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Welcome back to another episode of the Niche Pursuits Podcast!
This week Spencer and Jared turn things up a notch and cover many, many news items in the SEO and content creation space. After that they share their latest side hustles, and finish everything off with a weird niche site analysis.
You won’t want to miss this one!
They kick things off by talking about Google Gemini and issues with its image-generating capacities. It turns out that the platform is not very accurate, which has led its stock price to drop recently.
The core of the problem is that users found that the race of the people it was depicting in its images was not historically accurate and people are asking if the programmers behind the program have anything to do with it.
Does Google have an agenda behind its search results? This has led to a lot of debate and controversy and, as a result, Google shut it down temporarily.
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One person who has been extremely vocal about the Google Gemini debacle is Elon Musk. Spencer and Jared talk briefly about how Musk is leveraging this opportunity to talk about his AI chatbot, Grock, and how he’s going very hard against Google on Twitter.
The next news item up for discussion is the fact that Google is paying publishers to test out a new, unreleased Gen AI platform.
As part of the Google News Initiative, there’s a tool that beta testers are using during the next year to publish their stories, and Google is paying them five figures over the course of the year to publish 3 articles a day.
What does this reveal about Google’s feelings about AI content? Do the articles need to be labeled as AI-assisted? And does this fly in the face of its antitrust lawsuit?
Moving along, Spencer and Jared report that Vice has announced lay-offs and its plans to stop publishing on Vice.com in search of new traffic sources. Its authors and journalists are scrambling to back up all of their articles in the event that the website disappears.
Is it letting writers go to replace them with AI? What does their new studio model entail? Why are they giving up on their own website? Tune in to hear Spencer and Jared’s thoughts.
Moving on, it looks like Google is finally rolling out some new Generative AI features for Chrome. Now you can customize Chrome with themes, organize your tabs, and get help writing. What do Spencer and Jared think of these new features?
They talk very briefly about how the NYT filed a lawsuit against OpenAI for revealing the content behind their paywall, and now OpenAI is claiming the NYT hacked the system.
In the next news item, they highlight an article by Glenn Gabe talking about what could happen with the Helpful Content Update.
They highlight another article that did a big study of Google sites and the effect of updates, including the HCU. Spencer reads some of the website attributes that are considered very positive for websites, but check out the article for a more in-depth look.
Lastly, developers are looking into the possibility of adding micropayments to the Chrome browser so users can pay websites or publishers when they browse their content.
Although this is just an idea and there are no plans for implementation, it does raise a lot of questions. What do Spencer and Jared think? Tune in to hear what they say.
As for Shiny Object Shenanigans, Spencer talks about his new project, the Niche Pursuits Community, which will be live and open to the public as of March 4th.
He talks about some of the features, including calls with experts, small mastermind groups, a private Discord channel, and ongoing challenges with monetary prizes.
When it’s Jared’s turn, he talks about how he recently monetized his weekend growth YouTube channel. He reveals the earnings from the channel: $11.14.
Although that’s clearly not very much, Jared shares a few caveats as well as a positive outlook, since his YouTube channel is generating client work for his agency.
When it’s time to talk about some Weird Niche Sites, Spencer goes first with Next Episode, which lets you keep track of the TV shows and movies you watch and see when the next episodes are.
This site was going really well, almost reaching 1 million organic visitors per month, but it got hit hard by the HCU and is now averaging less than 200k, according to Ahrefs.
However, Similarweb shows the site is getting about 3 million visitors per month, in January for example, and the traffic is mainly direct.
When Jared’s up, he shares Jedi Temple Archives, a comprehensive resource dedicated to not just the movies, but also to toys and collectibles. This DR43 site is ranking for over 13k keywords and just 3k in organic traffic, according to Ahrefs.
It’s monetized with ads and affiliate links and a lot of the traffic is direct, and they talk about how much it might be making and what strategies appear to be working.
And that brings us to the end of a jam-packed episode of the Niche Pursuits Podcast. Tune in next week for another thorough run-down of all the latest news, and more.
transcription
Spencer: Hey everyone. Welcome back to another episode of this week in niche pursuits news. And it’s going to be a good one. I think we have so many news stories to cover. And I know in the past, if you listen to previous episodes, I usually say, man, there’s like 10 or 12 news items and we only have time for three or four.
Well, today we’re going to try something different. We’re going to try and actually touch on every single news story. Um, and so you’re going to hear everything that’s on our list. Uh, we’re going to dive deep on maybe three of them or so, but we’re going to let you know everything that’s at least on our list.
So listeners, you can hear all the headlines and, and we’re going to see how that goes. Uh, what do you think, Jared? Good idea. Rolling
Jared: back the curtain on our agenda. We talked about this agenda doc that we put together. You’re just getting tired of all the work we put into it and then we like to cover three of the stories.
Huh?
Spencer: That is true because we read all the news stories, whether or not we cover them. So we might as well at least mention them. So get a little credit for all
Jared: this work we’re
Spencer: doing, right? That’s right. That’s right. Pat our own backs a little bit, uh, would always be good. And, um, so after we cover the news stories, which we’re going to try and get through, uh, as quick as possible while still, you know, diving deep on a few, we’re going to cover our, uh, side hustle projects, things we’re working on.
Uh, and then we’re gonna bring it home with a couple of weird niche sites. And, uh, we do have a couple of good ones. Uh, both of our sites actually get, you know, some organic traffic and we’ll share some of the stats there, but get, uh, even more direct traffic. So these are sites that people apparently love and enjoy and go to directly time and time again, getting lots of traffic.
So stay around for that. If you want to know how to, to build a site that gets direct. Traffic and
Jared: not to tease it, but I know one of our sites yours. Uh, there’s a lot of talk about direct traffic correlating with HCU gains versus reversal or versus, uh, down downturns. And so we’ll have some interesting topics to cover
Spencer: there.
I think, yes, we will. Yes, we will. So I like the way you tease that because that’s the whole point is, you know, we got to lock these people in, you know, hook them in the first minute or so stick around. So it’s like a good YouTube video. That’s right. Uh, with that, let’s jump into the news. Um, the, the biggest story and, uh, I’ll go ahead and share, um, the article.
It’s related to a couple of things that we’re going to talk about, but basically, uh, there was, there was some issues with Google Gemini. Uh, the Google Gemini, uh, image generation, right. Is, is one of their, uh, tools as part of Gemini. And this article that I’m showing on Forbes is just the, Hey, Google’s Gemini headaches for 90 billion sell off.
And so if you look at, um, the current stock price, that’s basically what this article talks about. Um, you know, Google stock price over the last five days is down 6%. It’s down even further today. Uh, all stemming from this. Issue with Google Gemini image generation. And so Google themselves actually came out with this official apology and said, Hey, we recently made the decision to pause Gemini’s image generation of people while we work on improving the accuracy of the responses.
This is one that we could talk about a lot and spend a lot of time on and show examples. There’s a lot out there if you go to Twitter or probably Reddit or other places, you can see a lot of the examples that people were, um, you know, coming up with with Google Gemini. Now, uh, at the core of the problem is that a lot of the The race of the people that, uh, were being generated was not accurate, historically accurate, right?
The Google Gemini was not generating historically accurate races for people that were being generated. And it might not be the way that, you know, people might think. Um, so, For example, if someone were to ask Google Gemini to generate an image of a king of England in the 1400s, you know, Google Gemini was coming back with a black person on.
There’s lots of other situations where instead of what might be Historically should be a Caucasian person, right? People living in England in that time or Scotland. It was coming back with black people. Uh, and so, uh, there was tons of examples of this just, uh. And, and it got the attention of Google and they shut it down.
So I’m trying to tread lightly here because, you know, this is a subject that certainly sparked a lot of commentary on all sides, uh, but it was enough that Google shut it down and they’re going back trying to fix it. So Jared, what do you have to say about all this?
Jared: Well, the big story, which this isn’t the first time we’ve had this story, uh, in terms of the larger perspective, uh, but it’s, it’s one that really, you know, hit a sensitive Part of the subject or the storyline is this idea that, you know, uh, Google, uh, not Google.
Sorry. Uh, AI is known to hallucinate. And, um, uh, I think this one brings into question perhaps for the first time in a real public way. Like, are those hallucinations or inaccuracies that’s in some way influenced by the company that produces or makes the large language model that you’re using? And I’m not saying or insinuating they are.
Just saying that I think that’s a lot of the undertones here is we know that a chat GPT, for example, will hallucinate, make stuff up, but we have never had any reason to believe that there’s actual agenda behind that from the corporation creating it,
Spencer: right? Exactly. And that, that is definitely at the core of the issue here is that, uh, right.
Did, did the programmers somehow put some sort of, um, coding in place to make sure that they, you know, represented. Certain groups more or less than others. Uh, and, uh, so that, yeah, that’s sort of the crux of the, the issue here.
Jared: And I also think, you know, we look at a lot of issues, uh, with generative AI, with SEO, with Google.
And we, we, we all kind of admit like, Hey, we’re really involved, right? Like this is our, our world, but this certainly impacted the broader world of Google, like this, that you’re the stock hit your stock price that you’re talking about, the fact that they pulled it back. The fact that this is causing all sorts of controversy for alphabet as a parent company, um, uh, is, is, is really, really interesting in terms of the crossroads we’re at for them and the crossroads we’re at for the future of AI as a interactive model for these big companies.
Spencer: it. I mean, it’s such like a hot button topic, right? You’ve got AI that’s just controversial in and of itself. People don’t know what the future is going to look like with AI. Uh, but then if you’ve got a corporation that is somehow tweaking results, right? Uh, it’s, it’s a bad look for Google because not just the AI.
Is, does Google have an agenda behind their search results, their core product, right? Are they favoring certain sorts of things that maybe shouldn’t be favored? Right? Uh, and so that is what’s really hitting hard on Google. And if you, so if you do a search, if you look up, you know, Google stock price. All the news articles are about this Google Gemini, the AI, the, the agenda that Google has, and so they’re, they’re getting a lot of backlash, uh, for that right now.
So, and, uh, one person giving a lot of that backlash right now is, uh, Elon Musk. Um, Elon Musk is going to war with Google, and this is one that I won’t dive in deep, maybe give a 30 second over. View here because it stems from this Google Gemini issue. Uh, Elon Musk has been very vocal about it. And, uh, of course, talking about Grok, his, this is the perfect time for him to talk about his AI chatbot, chatbot Grok and how much better it is.
Uh, and so Elon Musk is hitting Google very hard on Twitter, pointing out all the faults. Uh, with Google, not just their AI image generation, but search and, and the whole company. Right. Uh, and of course it’s a perfect marketing opportunity for Elon Musk and his own AI chatbot.
Jared: Yeah. I mean, obviously he has an agenda.
To, to exercise when it comes to this. And yet, obviously he was at the center. If you want to read the article of many of the comparisons that were happening. That’s right.
Spencer: So to some
Jared: degree, I’m like, dude, you got an agenda. So I don’t really, but at the same time, like he was literally targeted with a lot of the screenshots and examples of against Gemini.
So perhaps he can at least be given some license to respond to that.
Spencer: Right. I agree. Just, you know, broad strokes. It didn’t look like Google Gemini liked Elon Musk very much. No, it didn’t. No, it did look like, yeah. Like he’s a low, low human being, right? Very low. People can read up on that because there’s like some direct comparisons between, you know, certain people.
Actually, here’s the paragraph. I’ll highlight it. I’m not going to read it. But if people, you know, uh, anyways, Google Gemini, not very nice to Elon Musk, and so that’s another reason that they, they pulled a Gemini back as well. So, uh, let’s go on to the next one here. Uh, in adweek. com, I thought this is just a really fascinating story.
My gosh. Uh, so we will. Is paying publishers to test an unreleased gen AI platform. So in exchange for a five figure sum per year, it’s a, it’s a per year sum. So not a necessarily a ton of money. Uh, publishers must use the tool to publish three stories a day. And, um, I don’t know if it gave the actual, uh, platform.
Like, is it, I think, I think it’s just totally private, nothing that we can check out, uh, right. Like, I believe that. Yeah, they made
Jared: reference to the Google News, uh, I think it’s the Google News Index. Is that what they call it? GNI? I believe so. Yeah. Google News Initiative. So it’s part of their Google News Initiative.
I don’t think they stipulated where it had to be published though.
Spencer: Okay. Okay. So yeah. So part of the Google News Initiative, right, there’s, there’s this apparently AI, uh, tool that is private for, you know, call it beta testers, early users here. Where, uh, yeah, basically what I said, they need for, for a period of 12 months, they need to produce a fixed volume of content, three articles a day or more.
Uh, and, uh, it’s going to be free, you know, to the publishers using this tool. It’s basically, like I said, I think it’s a beta test. Hey, come in, try out this tool, publish the content, and we’re going to pay you to actually use this tool. And now, of course it’s. Very interesting on like you said many levels.
One is yeah, you know, Google’s got this gen AI tool that they’re paying publishers Right, but two that sort of harkens to the question like well, what does Google think about AI content in the SERPs and on websites? Well, apparently they’re quite friendly to it is my thought. So what do you think? Well,
Jared: for starters, the program does, uh, human editor will have to scan the copy for accuracy before publishing three stories per day.
The program does not require that these AI assisted articles be labeled as AI
Spencer: assisted. Ah, yes. Very interesting.
Jared: Okay, so that’s one thing. So it’s like, do as I say, but not as I do, right? Um, and then, I mean, I think this is a much bigger story when you take a step back. Uh, I mean, correct me if I’m wrong.
Again, I don’t want to say out of turn here, but in effect, it’s AI that’s creating these articles from other, from, from other sources, right? That’s where AI gets its articles. That’s where AI gets its information to write an article is from other sources. So in essence, Google is. Publicly funding, ripping off other journalist’s work?
Mm
Spencer: hmm. Okay. Exactly.
Jared: Yeah. Yeah. Just repeating what I’m reading, basically. That’s what really is happening here, right?
Spencer: As I understand it, uh, the users have to, like, provide a source? Like some sort of data source, it sounds like, uh, they, they, uh, I don’t know exactly how it works, but somehow you select, Hey, I want these five or 10 sources, websites, news publications.
Right? And then when they hit on a topic that you cover, right? So if you’re covering a marathon running and any new source comes in on those subjects, I want this. The, you could, the Gen AI tool will then generate new articles based on the previously written content. Yes, that’s exactly what it sounds like to me.
I mean,
Jared: I feel like they must know something we don’t know about this antitrust lawsuit because it doesn’t seem like they’d be doing things like this. If there is ambiguity about the outcome of that, that, that, that, that lawsuit that just seems to fly in the face of that.
Spencer: Yeah. Good. Uh, good point. Um. So this, this is one that, uh, is, um, I was going to say less interesting because of the tool itself, because I don’t know if any of us will ever get access to the tool itself, but more just interesting, uh, because it reveals a lot about the attitude of Google, uh, as far as it.
Relates to AI content.
Jared: A hundred percent. I agree. Yeah.
Spencer: So, uh, our next story continuing to move quick here is, uh, the vice. com has, uh, shared the CEO, Bruce Dixon announced recently that there will be hundreds of layoffs and that the, the company will no longer publish on vice. com. Uh, and, uh, so it’s like another story of a big publisher that is laying off hundreds of authors.
Um, you have to think a lot of that is because of Artificial intelligence or, um, other reasons that they’re not getting as much traffic perhaps from Google. And there is some evidence I think behind it being partially related to not getting traffic from Google. Uh, because they say that, uh, instead they’re going to turn themselves into a, what did they call themselves?
A studio publisher. Uh, that, yeah, transition to, uh, a studio model. Here. Let me just read this sentence. Moving forward. We will look to partner with established media companies to distribute our digital content, uh, including news on their global platforms as we fully transition to a studio model. As part of this shift, we will no longer publish content on vice dot com.
Instead, putting more emphasis on our social channels as we accelerate our discussions with partners to take our content to where it will be viewed More broadly. And so just fascinating. They’re no longer going to publish content on vice. com. They’re basically giving up on their own website. Um, but they’re going to, uh, be very active on social media.
They’re going to build up their social media brands and they’re going to publish content, uh, in a studio model on partner websites. And so I don’t know exactly. How that works exactly. But the fact that they’re going to try and get traffic to their content from social media and build that up is just fascinating.
Jared: So which of our SEO friends is going to land vice. com as a go daddy auction.
Spencer: That’s right. How long will it be before the domain itself, uh, disappears? And that was sort of, um, the secondary story to this was related to that, that a lot of the journalists and authors that are getting fired, they’re trying to create a backlog of all the content that written because they’re worried that, Hey, this website’s going to go away.
They’re going to delete all the content. Although that wasn’t. Explicitly said, they didn’t say, Hey, the website itself is going away. They just said, we’re not gonna publish new content. But, uh, the next logical
Jared: step, maybe it’s happened in the past, maybe. Mm-Hmm. Yeah, they referenced some sites. It’s happened in the past.
And again, uh, frequently crawled websites that are large, like that should end up in, you know, most of the content will end up in archive.org, but still, it’s, it’s a point worth bringing up, you know? Yeah. I mean, do you think this is AI related? They, they, they’re, they don’t want their content crawled for ai, and this is a different way of handling it.
I mean, you said. The only thing that would go against that maybe is that you said that they are still publishing on partner websites. So it still would, I don’t know, I’m just kind of, it’s, it’s a bit of a bizarre, uh, angle to take on this entire, you know, debacle we have in front of us.
Spencer: Yeah, it’s a, it’s a little bit vague exactly what is going to be going on.
Um, yeah. And so I, I’m just trying to reread a sentence here, uh, trying to read between the lines, exactly what kind of content they’re going to be publishing. Um, We don’t know for sure. So that’s one. We’ll just keep our eye on and kind of share additional thoughts going forward. But, uh, I think it’s interesting because they’re clearly looking for different traffic strategies or audience building strategies from what they were doing in the past.
So. Okay. So another story that we’re going to cover here today is. Um, and, and this particular sort of news release, uh, was shared, uh, Chrome is getting three new generative AI features. They, uh, Chrome, um, Google announced this, uh, Chrome announced this back in January. However, they finally started releasing some of these features.
So that’s why it’s news, um, today in particular. Well, the three features, uh, one smartly organize your tabs. Apparently people have a thing where they have like. Hundreds of tabs open, right? And this will help organize them and suggest different tabs to make it easier. I guess. Are
Jared: you more of a, yeah, I can imagine you’re, you probably have four or five maximum tabs at any one time.
I can,
Spencer: I, yeah, I am. I usually close them all up. That’s the way I
Jared: go. So I’ve seen some screenshots online of people who have hundreds, but yeah.
Spencer: Yeah. Unless I’m running a. A podcast got like two dozen tabs open. Um, the next one, create your own themes with AI. So just change the look and feel of, of Chrome.
You know, that’s kind of cool. Uh, and then, uh, the next one, which is a little bit bigger, I think is get help drafting things on the web. So now you will have the ability, if you’re leaving a review, you can use the help me write option. And it will read the content of the webpage that you’re on and the context, and it will help.
And I, you know, suggest content for that review that of course you then edit and change, uh, and can, um, make sure it’s a good review yourself. Uh, Glenn Gabe on Twitter gave a couple of screenshots. So when you’re setting it up, right, you have the ability now to turn on these experimental features in Chrome.
So if you’re a Chrome user, you can go over right now, you know, and click on the experimental AI option and, uh, turn on things like the help me write, um, the, the toggle there. And, uh, then I believe he gave a couple of other options here. Yeah. Just, um, the ability to actually write. And, uh, there you go. It will, it will give you the option for tone, um, to get different style perhaps that you want, but, uh, just fascinating because it’s bringing essentially like an open AI, you know, Gemini, uh, tool to everyone for free directly in Chrome that can help them write content essentially on any webpage.
Jared: I could see it being incredibly helpful. Um, I could see it also, uh, over time, like everything changing the way that we, we do and we read and we evaluate, you know, like just even that screenshot you just had as an example, I believe from Glenn Gaber is given a restaurant review and he said, great atmosphere, great food, great atmosphere.
And then the AI, the generative AI goes on to say the restaurant has a nice, warm and inviting atmosphere. Well, those are adjectives that. are made up. They really are. Now, uh, as a press photographer, I could say, well, what if it was more of a cool, modern environment that could still be a great atmosphere, but warm and inviting and cool and modern or different things.
And anyway, so I could just, you know, my mind starts going and going where this could end up. And I don’t know if that’s an accurate review. I get it. The food is great. The atmosphere is great, but the nuance might get lost
Spencer: along the way. Are you suggesting that the first model that they put out could
Jared: If history were any indicator.
Spencer: If we look at Google’s stock price today. Yes. We can understand there could be issues. Let people decide. Yeah.
Jared: I don’t think you’d call me crazy for suggesting these things at this point, so. I
Spencer: would not. Uh, okay. Uh, here’s another. Uh, quicker hit story here. Open AI says New York times hacked chat GPT to build its copyright lawsuit.
And of course we covered this, this story, um, that, um, the New York times is suing open AI for revealing the content behind their paywall. Basically that open AI was able to access the paywalled content and use that to train their models. Uh, and now. OpenAI is arguing that, hey, the New York Times kind of hacked the system.
They had unethical prompts, uh, things that went against their guidelines. They shouldn’t have done that. And that’s the only reason OpenAI spit out the responses that they had. I, I find it kind of silly. It’s like, Hey, they, they use prompts. It sounds like anybody else. Uh, and you know, they, they convinced OpenAI to reveal things it shouldn’t reveal.
So it’s kind
Jared: of like how. Kind of like buying a fast car and then suing the company because, uh, it, it went so fast that you, you hit something quickly, you know, I mean, uh, it, it’s weird. I mean, it is weird that, um, a company would hire someone to kind of create this scenario. And I’m not a legal expert, but it’s also.
Uh, you know, it’s the system that they were given access to and stuff is, I guess maybe from a broader perspective, Spencer, I’ve never really paid much attention to the terms of service I have when I’m chatting with opening up with chat GPT, you know? So I guess maybe I should pay closer attention to the terms of service around that.
I don’t think people realize that like there’s terms of service around what you are supposed to chat about. I think that’s interesting. You kind of think of it like having coffee with a friend. You can just talk to it about
Spencer: anything. Well, there you go. So they broke their terms of service perhaps. Uh, again, that one’s a quick hit.
So we’re going to, we’re going to do our best move on. This one’s also going to be a quick hit. I would just encourage people to go over to gsqi. com. Um, and, uh, Five ways that Google’s helpful content system could evolve based on the evolution of previous punitive algorithm updates like Panda and Penguin.
And so Glenn Gabe, you know, does a great job breaking down, like here’s kind of the five bullet points of what could happen with the Google helpful content update. Um, it, it, it’s interesting. Um, he kind of speculates, Hey, it could lessen, it can. Lessen the severity, it could no longer be site wide, uh, you know, it could just hit certain pages heavier, uh, or nothing could change.
So, it’s, it’s an interesting read, but, uh, not truly news in terms of, like, we don’t know for sure. It’s a lot of, uh, speculation at this point, but definitely worth a read. Yeah,
Jared: we’ve likened HCU to Panda and Penguin many times on this podcast. Right. In terms of, I’d say that in the medic update are the only other updates in Google’s history that have been so, you know, uh, wide reaching, I guess.
I don’t know that you could come with a lot of words to describe it, but, um, you know, a lot of people, this is kind of their first massive update. So it’s kind of cool to watch how Glenn connects the dots with Penguin and Panda as those were. Insanely crazy updates and they happen, but they’ve, they’ve, they’ve gotten blended into how we do search now and how we optimize for the web.
And so it’s, uh, I thought it was a fascinating read. And I, if you’re looking for hope or encouragement from the HCU is probably one of the more encouraging pieces, although totally perspective. Um, um, what’s the word I’m looking for? Um, speculative, speculative. One of those spec words, totally speculative in nature, but
Spencer: still.
Absolutely. Yeah. A lot of data worth of read, uh, for people curious about that. Um, the next one, another, uh, friend of the show here, uh, Cyrus shepherd over at, uh, zippy. com. And he came out with this, uh, is a little over a week ago. Um, we didn’t have time last week to cover it, but it is a fascinating, it was on the list last week to cover, uh, winning and losing.
Big Google updates, 50 site case study. Okay. And, uh, yeah, the sub headline is a good one. What on page factors are associated with sites that see big gains or declines after Google updates? Turns out it’s not author boxes. Uh, and so he talks about the helpful content update, um, and, uh, primarily. And, uh, This graphic is, is excellent.
It kind of gives you the core of everything that he’s talking about on page website features versus Google updates. So basically a lot of these have either a positive or negative correlation, uh, with websites, um, either increasing or decreasing in, uh, The ranks, right? And so they looked at, uh, 50 websites that either lost or gained significant organic traffic across Google updates between August and December of 2023.
Of course, the helpful content update was in September. Uh, and so sites saw a traffic change of negative, negative 67 percent or an increase up to 5, 500%, right? Uh, and so some of the big positive. Correlations. Some of the biggest, um, sites, sites that saw sort of the biggest wins were ones that use some of these, I’ll, I’ll read maybe the top five or six here, um, first person pronouns like I or we in your reviews.
Go ahead,
Jared: Spencer,
Spencer: sorry. No, that’s all right. Uh, and or, or using firsthand experience was, of course, is very much coupled with the first one. There. Um, are you actually reviewing the product, having a cookie consent on the page, having a contact form or the ability to contact in the footer, having any way to contact the website owner?
Uh, you know, is another great thing. Positive correlator, right? Uh, and then you can read through all of these. There’s a lot about ads, word count, some of which, you know, don’t have much of a correlation. Um, but things like having a fixed footer ad has a strong negative correlation, or fixed video ads, or using stock images has a strong negative correlation.
Uh, the number of ads, uh, notifications. A big mega menu in the header, right? And so there’s a lot of these things that I would encourage people to go through and look at these, all of these factors, because these are things that a lot of them you could definitely change and, um, maybe not fully recover if you’re hit by the helpful content update, but might help you recover from other updates or prevent you from getting hit from future updates.
Jared: It’s really a great study. Everything we’ve been doing for the most part up until now has been very, uh, uh, you know, uh, looking at sites and drawing analogies and conclusions. This is a very, it’s not a causation study, right? So it’s not like this led to this, but it’s a correlation study. And, um, if you look at that graphic, actually, uh, and I just want to, because I’ve had several people email me or message me about it.
Um, if you look at that graphic, Um, basically the stuff at the top in the dark, dark green, that’s the stuff that’s highly correlation, highly corollary on a positive level, meaning if you have this, it’s highly corollary. And then the stuff at the very bottom, that’s highly corollary on a negative level, meaning if you have this, it’s very bad.
Uh, is the dark red there. And basically as you look at this graph, like pay attention to the stuff at the top and the bottom, the stuff in the middle is not as core. That’s still very interesting, but it doesn’t have real strong trend one way or the other. But, um, like you said, I mean, there’s some things that are literally presses of buttons with your ad platform to remove a certain type of ad unit that Cyrus found.
Strongly correlated with a negative impact in these recent updates. Um, uh, certainly we can all write in a different, um, pronoun per se as we write our articles for many, that’s just a semantical choice. They just prefer to use a certain, you know, perspective when they share. So there’s some really interesting things here that aren’t, um, I think a lot of the information has felt very overwhelming, but this feels very digestible and much of it’s
Spencer: very approachable.
I agree. I love it because it’s something, yeah, you can, do I have a table of contents? I can check that box. All of these things are, you can check the box or uncheck the box, right? Like you can just do them. Uh, and so some of them might be, you know, take, take a little bit more in depth, right. About first person, firsthand experience.
You’d have to actually rewrite your content, uh, to do that. But a lot of these are, yeah, simple fixes really. So stock images, one great list. Oh yeah. Look at that. Yeah. Strong negative correlation.
Jared: I was actually, as the resident photographer, I was actually surprised to see it as strongly correlated negative to negatively.
That’s a, I think that’s
Spencer: interesting. Yeah. Super fascinating. And that could be a big job if you’ve got, you know, thousands of stock images that you need to go swap out. That’s not a press of a
Jared: button
Spencer: one that we were talking. No, no, it isn’t. Okay. Uh, the final story that I’m going to cover here. And, uh, just briefly, this is one that you found.
Um, maybe I’ll let you chat about it briefly, but Chrome engine developers. Chrome engine devs experiment with automatic browser micropayments. Uh, so as I understand it, basically they’re trying to develop a way in chromium where users or browsers would actually pay website owners or publishers a very, very minuscule micropayment when they visited their website or browse their content.
Um, A potential future way to monetize the web. Um, as I understand it, this is still very forward looking experimental. Will it ever come? You know, we don’t know. There’s been problems with this in the past, and I have lots of questions about, um, who’s actually paying for it. Is it actually the browser, right?
The individual. And why would they do that? Um. So, I don’t know if you have any thoughts on that.
Jared: I’ll just read a quote on it, so we don’t belabor it. You’re right, it’s incredibly, um, you know, uh, future minded thinking. There’s no real, uh, from this article at least, I couldn’t find any real data to suggest this is actually happening.
But, um, you know, a quote to read out. It, quote, provides a way for content creators and website owners to be compensated for their work without relying solely on ads or subscriptions. Um, notably WM web monetization, this idea, uh, offers two unique features, small payments and no use interaction that address several important scenarios unmet on the web.
So yeah, so many questions, right? Way more questions than answers here. But I mean, we’re all talking about like, I got to reduce the ad density. Well, there goes some of my money. Oh, I can’t have as many affiliate links. Cause that’s a bad for the HC. There goes some of my money there. And so, you know, it’s nice to kind of see like, Hey.
At some point, people are going to stop publishing content if it’s not monetizable in some way, shape or form. Uh, we have all these stories of big publishers that are feeling it way more than the rest of us. And so here’s a story about maybe how the web works in the future that gives the experience that somebody like a Google wants while still monetizing and compensating the publisher.
I don’t, you know, obviously very, very prospective.
Spencer: Yeah, exactly. And I mean, it’s a, it’s a emerging technology that maybe will become something in the future. You know, A couple of years from now, 10 years from now, who knows, or maybe never, but it is interesting. I mean, it is a kind of fascinating technology that they’re building in.
And, um, yeah, we’ll, we’ll see what happens there.
Jared: It reminds me of like, you know, when you can round up, you know, and have it go to savings, you know, they have these little like apps that like round up purchases and send the money to savings and stuff. It just. I don’t know why I thought of that, but, you know, we’ve seen this sort of thing work in other areas, like, from a very disconnected, I’m trying to draw analogies that are very loosely connected, but, you know, I don’t know.
The micropayment thing has been around for a while, so, I suppose we have that going for us.
Spencer: Okay, well, we got through the news. Okay, that was interesting. things there.
Jared: Yeah, you know. If you’re, if you’re listening, if you’re watching on YouTube, let us know what you think of, You know, I don’t know, what did we cover?
Probably nine or ten stories there. We deep dove three of them, but we, we did cover a lot.
Spencer: Yeah, yeah, I’ve got at least ten tabs, uh, open here. Uh, so, uh, good stuff though. So, we are gonna move over to our shiny object shenanigans now. Uh, And I’m going to talk about the same thing that I talked about last week.
Um, it’s something that I’ve been working on for a long time and it finally is happening. And in fact, I’m going to be launching the niche pursuits community on Monday. So just a couple of days after this episode comes out, uh, the niche pursuits community will be live. And so people can go to community dot niche pursuits.
And, uh, I thought it would be interesting to maybe just share a little bit more about what is going to be in the community. What’s that all about? Uh, and so I’ll just, um, actually share a draft of what the new community page will look like right now. If you go to the homepage, it does not look like this.
Uh, but basically I’m building a community because, you know, building an online business can be lonely. Right. You’re doing this all by yourself. Uh, but what if you had a community there to help you motivate you to keep you accountable and to help you actually grow your business with unique strategies.
And so I’m building a community where that’s exactly what’s happening. So one. Is a few of the things that will be offered. There are weekly calls with experts. So, uh, early on, we’re going to tackle the topic of Google discover, right? So bringing on a couple of experts on the topic of Google discover, and they’re going to share what they’re doing.
And, uh, you’ll have the opportunity to ask them questions live on the call. And then second, there’s going to be small mastermind groups where I combine you with three or four people that are maybe in a similar stage of business or a similar business model, and you can dive deep into whatever problems that you have and get your questions answered again.
Um, within your small mastermind group on a deeper level, because you’re going to just talk about your business and their business. Uh, and then, uh, there’s going to be a private discord channel and I’ve already let in some founding members. And so there’s a group of, uh, some of us there that we’re already chatting on discord.
You’re going to get real time feedback. So if you want, you know, you have a question today that you need answered. You can ask that people can answer. Um. I’ll be in there along with my team asking, uh, and answering some of those questions. And then perhaps, uh, the final thing I’ll share and perhaps my favorite is these ongoing challenges.
Uh, so this gives you the ability to come in as a group and every couple of months or every month, uh, we will have a different challenge. So we might say, Hey, For the next 60 days, we’re going to see who can get the most traffic from Pinterest. And that’s all we’re going to do is we’re going to focus on Pinterest and we’re going to bring on a couple of experts to share their strategies, you know, give the sort of secret nuggets of how to grow Pinterest traffic.
And then at the end of 60 days, I’ll give a monetary prize to the winner. Now, even the losers, if they don’t, you know, get the most Pinterest traffic, hopefully. They come out having learned something, they’re actually getting more traffic from Pinterest and, uh, they’re a little bit more motivated in their business, right?
And, uh, so that’s, you know, there’s a couple of other things that are involved in the community, but that’s kind of, uh, it in a nutshell. I’m super excited to be launching this. On Monday, um, to get the ball rolling and really build what I hope is the best community out there for niche publishers, bloggers, and online business owners.
Jared: It’s just the full evolution of niche pursuits as a brand for you. And I don’t want to go too far back, but it was many years ago. I don’t know when, when you, I mean, there were many years where niche pursuits wasn’t your, like. Focus, right? It was kind of your side blog. And then certainly the past couple of years, I remember you talking somewhere about how you realize like, this is really a valuable website and brand, and I’m going to put more into it.
Right. And it’s, it’s grown. You started putting it, giving it, you know, um, giving it, uh, more of your emphasis and your time and, and, uh, and then building out the brand. And what did we talk a lot about when you’re building out brand more than a website? Like. The kind of penultimate is, is establishing a community.
Right. And so it just feels like the full circle of what niche pursuits has talked about for so many years.
Spencer: Yeah, no, thank you. Um, it’s the niche, niche pursuits has a community, you know, uh, Facebook, uh, Facebook group, there’s like 40, 000 people, YouTube, Twitter. There is a community there. And, uh, I’ve often heard that people want more, they want to connect on a deeper level.
And, um, you know, just by being in the industry for so long, I have so many connections and the ability to bring a lot of people. In this industry together and, uh, that is exactly what this niche pursuits community is going to be.
Jared: So I, uh, caught up with an old friend in, in our industry yesterday. We talked on the phone for an hour.
We haven’t talked in a couple of years. I believe we couldn’t figure out the last time we talked. He, he did, he did say, he’s like, ah, but I’ve been, I’ve been hearing your voice. Cause I’ve been listening to the, the niche pursuits podcast for, uh, frequently since then. You want to know what he said? His favorite thing that he’s, uh, that’s niche pursuits has been doing the one thing you decided to kind of point out.
Spencer: I have no idea. What’s that?
Jared: He loved the AI challenge. Oh, really? Absolutely. Loved watching it, seeing what was working, seeing the, uh, all the different types of websites that ended up, you know, kind of succeeding and stuff. So, you know, it’s exciting to see the challenges are going to be a pretty integrated part of this, uh, this group.
Spencer: Yeah. That’s always just been core to the brand as well. Right. So with starting with my niche site projects, I’ve done four of them publicly now with the AI challenge, uh, that’s going on with a little tease that there will be a new YouTube video.
Spencer: Let’s move on. You know, we got to cover our weird new sites here in a second. And so I want to give you time to talk about your side hustle as well. So let’s do that.
Jared: Yours is going far better than mine. I brought it on myself by talking about, uh, how I was, I was due for a dud. So, okay. Um, I I’m being a little facetious, but, um, I, I said a couple of weeks ago that I was monetized on my weekend growth, YouTube channel.
And I was really curious, you know, I w we knew going in, this was never going to be a huge moneymaker with a number of views at this. Brand new, less than one year old, uh, YouTube account that I published one video a month to, you know, it’s never going to be a life changing kind of money, but, um, I wanted to see what it would look like.
So first started, I have some, some news now, some, some numbers to report. We got the first couple of weeks of data in here. So the first earnings started on February 12th. It was a Monday two plus little over two weeks ago, um, at time of recording and, uh, it was only like five cents a day, but you were quick to point out, ah, you know, it takes a little while for this stuff to build up, you know, well, it’s been monetized for just over two weeks and I have earned in total 11 and 14 cents.
Spencer: 11. 14 in two weeks. So if you’re doing the
Jared: math at home, that’s 74 cents a day. Hey,
Spencer: hey. Alright, what can you buy for 74
Jared: cents? Well, I was thinking about that. If I, every two days I can buy a donut at my neighborhood donut stand. Okay,
Spencer: hey. Free donut. I like
Jared: it. And you it is a Saturday morning tradition that the Baumann family does go to get donuts from our neighborhood donut store, so I think at my present earnings, I can buy the family donuts every week with my YouTube earnings.
I, I, I, so yes, that is where I’m going with
Spencer: this. Well, before you know it, you’ll be able to invite a guest, and then you’ll be able to get you know, hot cocoa for the kids, and uh, you know, Cup of coffee for myself, cup of coffee for yourself. You know, the channel just keeps growing. And, uh,
Jared: so a couple of caveats.
I haven’t published any videos in the last two weeks since it’s been monetized. As a lot of, you know, who have YouTube accounts, I know from this account, but also just from managing other accounts and stuff, um, obviously, you know, your views. Tend to spike quite a bit when you publish a new video. So, you know, we’ll see where this goes.
I do have a new video that I’m planning on releasing in the coming weeks. I haven’t filmed it yet, so that’ll be coming up. It’ll be fun to see that, but. Uh, definitely, uh, don’t quit your day job kind of money here.
Spencer: Yeah. You know, what did they say? It takes a few years to build up a YouTube channel. So, uh, you know, stick with it.
We’ll see where it goes in. And I know, and you know, we both know that this is the, the, the display ads on your YouTube channel are not meant to be your biggest source of revenue in your business. There’s a lot of other reasons to have a YouTube.
Jared: Put it in perspective. I have, uh, I went back and looked and I thought I’d share, I have generated three leads, At my agency to and creative who listed youtube in the last month.
Wow.
Spencer: Okay, and
Jared: that’s you know One of them has already signed up to be a monthly client at a you know, multiple four figure a month Yeah amount so again just a reminder like these things can serve multiple purposes And the weekend growth brand in general is about so much more but that’s a good reminder for everyone like If you’re going to build a YouTube channel and kind of connect it to a website, connect it to an email newsletter, connect it.
And you can kind of bring them all together. It can be more than one metric that helps you evaluate its success. Right. But certainly if you’re just looking at the dollars earned by ads in the last couple of weeks, you probably wouldn’t run out and start a YouTube channel on these, on these, uh, on these numbers.
Spencer: But, uh, kudos to you. You said you were going to share your numbers. You did share your numbers, so thank you for being open, uh, with that. Um, I, I think it’s good, like you said, for other people hearing that if you’re going to go big on YouTube, um, I think very few channels, uh, Make all their money from display ads.
Um, or even the majority of the money, right? There’s, there’s very few brands like a Mr. Beast that could have, you know, make millions from just display ads. Of course, now he’s building a bigger brand as well. You know, I think it’s smart to have a bigger business model and brand behind the channel. So
Jared: you’re exactly right.
And hopefully if you maybe didn’t have that cemented in, you’ll, you’ll have my 11. You have my donut money burned in your memory now.
Spencer: There you go. Exactly. Right. Okay. Let’s move on to our weird niche sites. We each have a weird niche site that we found here and, uh, mine. Well, maybe I’ll just, uh, you know, go ahead and share what it is.
Mine is next episode dot net. Now be sure you put a dash in there. It’s next dash episode, uh, dot net. And, uh, you know, they couldn’t get the. com even with the dash in there, I guess. Um, but, uh, okay. Next episode dot net now. It’s a place where you can keep track of the TV shows and movies that you watch.
Right. So you, you can pick from a bunch in the sidelines here. Let’s pick, let’s pick the Mandalorian because maybe that could tie in with your weird niche site here a little bit. Um, you know, if, if you come on here, it gives all the show information. And, uh, where does it show? Well, it gives a guide, you know, you can see all the dates.
That these were published, but you can actually follow and track somehow somewhere, um, you can see when the next episodes are, right? So if you follow the Mandalorian, I will say, okay, on this date is when the new ones are going to be published. And you can always be on top of your favorite shows, knowing exactly when and where they’re going to be released.
And, uh, I think there’s a bit more that you. Okay. Well, if you join it, let’s see. Okay. You can get your name and email and then they’ve got an app here, uh, as well. So, uh, it’s kind of like a mini IMDB in a way as well, right? Because you’ve got, you know, the cast of everybody here. And, uh, they’ve got information on everybody.
Um, you know, what other shows they’re known for? Uh, and so there is a lot of information in their database. The, the sort of special thing is that, Hey, it allows you to add it to your watch list, right? Boom. And then track when all the next episodes are and when they’re coming out. And I assume if you have the app, it will notify you, Hey, it’s coming up, coming out tomorrow.
Don’t miss it. Uh, that sort of thing. So what kind of, uh, You know, money isn’t making here. Well, I don’t know, but I do know that it is getting, I’m gonna have to look at my notes. I didn’t pull up Ahrefs, uh, 151, 000 organic visitors, uh, from, um, from Google. And I do need to open this up because. It’s got such a good graph.
Uh, if we go to next episode. net, and now I’ll share my screen with the AHRFs, uh, you can see that it got absolutely slaughtered, uh, in the helpful content update, right? So as you alluded to in the beginning, this, you know, website got hit hard with the helpful content update, you know, so you would think, oh, that’s, you know, that’s good night for this business, but if we go over to.
Um,
Jared: I mean, for those, for those watching, it was nearing a million estimated million organic traffic per month. And it’s down to well below 200, 000 now. So when Spencer says slaughtered, he means like 85 percent of the content or 85 percent of traffic from organic
Spencer: search. Absolutely gone. Uh, and so, but if we go over to similar web, they of course show traffic from all sources and you can see the graph here that it is getting about 3 million.
Uh, visitors a month in January is 2. 75 million visitors. Per month. So wow, massive website. Um, and a lot of this traffic is direct. So 72 percent is from direct sources. Only about 20 percent is actually, uh, organic. And, uh, so, um, it’s, it’s, and of course their top competitors are, you know, like IMDB and, uh, so a good.
website that is doing, you know, I, again, I don’t know how much money they’re making, but they’re getting a ton of traffic and doing pretty well.
Jared: Well, again, you know, kind of tease it earlier, but like, there’s been a lot of people talking about the solution to the HCU is make sure you have a lot of direct traffic, right?
Like that shows your brands that people find helpful. Well, here’s a website that has a lot of direct traffic and didn’t just get hit by the helpful content update, got obliterated by it now. I did look it up. This website was first launched on October 1st, 2005. And it looks like it’s using the same theme and design as the day it was launched.
Yeah. So, um, but, but again, going back to it, we saw Cyrus’s study show, uh, you know, ad units, number of ad units, location of ad units is a big detractor. And these recent updates, I think that, uh, there’s, I only saw like one ad per page, basically. It was a pretty subtle ad. I would say they could probably increase the amount of ads they have on here.
So.
Spencer: Yeah, absolutely. There wasn’t very many ads and not even on all the pages. Um, they do have a premium option. Um, with a free trial, which I don’t know exactly what it does. I mean, many additional features with cool tweaks and tools, right? Uh, that makes me want to sign up. It’s so specific. Uh, premium keeps getting better with features at it all the time.
Clean, no ads experience. Uh, 30 day free trial. So basically.
Jared: Not only do you get cool features, but you continue to get more cool features.
Spencer: And they continue to tweak them. Um, so, you know, the, the sales copy is not great on their, uh, their premium. I don’t know exactly what it would be, but, uh, so I’m guessing there’s not a lot of premium subscribers, but still a very interesting, uh, business and weird niche website nonetheless.
They said at
Jared: the top, uh, uh, try free for 30 days, less than a coffee a month. If you continue after. And, uh, on my budget, that would have to say less than a doughnut a month if you continue.
Spencer: Less than a doughnut a month. There you go. Hey, you know, with all the money you’re making on YouTube, you could get a free premium subscription here to next episode.
Done.
Jared: Uh, well, with their traffic levels, though, going all the way back, even with their minimal ad placement and their poor, uh, premium. Sales page copy. They’re probably still doing okay. In terms of revenue. Um, I mean, this is a pretty heavily updated website, but nonetheless, it’s definitely earning some money.
Spencer: Yeah, no, I think so. But, uh, yeah, a lot of opportunity as well.
Jared: Well, my weird niche looks pretty similar. In terms of the way the website comes across as yours does. Should I, uh, should I jump in now?
Spencer: Do it. Yep. Go
Jared: ahead. So my website is Jedi temple archives. com. It’s an ode to star Wars. My daughter has got the Star Wars bug and, uh, is full on in Star Wars mode.
So we talk about Star Wars a lot and I thought there’s got to be some weird Star Wars niches out there. Um, this is one of them. Um, so in essence, this is, it’s basically like a comprehensive resource. It’s dedicated to not just Star Wars. Again, listen, listen to, to, to what we talked about, but Star Wars toys and collectibles.
So it’s like a niche of a niche. Right. And, um, I mean, it is. Like, they, there are multiple articles being published every single day on this and it’s just all about hey, here’s the latest toy that got released and obviously it’s got a collectible bend to it, I don’t collect these kind of things, um, but uh, but there’s like a collectible twist to it so it’s like, you know, obviously probably toys that are like gonna resale for hire or there’s a good deal on or something like that, um, you’re poking around there, you’re looking at something not even related to toys it looks like.
Well, it started out
Spencer: as toy reviews, uh, but, uh, I don’t know, it looks like almost some sort of discussion forum as well. I’m not sure. Yeah. Oh, it’s just, they had comments on their, their review. That’s what it was. Okay.
Jared: Yeah. Well, it’s, um, it, it’s, it’s, uh, it, it’s been around for a while, you can tell, uh, in terms of the metrics, uh, in terms of, like, what we all like to see.
A DR 43, so, you know, nothing to sneeze at, but, but nothing, um, nothing crazy. Uh, just over 13, 000 keywords. Um, only just over 3000, uh, monthly organic searches. So it’s, it’s been on the down. There you go. You can see it there. It’s been on the downturn. Certainly since, uh, the, the, the usual barrage of updates where we’re kind of used to looking at, um, uh, it does have ads on the site.
They’re kind of like the last site we looked at there. They’re not over overly prominent. Um, it does have affiliate links though, to a lot of those toys that they talk about, uh, I saw, I saw share sale links. I would imagine maybe some Amazon links when applicable. Um, and, uh, and, you know, I, I was telling you before we got started, I don’t know if you had time to bring this up on similar web, but I, I do think this looks like a site that doesn’t just live off of organic traffic, but probably does decent on direct traffic.
Spencer: Yup. So here we got similar web. Um, it’s showing that, you know, overall it’s like 80, 70 to 85, 000, uh, visitors total a month and direct traffic is, you know, 60 percent of that. Right. So
Jared: yeah, they have their organic search. Yeah, a lot higher than 3000 a month, but but still a small portion of compared to the direct traffic.
So, um, I mean, you know, again, we talked about a niche of a niche. Um, I would imagine that if the majority of their traffic is coming from direct traffic, that these are people who are. Coming here to find out about the latest star Wars toys and collectibles. They’re probably making purchases from this website.
They’re probably generating decent affiliate commissions. Um, I don’t know how much all these things are, are priced, but I imagine some of them are, are, are fairly expensive. So maybe some of them are. So I’m, um, I’m stretching a bit, but I, again, think we have a site here that is out of date, uh, not doing great in search, but still probably very, you know, making a very, uh, good little side hustle kind of income.
Spencer: Yeah, it’s, uh, it’s interesting, right? I’m just looking at one of the posts here, the vintage collection, Luke Skywalker, Jedi Academy. 12 and 60 cents on Amazon. Like that’s the whole post. It’s like, he’s just literally saying here, go buy this on Amazon. It’s, it’s this price, right? Uh, yeah, yeah, that literally is it.
Um, I assumed there would be some other details, but there’s not, uh, you can just click on his affiliate link. Yep. And you can go buy it on Amazon and I guess he must be doing, I mean, this was published yesterday or no, two days ago. And, um, so he must. I mean, he’s still active. He’s doing it. It must be working
Jared: just three or four posts a day.
I saw, I mean, I didn’t go back very far, but there’s like three or four posts a day on it, so
Spencer: very interesting. So he’s getting enough direct traffic, um, that, Hey, it’s worth it. He’ll just keep publishing, go get it on Amazon and, uh, make a little bit of money. So between display ads and affiliate revenue, you know, he’s making probably a couple thousand bucks a month,
Jared: right?
I mean, again, there’s one of those things where. I’m totally guessing here, but it’s probably a guy who, you know, is obsessed with, uh, Star Wars collectibles and toys. And he just, he’s already checking these things anyways, and he just made a website about it. Now all he has to do is one extra step to publish like, Oh, cool.
I just found this newest Star Wars collectible. Bam. I’ll just put a post up, throw my affiliate link up, you know? I mean, it has that feeling, but it obviously gets what 90, 000 people coming here a month to look at it. Yeah.
Spencer: Yeah. Now this one’s a, this one’s fine because it’s, you know, it’s kind of like a.
Taking a fan base, right, of Star Wars, and this is mostly toys it seems like, right, and kind of sort of the niche of the niche. Um, and then certainly people that are big enough fans that they’re collecting the toys. You know, we’ve seen that, of course, with Inside the Magic, with Disney, right? You can take something that people are just really passionate about and create.
It’s not even necessarily just a fan website. It’s more like this one, uh, seems to be mostly about, you know, toy reviews and that sort of thing. But there’s so many things out there that people are just hugely passionate about.
Jared: We have on bachelor
Spencer: Steve or something. Uh, reality. Steve is a, uh, Yeah. Yes. It was a weird niche site that talks about the bachelor.
Uh huh. Right. There you
Jared: go. So another great example of like, I mean, he didn’t make up the bachelor. He didn’t have to come up with a hit product. He just came up with a, took advantage of a fan base and found a specialty in it. And then, you know, you need to build an
Spencer: audience. Mhm. Yep. So there’s so many ways that people could do that out there.
So hopefully that, you know, sparks some ideas for people. Um, good. Fine. You keep finding these old websites, you know, same, you know, old looking websites at least. And they’re always fun, fun to talk about so many things out there. Uh, here we are a year doing the, the news episode essentially. And, uh, we are, we have not yet run out of weird niche websites.
Jared: No, no, but, um, I have been, uh, it’s, it’s fallen on me the last couple of weeks. So our, our listener base has, uh, has been coming up dry of late. There
Spencer: you go, guys. Give Jared some help out there, send him some tips. Big of a cry for help as I can make. We have a hotline, 1 800 weird nitch, you know. See if you
Jared: can lock that Google, uh, that Google voice number down before we go live.
Spencer: That’s right. And, uh, give us, give us a tip. So, all right, everyone, thank you so much for listening. Uh, lots in the news going on, of course, that, uh, you know, we, we read all the headlines. We’re going to have a lot more next week for you. So stick around for that. Uh, and then, um, Niche Pursuits community is coming on Monday.
So head on over to community. nichepursuits. com and Jared, of course, thank you so much for joining us, being open with your numbers on YouTube, sharing your weird niche site. And of course your perspectives as well.
Jared: Of course. Have a great weekend. We’ll see you guys. Same place, same time next week.
Spencer: Thanks everyone.