPT.
What does he think of Perplexity’s explanation of the ads? Do you agree with Jared’s perspective? Do you think other companies will follow suit?
The last order of business is the fact that HARO/Connectively is closing down next month. Jared gives a bit of background and then reads a statement from the company, explaining its decision.
Do you believe its demise is attributable to AI?
They talk about their experience using the platform and share some funny anecdotes, and they also mention some alternatives and offer some ideas for getting links from journalists.
Moving along, Jared talks about one of his side hustles that he’s working on with Thomas. He took an HCU-hit site and turned it into a newsletter business.
Tune in to hear how he’s doing it, how they’ve started earning money, and what platforms they’re using to bring it back to life.
Do you agree with Thomas’ opinion about email? Can you apply any of their ideas to your own site? Check out the full episode to hear about their strategies going forward and the tests they’re running.
Thomas then shares his side hustle, which is quite surprising: a food safety newsletter.
He talks about how it came about, which involved McDonalds, a landing page, and an aggregator. They discuss monetization techniques, evergreen content, and a whole lot more. Tune in to hear it all.
As for weird niche sites, Jared goes first with Slick Deals, a deals aggregator that was created in 1999.
How much traffic is it getting per month? How is it monetizing? And what did he discover on Reddit?
When it’s Thomas’ turn, he shares All About Birds, an opposite of “the parasite world.”
Why is the DR82 site doing so well? How much traffic is it getting? How much are they likely earning?
And that brings us to the end of another great episode. Hopefully, you feel all caught up with sector news and you feel inspired by their side hustles. Maybe you can apply some of their strategies to your own business! Tell us your thoughts in the comments.
See you next week!
Transcript
Jared: All right. Welcome back to another week of niche pursuits news. My name is Jared Bauman. Today, we’re talking about the after effects from Google’s enforcement of its site reputation abuse policy. We often refer to as Parasite SEO and Google started clamping down in recent months on big sites like Forbes, CNN, and the like.
Well, the data’s in and these sites are experiencing pretty huge losses, some of them very, very large. And we’re going to dive into all those details. Uh, in addition, we’ve got a story on ads being introduced into an AI software. And what that could mean going forward for all of the different, uh, AI softwares that we use on a regular basis.
And a big platform that many SEOs and online marketers use is shutting down pretty much ASAP. That’s not all, of course. We’ve got our site hustle updates, a couple of interesting and weird niches. Joining me today is Thomas Smith. Thomas, welcome. Great to be back. Good to have you. I’m, you know, it’s funny.
We keep having this happen with co hosts. You know, we kind of have co hosts that come on regularly and alternate. And I feel like the last time you were on, we were talking about this topic of the site reputation abuse with some of the larger websites like Forbes and stuff. And here we are, we have an update a couple of weeks later, you’re back.
So I feel like you’re going to be very familiar with it.
Thomas: It’s perfect timing. It’s almost like it moves in a cycle. Yeah, it takes a couple of weeks and we have a check in. So yeah, big, big movement there. Uh, it’d be very interesting to talk through it.
Jared: I’m looking forward to your side hustle update for the record.
I’ve seen the agenda. Bizarre would be the word I’m going to say. I don’t know how you ended up in this side hustle. So stay tuned. If, if you think Thomas is the man of many side hustles, He’s now about to introduce what I will call a very bizarre side hustle into the mix. All right, let’s go ahead and get into our first story here today.
Like we teased at the outset, um, there have been some large losses in the site reputation abuse side of large publications like a Forbes, a CNN, and many, many more. Um, um, again, this is, it’s actually not a very long story, but it’s a very kind of in depth story. So what I’m going to do is kind of just give the high level overview of it.
Basically, there’s been a significant drop in search visibility for the affiliate side and just the affiliate side, by the way, if you’re wondering, um, of major publishers like Forbes, CNN time, um, and most of this is attributed to Google’s recent policy changes regarding third party, uh, third party run affiliate businesses.
So it’s, it’s basically. This idea that, as we covered before, Forbes and CNN, they use a third party affiliate company to publish a totally separate set of content on their website. And so these declines started, as you can see in the screen here, in July. But really picked up at the end of September. Um, what we’re seeing here is Forbes advisor.
So here’s the data Forbes advisor down 43%. Uh, wall street journal by side, 77 percent decline. CNN underscored 63 percent decline fortune recommends 72 percent decline. And then here’s the big one. And you can see it in a yellow, their time stamped. 97%, 97%. And you can see, it’s really interesting that drop off the drop offs are different, right?
In terms of how they are, if you’re not able to see on screen, you’re listening. Some of the drop offs look very. Algorithmic mean they’re kind of a gradual drop off and many of them at least one. I’ll say time Time stamped looks almost like a manual penalty there at the end of September and then it’s continued to drop off since then So really quickly and then Thomas again want to bring you in because we covered this story and kind of the in depth But behind the scenes on it a couple weeks ago, but Cistrix estimated that the collective lost traffic Is worth about 7.
5 million, which almost seems to underscore or under report. Sorry, how, how I cast influence or crazy. This is, um, you know, we went into depth last time on the story a couple weeks ago about the, the, uh, Forbes marketplace, which is a different company than Forbes and Forbes marketplaces, who runs a lot of this affiliate content.
Now, here we are, and we’ve got major drops coming. We’ve got actual evidence of. Google coming in and saying, no, we don’t like this. Um, I mean, what are your thoughts?
Thomas: Well, I think, you know, it’s gratifying in the, in the, in the first place there, because we were kind of at the very beginning of the story.
And it was like, Hey, we’re seeing some downward movement on this one, you know, with Forbes marketplace, this one sort of big, uh, affiliate play from one of these giant brands. And we extrapolated from that, that this was going to be a big change. It was going to change the affiliate space. But we were still very early to that story.
And I think we kind of went with our gut on reporting that, um, we had some, some, you know, early coverage in our industry to report on at that time. So to see how it’s played out in the way that we anticipated that it would, with this affecting more brands, to see it in a publication that extends beyond our little corner of the publishing world, you know, ad week.
Covering this to see some of our friends, you know, quoted in there. Um, it’s, it’s, I think, useful to see it reported on in, um, kind of a broader context. Like, this is not just a big deal for our industry. It’s a big deal for publishing in general. It’s probably a big deal for the bottom lines of some of these companies that have kind of created this little cash cow, and they probably didn’t realize it was all going to be taken away just like, you know, a month, a year and a half ago, a lot of us found that pretty much all our traffic was taken away.
So I think there’s, you know, for one thing, just good confirmation that this is actually happening and seeing these really unambiguous results and seeing it affect so many different kind of flavors of the same thing. People who use the same companies, big brands, And I think, you know, as a small publisher, it’s kind of nice to see big guys get treated the same way that we are in some ways, maybe even getting, you know, hammered a bit more like 97 percent loss is pretty substantial.
So, you know, you never want to see people lose all their traffic. It’s not fun to imagine being in their shoes, but at the same time, it feels like there’s finally a little bit of fairness between the big brands and the small publishers like us.
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Jared: It’s interesting. I want to come back to that on small publishers because I have a point that I wanted to ask you about as well.
And so it’s interesting that you brought that up. Um, I wanted to highlight this quote here at Google spokesperson told ad week quote, we’re working to combat tactics where third parties try to exploit a site’s reputation just to rank well in search. We recently updated our spam policies to specifically target this type of behavior.
So we knew about that. That was updated, uh, probably back in March. Said it was going to go into play in May, never did. Glenn Gabe was in the news a couple weeks ago, like looking at this, analyzing, was this algorithmic or was it a manual penalty? I’m not even sure we really know yet, no one’s really said.
I know that, um, I believe it was, I believe it was Danny Sullivan or someone from Google came out and said, no, this isn’t, um, uh, you know, this isn’t what you’re suggesting. It is like, this is just part of what we’re doing. Kind of keeping it vague. I mean, some of the graphs look very, um. They look like a very slow downturn over the course of several weeks, but it is interesting to try to figure out, like, how they’re doing this.
Um, Systrix, Steve Payne, I’ll read that, I’ll read a quote on that as well. Uh, he surmised the crackdown required either specific algorithms or a human touch. So, um, a quote, to target at a directory level, that would require some very specific algorithms or a human touch. I would say this is almost unprecedented.
So, um, I mean, to your point, like, Uh, uh, I agree, like my question to you is going to be if small publishers like the you and I, the, the, the, the niche websites, the content sites, the authority sites of the world, if they aren’t ranking any longer post HCU for affiliate style content. And if now we have these large brand kind of high Dr sites like Forbes that aren’t ranking for really affiliate content anymore.
Who, what’s going to be left in the SERPs there? Like what is Google wanting to put in there if they don’t want us small publishers and they don’t want third party content on a Forbes or the like. What’s going to go there?
Thomas: Well, AI overviews, I think we all know that something AI flavored is going to go there realistically.
Um, so I think, you know, that’s obviously SERP diversity has been sort of a big thing. At Google and we see that with the AI overviews, but also I think we’re going to see more video for a lot of this stuff. Um, I’ve seen an, a big increase on my YouTube channel, for example, and you know, I think it’s, it’s the time of the year, so it’s a little hard to sort of sort that out, but even on more kind of.
Things that aren’t exactly a review that aren’t exactly tied to the season. I’ve definitely seen a bump up there. So I, I don’t think the traffic’s just all going to go back to our blogs. Unfortunately, like
Jared: maybe,
Thomas: maybe, I mean, it would be wonderful, but I just don’t believe that’s going to happen. So I think they’ve cleared out that space.
They’ve cleared us out of there to a large extent. It’s going to be AI stuff that keeps people on the Google. Domain that keeps people engaged with them and not going off platform. And when it is sending them elsewhere, I think it’s going to be video. It’s going to be the sort of newer formats because, and, and forum posts as we’ve seen a lot.
But I’ve seen a bump in video. Um, I think it’s going to continue. I think YouTube is the place where. All of that kind of stuff we would have done on a niche website, maybe five, six years ago. Is living now the how to is a sort of random topics that people cover the reviews of a product. I think that’s where it’s going.
And it’s good that it’s not going to these big brands that didn’t really do the work. I think the other thing will happen is these brands are going to pivot. You know, they’re not just going to let this go. They’re going to hire people in house. They’re going to make it kind of more of a wire cutter model.
They might be kind of knocked down. They might’ve lost their super easy route to these kinds of funds, but they’re, they’re not going to just, you know, go, okay, you know, affiliate didn’t work, let’s just go back to publishing lots of great editorial stories. Now they’re, they’re going to find a way to pivot.
It’s going to take time, but I’m sure we’re going to see all these companies back. Just now it’s going to be their own writers. Now it’s not going to be on a separate domain. It’s going to be like baked in in a way that it’s a little bit harder to target.
Jared: I was going to say, it’s a good thing to point out.
Like this is all targeting that third party style content that tends to live on a sub domain or an area of the site that’s easily cut off and traceable because of the way it was set up, which is what that story outlined. And to your point, like this, isn’t targeting the wire cutter, which yes, They’re doing affiliate content and yes, they’re doing it on the New York Times domain, but they’re not doing it with a third party content agency, basically.
Um, so yeah, that’s a good point there. There is the opportunity for them to pivot into doing it more in house. And in theory that would be rewarded. It is interesting almost to circle back. Like you, you look at the concept now from parasite SEO, which really this, this isn’t. Parasite SEO that a lot of people listening are take advantage of, right?
Because that is more working your affiliate link or your affiliate relationship into just an article rather than, uh, dominating and coming up with a company that will service a Forbes, like Forbes marketplace does. And it’s interesting that if, if that gets also affected by that, where those types of things happen.
You know, there will be new opportunities that will get created. And I wonder where those are going to go. Because like you said, like there’s always going to be room in the SERPs for uh, affiliate style content. And then if we now see forums rise to the top, is that where people will start to target their efforts?
If we now see video start to rise to the top, is that where people will start to put their efforts and going forward where AI has a role in that? It’s really interesting to think about the kind of the ripple effects, I guess, of something like this happening.
Thomas: Yeah, it’s not just going to go away and then, you know, all the traffic goes to blogs and everybody just walks away from it.
People are going to find a way to pivot. Um, and yeah, certainly with AI, now you can generate a relatively realistic, you know, video of at least more of a faceless style video with a narration, some images in the background. So, whether that’s going to all get clogged up, I think we’re already seeing it with Reddit.
I mean, I already see in my own space and travel. I already see people hijacking Reddit threads where people were genuinely discussing some destination five years ago, and they come in and drop in, you know, a link to, uh, like a tour or something that’s an affiliate link. And they try to pretend like it’s just somebody, Oh, casually.
Well, I just happened upon this, you know, here’s the best bike to rent in San Francisco or whatever it is. It’s already here. I just think it’ll accelerate, but I think these brands are going to, um, just have to work harder. They’re going to have to hire the people, do the work, right. Maybe do fewer, but more targeted things that actually match with their.
Um, you know, focus and I mean, some of these are hilarious, like time stamped. It almost feels like, you know, they just put their stamp on it.
Jared: So much when you enter there. Right.
Thomas: It’s like, it’s almost like they were aware that this was, this was a little bit ridiculous. Um, yeah, I
Jared: guess in summary, like, uh, we don’t have to be altruistic about the fact that, you know, This is an ever moving target that Google’s dealing with, and yet we can still kind of celebrate a bit.
Like you said, like, hey, this was something that we were all very frustrated about that these high dark, high, um, high DR or high powered domains were getting treated vastly different than small publishers. Not that that’s gone away, but maybe one little victory for the small guys here in this one.
Thomas: Yeah.
And the, and the, um, niche site that I’m going to share later, I think is a cool example of. That effects of a big brand. It’s a little bit, it’s not quite a brand, but I think it’s sort of a brand, um, being leveraged in a really good, positive way. So stick around for that. Yeah.
Jared: Well, good, man. You’re just, we’re teasing left and right in the second half of the podcast, but, um, to get there, we still have a couple more stories we’ve got to cover.
Let’s move on to the second one here. And this has to do with perplexity. Um, perplexity is introducing advertisements. It’s a story I have up. Uh, in front of us here is on perplexity. ai’s website. It’s their blog. It says why we’re experimenting with advertising. And basically, cat’s out of the bag here.
Perplexity’s announced that they’re going to start placing ads into the experience they’ve created. They’re initially going to appear in the U. S. only. There will be two formats. One is going to be, um, sponsored for advertising. Um, and the second is paid media displayed on the side of an answer. So ads will be clearly labeled as sponsored.
Um, answers to sponsored questions will be generated through perplexities technology, and it won’t be influenced by brands. Um, You know, it’s, it’s a pretty short article. There’s a bunch of dropdowns here that you can, um, you can kind of see what it looks like. Um, uh, if you wanted to, actually, it’s only a screenshot.
Mm-Hmm. . So this is in a screenshot of what it will look like. These dropdowns don’t actually work, um, if you’re not watching on screen, it basically has a very well labeled, sponsored at the top. Um, and it’s, um, it, it’s, uh, it’s related to obviously the search that’s, that’s happening. I mean, why does this matter and why is it worth bringing up?
We’ve long talked about. We know that Google as a traditional search environment, the SERPs, the search engine result page is just loaded full of, um, of advertisements, right? And that’s Google’s primary business model, their primary revenue model. And we’ve long wondered like, how is a chat GPT Is it just going to be through its, you know, 20 a month subscription?
How is a perplexity. ai going to monetize? How are these platforms going to monetize? And we’ve always felt like ads were coming. Well, they’re here now and I’m wondering long term what this can signify for the, for the industry. Um, are you a big user of perplexity. ai? Do you think this is a good user experience for them?
Do you think there’s a good step in the, in the ad model direction?
Thomas: You know, I’ve tested it out. Um, I’ve been using search GPT, which I know you talked about last week on the podcast. I, um, I find perplexity does a really good job of sort of live information, like stuff that’s happening right now. Uh, search TPT doesn’t seem to do quite as well with that.
Um, and I think, you know, that’s at least how they’re justifying adding the ads in. Right. They’re saying we have this publisher program where we’re, we’re basically sourcing these live feeds. We’re paying publishers for access to that live information and that we’re going to put in ads to kind of subsidize that and help pay for it.
I don’t know that I a hundred percent buy that, you know, it feels like a, an excuse that nobody’s going to disagree with. Like, Oh, great. You know, more money for content creators and publishers, you know, no, one’s going to get angry about it, but we all know how these things creep. Right. Like, I mean, there were at the beginning and Google, there were like one or two sponsored links at the top of the page.
They were clearly sponsored. They didn’t even necessarily relate to the search. And now for many searches, you’ve got five links. Put around there. It’s very hard to distinguish what is and isn’t sponsored. There’s stuff on the side, so I’m sure it’ll continue to grow, but I think the way they’re approaching it as smart, that it’s basically instead of just kind of displaying an ad, like we typically see, or trying to sneak it in, they’re making it an actual question, right?
Like you kind of, you use the technology, you continue your conversation, but about the brand that’s paying for that. So maybe you’re looking like. I don’t know. What’s it? What? How long should I cook my turkey for Thanksgiving? And it gives you an answer. And then it has a question. It’s like, what are the sizes of Turkey?
I can get at Whole Foods sponsored by Whole Foods. And then you ask that and then it tells you and then you say, Oh, you know, how long do I cook the 16 pound one? I think making it organic and part of the conversation is really smart. But I also just feel like it’s going to going to creep. To be bigger and bigger.
And it also feels like open AI has access to these huge amounts of capital. You know, they’re raising tons of money. They’re worth huge amounts of money now. And Google with Gemini, they don’t really have to worry about it. They’ve just got infinite money. Essentially. Propelexity is small and they probably don’t have the investment and they can’t just do that standard VC kind of play of like, Just spend and spend and spend and try to grab as much market share as possible.
They have to start to show that there’s some route to profitability. So this feels like maybe they’re finding it harder to raise and they need to show, Hey, look, there’s a revenue model here. You know, we’ll throw some ads in. I don’t know that it’s really going to be the core offering. In the longterm, but I think they’re trying to show like, look, there’s a way we can earn money beyond just the subscription fees.
Jared: Yeah. I play devil’s advocate and say like, I appreciate what they’re trying to do in terms of being different. And I’ll read the quote out of the blog post just so, so everybody can hear it. Um, while brands are keen on understanding how their companies appear in AI answer engines like ours, we will avoid duplicating the SEO industry where people are implementing arbitrary.
tactics to improve their rankings at the expense of user utility. And so, you know, kind of your point, like, well, first off, it’s like a shot across the bow at the way Google does stuff and a lot of us do it. Um, and so that is what it is. Fair enough. But I’m not sure I, if I liked the experience any better, getting like, kind of sort of told by.
Whole Foods, who you mentioned is one of the notable partners they announced, but Whole Foods like, Hey, um, by the way, we’ll be the ones to tell you what kinds of turkeys to cook for Thanksgiving, but we’ll do it kind of subtly. Like, I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t love the Google experience. We talk about how ads just litter the syrups.
And to your point, like it didn’t start that way, but it’s creeped that way over the last 20 years. Um, and, and so, uh, it’s, it’s interesting to see, Kind of where this goes. Um, I don’t know. I I’m kind of curious to use perplexity. I don’t use it a lot. I use it a little bit, kind of like you. I’m kind of curious to see it just to see how this feels.
I’ve long wondered how a, uh, AI would implement some of these chatbots would implement, um, uh, and these, these, these AI search platforms and implement ads. So I don’t know. I’ll, I’ll, I’ll fairly say I can see the advantages and the disadvantages. Pretty clearly, I’m not sure which side I come down on.
Thomas: It feels very much like the distinction in our space of like affiliate slash sponsored stuff versus just straight up putting Mediavine or Raptive on a site.
You know, there’s something kind of honest about just putting ads on it, even if the user experience is kind of terrible sometimes. People
Jared: know that it’s an ad.
Thomas: It’s an ad. You know, yeah, you got this content for free. The exchange is that there’s going to be ads on it. We’re not trying to like work it in or pretend.
Right. You’re going to have to scroll past a bunch of really annoying stuff and you’re going to get the content versus sponsored and affiliate. The page loads faster. It looks better, but then you’re constantly having to look and go, Oh, is this really a, you know, really a, an organic post? Is this actually sponsored?
Does it say it’s sponsored? Is there like an affiliate disclaimer at the very end and little font, you know, that kind of stuff. So I, I don’t know that there’s a right answer. It probably depends on the user, right? Like some people would prefer. And some people prefer just to pay, even if it’s a lot to have access to it and not have to have, you know, the distinction at all.
And that’s, that’s kind of where like the mediums of the world. I was going to bring a medium. Yeah. And really where your money
Jared: you pay your money. Yeah. And in many ways what chat GPT is doing, obviously their premium experience, you still get it for free, but you don’t get all the bells and whistles, but that’s a third model, right?
Thomas: Yeah. And I think, you know, that probably some connection between that and what Google is doing, which is like, Don’t really worry about the chat bot. Like they kind of realized, I think that they’ve lost that game with Gemini and they’re just going to bake it into everything else, AI overviews. And now we’ve got notebook LM, which is pretty awesome, honestly.
And, you know, they’re just going to put it into Google docs and into your Gmail and on your phone, and they’re going to use it to make their other products better. So I think everyone’s trying to figure out the monetization. It’s interesting to see perplexity taking this ad. Supported, uh, approach and again, you heard it here first, because I think it was three weeks, four weeks ago.
Now we’re on the podcast. We’re saying, well, there’s this data that shows that perplexity is sending more traffic to user sites than, um, other, you know, kind of chat bot search built types of things better than AI overviews. And I remember the caveat we said at the time was, well, that just means they’re going to put ads on it soon.
And we’ll see what happens then. And now, of course, you know, that’s what’s happening. So we’ll see what happens. I, I agree with you. I want to test it out. I want to see what the experience is like, but no one knows how to monetize this yet. So everybody’s just going to try everything they think might work.
Jared: Yeah, I think you summed up perfectly. I was trying to come up with some really beautiful analogy and you did like the idea of sponsored content versus just slapping ads on it. There is something. Rather elementary, but honest about just plastering ads all over, which I can’t believe I’m saying that because that would owe to Google SERPs kind of being very honest, which not sure I’ve said that those two things together in the same sentence on the podcast before, but I see what you’re saying.
I think it’s a great analogy for people to kind of think through these different ad models and then we have what perplex AI is doing right now. Um, and then we also have that third model, which is, Hey, just pay and you get whatever you need without having to deal with it. You pay per month, you pay per per use or whatever that is.
So, um, Well, could, uh, if you aren’t using perplexity. ai, let us know what you think about it pre ad, and maybe we’ll keep an eye on what it is like post ad, uh, with ads in it. So, hey, we got one more story here. Um, this one might hit home for a lot of people that are listening and watching, um, kind of out of the blue.
Uh, I would say, I mean, certainly there’s been a lot of changes on this platform recently of late, but kind of out of the blue. Harrow, help a reporter out. Connectively is closing down. This announcement was made a week or two ago, but it’s gone on December 9th. So for those, you don’t know, Haro is help a reporter out.
It was, I’d say rebranded, but really replatformed to connectively. Um, I think that was earlier this year or late last year, but basically it’s this platform that allows journalists to connect with, uh, The public and publishers in a way to get quotes and get content and get expert insights so that they can use them in their stories.
For a lot of people listening, it was a great place to build really high quality links, um, links that are referencing a brand. Uh, in a very, well, I’ll say a very unique and genuine way. Obviously there were certain ways that certain people would get on there and brands would get on that game, that system.
But generally speaking, these were links that were very high quality and were a relatively easy to build provided you had the time to kind of respond to the queries over time, obviously it was getting saturated by online publishers. But nonetheless, still a lot of people are getting great results from it.
We’ve interviewed, um, several kind of harrow link building agencies, uh, across the years and kind of learned a lot about how to build those successfully. I know I’ve had a lot of success on that as well. And so they closed it down starting December 9th. It’s owned by the larger brand Cis, Cision. Um, and they’ve owned it for a while now.
I don’t know if they started it. I can’t remember, but here’s their quote on why they’re closing it down. I’ll just read it. It’s a little lengthy and then we’ll kind of dive into it. After assessing feedback from our customers and evaluating our product portfolio, we have decided to focus our attention on core offerings, where we see significant opportunities deliver even more value to our PR account.
You know what? I’m actually not gonna read this whole thing. You get it. They’re shutting it down and they’re not really giving us a good reason. Um, I don’t need to read that. Uh, I, I have connectively move was not necessarily great, but it also wasn’t bad. It. It kind of had, um, it, it, it made the platform a little less spammy, made it a little harder to use, but I was still using it.
We were still using it and I was enjoying it. I’m bummed it’s going away. Uh, what about you? Uh, do you use Hero? Have you used it? And what are your thoughts on this?
Thomas: I’m sad. Yeah. I have a funny harrow story. So, I mean, for people who used it before the connectively move, it was really funny. It was like, you’d get this really rudimentary email multiple times a day, just text.
And it would say
Jared: reporter cut off, right? Always cut off an email reader. It’d always be like, I’m sorry, we can’t get to the whole thing.
Thomas: Yeah. Huge, huge. I mean, every topic you can imagine and it would list reporters and you could write back and you know, share your expertise. It’s And sometimes it would say who the publication was, but sometimes it wouldn’t, it would just be a random one.
So I would go through, um, and pitch like travel stories, you know, for, for the Bay area or just general, you know, they’d ask like any tips for traveling with kids. And I would write something up, but I saw one that was anonymous for the reporter. And the question was like, we need strong opinions about umbrellas.
I thought, all right, you know, just for fun, I’m going to write back to this. Cause I have a couple of minutes. I was sitting in the car or something on my phone. And I, and so I, I hate umbrellas. So I wrote this super strong take on umbrellas. It was like, they’re awful. There’s this one that I found that’s not terrible, but every other one, you know, they, they leak on the floor, you lose them after a season, you know, they fall apart, um, and sent it off to the reporter just kind of for fun.
And it turned out it was the wall street journal. Um, so now there’s this quote, Thomas Smith, a web publisher says, you know, and all this, like me basically just hating on umbrellas. So that was the fun with Harrow is that you could just find these incredible placements, um, and it was just so random and you never knew what you were going to get with it.
Send something in and you think, Oh, nothing happened. You’d get no response. And then a month later, you know, there’d be like a quote, you’d get a backlink and some huge publication. So I, yeah, I’m going to miss it, but I think it’s a casualty of AI, you know, cause it was just before there was a cost to writing these things.
You had to write it by hand or you have to hire somebody to do it. And now with chat GPT and, you know, you can, you can easily write back to every single one of them if you want to, and find some way to work into, you know, Into the why you’re an expert, even if you’re not. And I think they tried to move to a paid model where you have to pay to submit, but really that just incentivizes the people who are doing this at scale.
You know, if I got to pay a dollar each, the person who’s really an expert is like, well, I don’t want to have to pay. To tell you good information. I’m not going to do it, but the person who’s doing this, you know, thousand a day on, on, uh, on chat GPT and they get, you know, 10 great backlinks and it ends up costing them a hundred bucks, but it’s not a problem for them.
I’m not surprised that it kind of probably got killed by, uh, by AI, but I’m going to miss it.
Jared: Yeah. I have some equally funny stories where I’m, uh, quoted, uh, you know, uh, with my hot takes on like home decor. Um, and, uh, you know, uh, again, I wasn’t actually pitching that I was an expert in home decor, but I established this relationship with a journalist and through Harrow and through all, it’s just, it’s a funny world, but it was a cool world.
It was cool. Um, obviously to your point, like. So much was, I mean, I think they were having problems before AI, right? Like with people pitching. Uh, off topic to what you’re an expert in, and they, they, they always had a stance on that. And they, they threatened to kick people out if you kept bugging journalists with kind of off topic, um, uh, takes and that sort of thing.
I don’t know where that ever went. Then AI was introduced. I don’t know if AI was the reason they moved to Connectively, but that whole process, that whole change was, was pretty, pretty big. Frustrating for a lot of people. Um, and then obviously we’ve run connectively for a year or less, something in that range.
I didn’t look it up and here we are. There are alternatives on the article does mention alternatives. Uh, let me see if I can pull them up. Uh, everyone’s asking their alternatives. I mean, I suspect so just Google it. Uh, some include one by the original founder of Harrow named sources of sources, which we did discuss on the latest interview.
With Chris Pantelli, uh, he went through that one. There’s journal finder. There are others. Um, I made a list, uh, pretty quickly after this was announced so that there’s still opportunities. Uh, you know, I mean, Hey, we’ll say it again. Like the best thing you could have done with Harrow could have done with connectively and the best thing you can do going forward with any future service or kind of platform you use is to try to, yes, use it to get in front of journalists, but then create and maintain those Relationships with the journalist one on one rather than relying on the platform.
A lot of people I know have built relationships with journalists. And now they just, you know, can’t go to Hero to get new opportunities, but they still have a nice Rolodex full of journalists they’ve established relationships with, provided quotes for, and those journalists can come straight back to them now.
And I do think to some degree that might be also at play here, to your point about AI, but journalists getting flooded with AI answers are like, I’ve already got, you know, 25 sources in my niche, in my space, I can go to about this. I’ll just start going to them instead of messing with this kind of AI nightmare.
Thomas: Yeah. You know, I think it’s in some ways similar to the first story we reported here about, you know, the, the easy way the Forbes advisor, you know, all that, where you just sort of have this strong domain, you bring in an outside company. They spin up a bunch of. Affiliate stuff, you put it on your domain and profit that’s gone.
Now, these brands are going to have to bring it in house. They’re going to have to really review the products. They’re going to have to really make the investment. I think this is similar. We all kind of got used to Harrow being this kind of incredible way to just get these super high value backlinks without the work of forming those relationships.
And now it just means we’re going to have to form those relationships, which we probably should have been doing all along. And if anything, I think it’s going to weed out. Some of the people who didn’t really, weren’t really experts, you know, couldn’t really justify it. Um, and so if you can make those relationships with reporters, then those can last much longer and be much higher value.
So we just have to do the work in a way that before maybe we got to skate along with a simpler solution.
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Jared: C’est la vie. All right. Well, that brings us to a wrap on this week’s news, but lots to stick around for. Um, and, uh, I, uh, Uh, Thomas, I think we’re all very excited about some of the, some of the things you’re bringing to the table, but hey, I’ve got some stuff to share too.
So I’ll start with my side hustle and I’ll touch this week on, I mentioned it last week for the first time, but this week you’re here and my side hustle is really a partnership with you. So yeah, I’ll kind of give an overview of where it’s at on week two. Really? It’s like day nine at this point. It’s, it’s really very much in its infant stages, but then I want to kind of hear your side of why we’re partnering and why it makes sense for you.
Basically I have, and so many of us listening have like sites that were decimated by the helpful content update. I’ve talked previously about one of the sites that I went back to and started pursuing Pinterest and did that throughout the summer. And that site is now earning over 2, 000 a month, which was higher than it used to be earning.
Back pre HCU. Well, I got another site and in this site, um, did very well back in 2018, 2019, 2020, but again, decimated by the helpful content update and, um, monetized on raptive, not making much, still getting a little bit of traffic from being, uh, still getting a little bit of traffic from Pinterest and social media, but really just kind of laying there.
Now I had. Built an email, uh, address, uh, built an email list. Sorry. I’m tripping on my words. Um, and back when, you know, there’s a lot of traffic from Google that was picking up steam. I had about 14, 000 people on it. Um, and so you and I were talking a lot of it on the back, by the way, of some of the email projects you’ve been sharing on the niche pursuits podcast previously, and.
You were like, this is a great opportunity, Jared. Like it’s got all the bones, right? It’s already got an established email account. It’s already got a Raptive, uh, Raptive ads set up on it. And it’s in a very compelling niche. So anyways, we got together, we said, let’s partner up on it. I’m short on time. You are too, but for some reason said yes to this.
And so we started working on it. Um, uh, last week we started emailing once a week, so we’re about seven, eight days in on that, um, this week in the last couple of days, we’ve added, um, affiliate links to emails and have made our first sale. Um, on Amazon. Uh, like you said, I think we earned about 2, but something, and we weren’t able to include Amazon links in email back when I used to be doing the, the email, but that has since changed.
That’s a great way to start to earn money. So, um, and also we started publishing the Pinterest, um, just a little bit to kind of warm back up the account, but it’s such a good niche for Pinterest that we decided to partner up on the Pinterest side of things as well. Um, I will tell you, it’s been a rough week.
To start a project like this, because for the last six, seven days, Raptive and Google analytics have struggled with reporting. So there were actually, there was actually a six day period. We finally got revenue data from Raptive yesterday. So we were flying blind after the first three days. And then we still don’t have data on traffic to correlate into RPM.
So we still don’t know, like. Where the RPMs are better, but we at least have some, some data on revenue. And so it’s been, I think, quite the success. It’s been quite the up and down. There have been some days, the highest day was a 53 day. Uh, but we’ve also had some 43 days. I’m looking here. Um, there was a 40 day and there were some days in the thirties.
Um, and just for clarity, the previous average prior to starting all of this was about 13 to 16 a day. Um, I was running a little bit of Facebook ad traffic. So if I pull that out, it was about 13, 14, 15 a day on average. So going up to 53, 43, 40, like that’s a big increase for the first week. I’m really excited about it.
I really am just curious about where this could go. Why did you want to partner up? And any additional insights you can add for people listening who might be sitting on a project like this and might be able to gain some inspiration from it?
Thomas: Yeah, I mean, I’ve been really all in on email in the last probably six months, especially I’ve talked about, yeah, using medium to grow an email newsletter, building my, my local newsletter.
That’s still going really well and growing for my, uh, my other, you know, side hustle update today. I have a not yet another 1. But yeah, I just have seen how email is such a powerful thing at this point, because you on all these platforms don’t really have control over your audience at all. You know, we’ve seen this really get hammered home, like you said, with the HCU that you can be doing great for years, decades, even, and then suddenly lose everything.
And. That happens on Facebook. That happens on pinch. Every one of these platforms, email is something where you can directly press the button and you’re going to reach, you know, probably if you’ve got a good list, 98 percent of the people on there, you know, maybe half of them will open it if it’s a really good list.
And you’re in front of thousands of people instantaneously. And I realized, you know, in my own stuff, I’ve been doing this kind of work. There’s a lot of things now, like being able to put Amazon links in an email that add a lot of value before you weren’t allowed to directly put affiliate links, but now you can on Amazon associates.
Um, that’s, you know, that adds a ton of value to it. AI makes it easier to repurpose or even just to ideate or write, you know, write content, that kind of thing. If you want to use that. Drop in an article, you know, and say, Hey, what are some ideas for how I can write a compelling newsletter or help me write a headline or, you know, whatever it is.
So I think there’s a confluence of. Platforms have gotten riskier. Um, ad rates are still super high if you’re in a premium network and there’s all these new ways to monetize and easier ways to create content. So it just felt to me, you know, this year, especially like this is a time to really lean in. I did that in my own work.
People started to reach out and say, Hey, can you run my, my newsletter for me? I think that particularly in a space where you had a lot of traffic, you built a great list, you’re I see so many people who still have wrapped over media vine where they can monetize a site really well. They don’t have to bother with getting sponsors and that kind of thing.
They’ve got huge amounts of content, man. The site we’re working on, I think you have like 700 to 800 articles. Something like that. It’s over solid. Yeah. I mean, that’s years worth of content when you repurpose and resend stuff that works and all of that. So they’re sitting on tons of content, a great way to monetize.
And a lot of people built a list because people told them they should, or it was easy to do. You know, you just. Put a convert kit pop up or whatever it is on there. And suddenly you’ve got this list in your case of, you know, over, over 10, 000 people, but people didn’t really know what to do with it. And people still don’t really know exactly how to create the content for it.
So I started to really lean into that for myself and now I’m doing it for other people. And this just felt like a great. Opportunity to work together on it because you have, like you said, all the bones, all the pieces in place and the strategy, you know, as you mentioned is daily emails to this list. Um, it’s a, again, a niche that’s, I would say, sort of a, you know, home DIY type of space.
We’re not going to share the specifics, but, um, you’ve got this huge mental content. And we, I’ve already seen that, uh, this list converts well, performs well. The strategy from here is really to go from what we’ve been doing so far, which is again, testing without data, which is always super fun, um, to really honing in on, okay, what is going to work?
What is the right content length for this list? What do people care about? Or what are they willing to click through? What minimizes the risk of getting caught in spam filters? That’s a big consideration. Email isn’t a hundred percent immune from the same dynamics we see with search or still gatekeepers.
Um, you can still get blacklisted, which you want to be really careful about. But the strategy from here is look at those 53 or 43 days. Say, okay, what can we do, um, to build on that more of that content, longer content that we send people to, uh, on the site, creating new content or adding to content once we see what works, um, adding in more affiliates, uh, you know, a lot of different ways we can do that.
Adding in first party data tracking too. That’s a huge one. Eventually those third party cookies are going to go away, but if you work with a big, uh, partner like Raptive or Mediavine. They now have ways that you can connect your email subscribers and kind of use the data you’ve gathered about your audience to better target ads, which means higher RPMs.
So I’m really excited about it. I would love to see it eclipse the 2000 a month that you’re getting from Pinterest on your other resurrected site. I definitely think we can get there if we continue this. Um, we’ve already validated that we can send daily emails without too many people dropping off the list, solid click rates.
We’ve seen what performs well, so we have some data even, you know, lacking the RPMs. So yeah, I’m excited. I think we can get to 2, 000 a month readily. Um, You know, probably over in the next couple of months. Easily.
Jared: It’s interesting because the data came in yesterday, you know, I was waiting, I was really excited because I’ve seen the emails go out over the weekend last week and just no clue how much it was earning.
GA was also, you know, delayed in reporting. And so. So frustrating. But yesterday, the data came in and to your point, like we had some really good days, but we also had some, some days in the twenties and thirties, uh, 20, 30 marks. I was like, Oh man, I wish it was just constantly up into the right. And you’re like, well, I’ve been testing different types of emails, right?
We’ve got like a more of a listicle style, more of an inspirational style, more of a really detailed how to style. So you were testing purposely different types of emails to see which ones people gravitate towards. And I think it’s interesting, like, You’re already seeing trends and what is working so you can cater that.
And it reminds me, like, don’t be afraid to try things in the first couple of weeks of doing these so that you don’t just assume, you know, what converts the best, what works the best, et cetera, et cetera.
Thomas: Yeah. And we’re honing in, you know, in this particular niche on people want projects because again, it’s a DIY kind of space.
They want projects they can sit down and do versus things that are maybe a little bit more skills based. That’s, that’s pretty interesting, you know, and maybe there’s a niche within. That’s the other thing we haven’t done any, any really yet. There were some segments. But we haven’t really added to that.
Um, there’s sequences we could build of sending out the skills based stuff to the people who have interest in that specific skill. So I think, yeah, um, but it’s also important in the beginning to be careful, right? Because this was mostly a cold list. You had a few, like, a few sequences. Most people have not received an email in two years.
They signed up for this two years ago. It’s sad, and that’s the case for a lot of people. A lot of you out there have lists that you built because you were told you should. And you just, it’s sitting there not doing anything for you. And so the first thing is just to warm it up in a way that doesn’t freak people out.
And so a lot of it is sending content that people aren’t going to be offended by, you know, and I don’t mean like that there’s anything offensive about this, but stuff that’s like, if you’re in this niche, you know, I’ll give the example of my own niche. If you’re in travel and, uh, you’re interested in traveling to, to the Bay area, which is what my site is largely about, and I say, you know, here’s five amazing ice cream stores in San Francisco.
You’re probably going to be okay with reading that content. But if I say like, here’s the best flight to Hawaii, suddenly the spam filters and the users are going to be like, eh, that isn’t quite what I signed up for. You know, it feels a little salesy, but you know, maybe my ice cream article isn’t going to earn me as much as best flights to Hawaii.
Maybe I can send the best flights to two months later when you’ve gotten a bunch of emails from me and you trust me again, but you have to be careful and balanced. And so in the beginning. There’s going to be this process even days off. I gave the list one day off because deliverability dropped a little bit.
We didn’t do a daily email pick right back up when we resumed. So it’s going to be a bumpy ride in the beginning, but you’re trying to gather that data and hone in on what works for the list and also doesn’t offend, you know, the spam gods at Google. And once you figure that out. Yeah, I think the best day so far.
Has been a differential. Like you said, there was a little earnings before, but a differential of around 30. So you figure if we do that every day, you know, that’s 1000 bucks a month, a little bit more there. Um, and if we just scale that up and continue to build it, I think we can readily get to that 2000 or more.
And again, if you’ve got a list like this, it’s something you can totally do with your own content. Your existing content, existing monetization. You don’t have to do the scary work of like pitching sponsors and stuff. I hate doing that. So I love that. This is pretty much passive.
Jared: Yeah. To your point, like any site you have, this is my, my new friend of mine and why I was so open to partnering.
Cause I just had this kind of coming to know, like any site that. You have that’s on a premium ad network. You kind of have a head start because you can start earning good money right away, like day one, day two, day three from whatever actions you start to take. So it’s, um, it’s really exciting. And almost all the way back to my Amazon influencer journey, like getting that feedback loop right away, making money on day three.
It wasn’t much, but it’s so invigorating to help you continue the process. Whereas so much of what we’ve had to do is endure a lot of months of really like just frustration and, um, reduced earnings and stuff. So even though it’s not much money, it is also nice to get a quick feedback loop, see something working, create that positivity, it encourages me to want to work on it more.
And in this case, I don’t have to work on it. I’m just working with you on it.
Thomas: But that was great. Yeah. The first day it was like a 20 differential. It was happening before. Um, and the second day it was more like a 40 and so that, yeah, that’s very motivating.
Jared: Well, um, we’ve got to leave time for yours because I know yours is email based.
You did really reveal that, but what the heck did you do? And what the heck is going on with your side hustle this week?
Thomas: So I mistakenly, completely by accident, started a food safety newsletter. Really didn’t intend to do this. Um, I, I published a food safety article about a recall of McDonald’s hamburgers that people were probably aware of that happened about three weeks ago now.
Um, this was a big story. It was all over the national media. And I’ve shared before that for some reason, Google thinks my Bay Area travel website is an authority on like Starbucks and McDonald’s. I don’t know why, um, but for some reason they, they seem to think it. So I published a story, uh, about this McDonald’s recall and I’ve started as one strategy.
Whenever I publish a new sort of type of story, I create a new landing page for a list in that category on ConvertKit on my existing, uh, list. And I just drop a link in at the end, you know, so whatever the topic is, if I’m publishing about like. Travel in Southern California. I’ll spin up a newsletter landing page that says the SoCal traveler and I’ll put, you know, put it a link in there.
And if people sign up, then I’ll start a sequence and I’ll start sending them things. So I did this with food safety. Um, I wrote, I think, a pretty good and compelling CTA and made a convert kit landing page and a segment within my existing list. Dropped it at the end of this article, long story short, the article completely took off.
I think it’s up to several million impressions. It’s on an aggregator. Interestingly. So I, um, I published on my own site, but it gets picked up on all of these aggregators. I’m not allowed to say which 1. they’re very protective, but, um, you know, it’s things like, like MSN, um, or. Uh, smart news, for example, or these places that will pick up these stories, um, hundreds, millions of you, uh, of impressions, hundreds of thousands of views on this article.
And, um, a bunch of people as a result of that clicked through and signed up for my, uh, food safety, uh, newsletter. So all of a sudden I’m like, okay, now I have this thing. I obviously have to deliver and actually start to use it for something and deliver what I told people I was going to do. So I started, um, sending out a sequence to that list, um, continued to grow it and publish more food safety stories.
Let me actually just quickly here, see if I can get you a live count of how many subscribers I have. Um, it’s going up and up. It’s at 884,
Jared: uh,
Thomas: over the next, the last two and a half weeks or so on this. Um, and so yeah, now I’ve got a sequence. It’s probably six or seven emails in it. It’s the same play I’ve used for my other newsletters.
It basically teases the story. There’s an intro. Usually it’s written by AI for the intro. I’ve got the main featured image for the story. And then a link back to that story on my site. Super simple. And people end up in the sequence. It’s every two days at this point, they get one of these emails and it sends them back to my site and I monetize with Mediavine.
Also, I’ve started to drop in some affiliate stuff in there. So I’m trying to think of like what appeals to people who care about food safety. I’ve got like meat thermometers. I’ve got vacuum sealers. Every, every day gets some kind of product dropped in there too. Um, so yeah, I mean, total, total accidental thing.
Um, but apparently it’s a very compelling topic to people. So I’m just going to keep building that sequence and, uh, see where it takes me.
Jared: I mean, what are the paths to monetization on it? Like, um, you mentioned. Some varying things like that could lend itself to sponsored content, affiliate content. I mean like what, I realized you’re kind of making it up as you go, but like, what are the ideas for what, like, are there any threads of what is working yet for monetization?
Thomas: And so I think there’s two pieces. There’s the, the breaking stories that people find super compelling. And they kind of have to engage with it. And that’s these food recalls, um, where, you know, something gets recalled. And most recently it’s carrots. There was a big carrot recall two days ago. Now I’m tuned into this world, so I have to follow it.
Um, and it’s one of these sort of breaking stories where people want to know immediately what’s going on. There’s really authoritative sources, the CDC and FDA, you can pull from for this, which is great, you’re not having to make up content, you’re really reporting on. Actual stuff that’s happening and they provide a ton of data that you can sift through.
So the content is almost there for you on that. Um, and people share it. It’s very shareable. Like they read a story that talks about carrots were recalled. Here’s the brands to look for in your fridge. Here’s why it’s a problem. And they forward it to all their friends to say, Hey, go check your fridge. And, you know, it’s useful.
It’s, it’s good information to share. I feel good about sharing it with people. Um, but it also means people forward the emails, they forward the articles along. So it grows the list, that kind of stuff, the breaking news content. I think it’s a great way to grow the list. It’s harder to monetize because it is very kind of, yeah, newsy.
The RPMs aren’t great. The article length isn’t great, but, you know, probably 15 when people click through and they certainly share it and it does well. But then what I’m looking at with these sequences is whatever green content can I send out to the list stuff that’s going to always appeal to people who are interested in food safety.
And what it is so far is not really safety stuff. It’s more explainers and like behind the scenes of like, what is in your fast food? So one that’s done really well, I have an article about what’s, what’s really in a McDonald’s Filet O Fish. So that’s an article when you see that headline, Oh, I wonder what is.
So you click through, and I have this whole thing with all the information, quotes from McDonald’s, pictures, all that kind of stuff. Um, that kind of story does really well as an evergreen story, and so that’s what’s in my sequence, and it’s all ad monetized on that. Click through to my site, they read the story.
Those are more like a 30 to 40 RPM so far. So if I can build a sequence like that, that has maybe 50 to 100 messages in it, A year long. Once you get on my list here, you come in for the food recalls and you keep getting that content, but you also every other day get some kind of interesting, quirky, fun food article and you click through.
It’s a good point. I mean,
Jared: I was trying to think as you were talking, like, where does this go? But I suppose if you’re interested in food recalls. You might be interested in it because you had McDonald’s yesterday, but you might also just be interested in it because you’re kind of interested in this concept of, of, of food, food, safety, food, health, what goes into food, where, how, how the world works.
And you start to nurture people along. You’re exactly right. That could turn into a newsletter where you’re like telling your friends a month later, I don’t know why, but I got Bizarre guys, email list. And I’m learning all this stuff about meat production, um, uh, across the Americas.
Thomas: I think the most important thing is it’s not a new, it’s not wholly new.
It’s sort of a segment and a piece within my existing website and its content. I was already writing about again, weirdly, you know, McDonald’s and Starbucks and these other brands. So it’s easy enough to tack this on and I don’t have to grow to 10, 000, uh, you know, views a month to get into a premium ad network.
I don’t really have to like create a new domain and manage all of that. It’s even coming from my same email. You know, I don’t have like a separate email for it. It’s, it’s literally like the food. It’s called the food alert, the food alert by the Bay Area telegraph branded with my existing brand. And so I think that’s the key.
Like, if I had to spin up a whole new domain and website and, you know, Uh, convert kit account for every new space I went into, that would be overwhelming, but with this, it’s just an ad on it, you know, reflects each day and my earnings on, on, on, uh, Mediavine for my site. And it’s just a little like head, you know, tailwind, just pushing things along a little extra traffic every day.
Jared: Well, we got to move into weird niches. We are way behind on time here. Um, keep us posted on that. Speaking of weird niches, that’s a weird side hustle, which will transition us perfectly into weird niches. Yeah. Um, My weird niche is not very weird. I’ll say that at the outset. I think that the concept of it is weird.
And that’s why I want to share it. It’s also very relevant to what we’re doing right now. Um, and that is, uh, the, the website is slick deals. net. Now, many of you might’ve heard of this matter of fact, I would think maybe most of you would have heard of this. It’s basically a deal aggregator site and people.
Yeah. Absolutely go nuts for deals. And they have, it’s so funny because I used to use this and then I stopped using it. Um, and I just never thought about it. And then all of a sudden somebody reminded me of it and I started using it again every once in a while. Um, Basically what they’ve done is they’ve aggregated community in order to whenever people find deals, they will post them through their account here.
And then they have a system where different deals get upvoted or supported almost in a Reddit manner. And so the best deals kind of rise to the top. Um, they also kind of cater it. So they have for you, I don’t know how they have this concern. I don’t have an account with them. But maybe they just know from my browsing history, or maybe they’re just making guesses.
Um, so I think it was interesting. I just wanted to share a little back story on the site. So it was started, I lost my tab there. It was started back in 1999, which I think is really fascinating. And it was started by a guy, I believe, named Van. And he started this. It just in order to, uh, kind of, kind of share, uh, the types of deals he was looking at, he was broke.
Um, and now the site, it gets an insane volume of, um, of traffic. Uh, I believe I saw 18 million page views, um, a month. It does have a lot of advertisements on it. It has turned itself into quite the, um, I would say quite the, uh, the ad platform, right? We got ads on the right. We got ads, um, interspersed inside the deals.
Um, again, you got banner ads here as you scroll down. I imagine time on page has to be pretty darn good because you just kind of scroll through all these offers to try to find the one you want. You do have search, uh, capability. But I mean, it just isn’t something that, um, that I think a lot of people probably do.
I think this is interesting. Many, many years ago, they did an ask me anything on Reddit. So this is 11 years ago. Interesting. Yeah. Yeah. And it’s, um, it’s really fun to read through, uh, here it is. Van, the founder started the website in 1999 as a poor starving college student. Um, 12 million unique visitors a month.
This was 11 years ago. Uh, they had three employees in 2009. Now they have 35 employees and they’re growing fast. Again, this is 11 years ago. So this is a really popular website. Um, and finally, if you go over to Ahrefs. Um, I think this is also interesting, uh, huge domain DR78, but look at this. They actually, they had a nice burst in, uh, uh, the summer of last year and then they got knocked down maybe by helpful content update or maybe by subsequent core updates and they’re actually getting hit by the November core update right now.
So, um, I don’t know why, I mean, user content, user generated content is in vogue, but right before Black Friday, that’s kind of a bummer for them, but just a cool website. Bye. A cool concept. I mean, started on the back of someone who was broke in college, wanting to share deals, something he was passionate about and look what it’s grown into now.
It’s almost like a very large scale success story from a very small scale concept.
Thomas: Yeah. I think when you, when you have UGC, it’s amazing what you can do with very little, right? Like if people engage and they start making your content for you. Then you can, you know, have like they, they were doing, uh, 11 years ago, a huge amount with a very small team relative to, you know, what they’re probably making from affiliate commissions and sponsored stuff from brands and advertising.
Um, and to do that, like a UGC play in a space where it’s so commercial, it’s so much about buying stuff. You know, that feels like they, they really, uh, either play their cards right, or lucked into something that’s, uh, yeah, that’s seems like a super successful.
Jared: I mean, some of both to be sure. Like, it’s just like you said, the commercial intent for someone looking for a deal is I’m, I’m dying to open my wallet.
Just give me a good deal to spit to open it for.
Thomas: Yeah, I mean, it’s like you’re in the shopping cart, you add the thing. And then it says, you know, the there’s a coupon code, you think, Oh, I wonder if there’s any deals, you go and search and oh, you land on this. Oh, I can get it for 50 percent off here. You know, it, yeah, you’re literally like at the last stage, I think, in most cases of the funnel at that point.
So,
Jared: um, okay. I’m going to turn it over to you here and, uh, I’ll boot your, I’ll boot your weird niche up on screen while you’re talking.
Thomas: Yeah. So mine is allaboutbirds. org and as the name suggests, it’s an informational website about different kinds of birds. Um, so I think there’s some, some interesting things here.
One is, you know, the amount of traffic that it gets, which we’ll get to in a second. But. I think it’s very much what we would make in our space. If we were going to make a website about birds, if you go in, like, I found it, I looked for Turkey, but Turkey into, uh, into Google. And I was looking for some Thanksgiving recipes, um, but it gave me like sort of diversity.
Maybe you want to learn all about the bird turkey. So I put that in and it’s got a great informational page, but honestly, you know, we could probably these days spin up something like this using stock media, you know, photos and, and AI to create. a comparable website. But the reason that this has done so well, I think, is that they’re using a big brand.
In this case, this is affiliated with Cornell University.
Spencer: So it’s Cornell
Thomas: Labs. It’s a, it’s its own division within the university, interestingly. So it’s sort of independent in some ways, but it uses that Cornell brand. And has all these connections and a lot of, you know, big name professors and people who participate in this.
So, yeah, the Cornell lab of ornithology. And what I think is really interesting about the site is that they’ve done a great job of taking that brand and creating this really good content around it. And ranking really well and doing really well. So they are a DR 82. Um, Ahrefs says they get 1. 4 million monthly search traffic.
Again, like bird watchers are very passionate. And so they come to the site. Most of the pages that are ranking are just this, you know, profile of a particular bird, where does it live? You know, what does it, what does it call sound like? I dug a little bit deeper. Um, they actually report in their advertising info where they’re pitching to ads.
Look at that in a second. They, they have a 5. 08 million page views per month on the site. So they are taking that brand and with content that again, you know, we could probably all spin up. Like we’re looking at the Ahrefs Cooper Hawk, you know, wild turkeys. It’s, it’s not super in depth, uh, you know, academic papers or anything.
Um, they are doing incredibly well on it. But the thing that I think is most interesting about this is that then what they’ve done with that is exactly what any of us in this industry would do with it, like a lot of the time, you know, academic sites, okay, they get the traffic, but sure, they have an advantage because they’re not really monetizing, they’re not doing stuff.
We are, they are doing everything that we would do to monetize this site. There’s ads at the top of the page. There seem to be doing direct sales to related brands. So they’ve got an above the fold ad at the very, very top. Um, and they’ve got courses. So they have a, you know, a bunch of these like 40, how to paint birds, the joys of birdwatching, you know, bird call identification that you can enroll in.
And, you know, this is exactly what we would do, right? We would do ads. We would do some kind of, uh, uh, digital product. And, uh, again, dug a bit into it, their program income, there are nonprofits. We have a good, a lot of good data about them. I, this probably includes some in person stuff too, but their program income is 4, 745, 000 a year.
So these courses with an audience of, you know, 5 million people coming and a strong brand and probably really good courses. 40, 50 bucks. They’re probably earning millions of dollars a year from this. So I think it’s a great story about the opposite of the parasite world, right? They took a great brand.
They created a whole community of passionate people. They put up content that’s good, you know, again, we could probably spin it up if we needed to. It’s good stuff. They monetized and all the ways you should monetize and they’re doing great work and earning a ton of money probably for Cornell from it.
Jared: Fascinating. They do it. Right. I mean, the site is beautiful, but to your point, like, it’s not like just a nonprofit philanthropic exercise. They have ads, they have courses, they have live lectures. They’ve, I mean, it’s like a full fledged, uh, brand, but like you said, it’s just kind of the way we would do it.
If we were doing, if we built a perfect site, if we put everything we had and we could put everything we had into kind of one project, you’re exactly right. That looks pretty much exactly like how we would do it.
Thomas: Yeah, and in a niche that a lot of us would target like bird watching a hobbyist niche like that is a ton of content you could create around it.
It’s not like this is particle physics or something that none of us are going to be able to do. It is the site we would all build. Um, but, you know, again, that power, the brand power of good products. Think about if this was a for profit business, you know, millions of dollars a year, uh, just in digital course sales.
They don’t even report what their advertising earnings are. Um, but I have to imagine pretty, pretty solid with that above the fold ad.
Jared: Thomas, I think your next side hustle is to go pitch Berkeley, uh, Cal Berkeley on, uh, starting, uh, uh, some side site like this for them and see, maybe split the profits with them.
Thomas: Let’s do it. Yeah. They’ve got a newsletter, all the better.
Jared: Hey, that hour flew by, uh, uh, Thomas, thanks for joining us. Great news topics. Obviously we’ll continue to follow along with some of these stories. It’s not the first time we’ve covered them as they continue to evolve some new stuff. AI now starting to have advertisements in them.
Um, goodbye to Harrow, uh, side hustle successes, and definitely some, uh, some odd niches to, to finish out on. Thanks again for joining us, Thomas. That was great talking with you. Have a great weekend, everyone. We’ll talk again soon.
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