97% hit by Google's HCU, Newspaper publishers sue Microsoft/OpenAI, CNET+Best Buy, and more

Did you know that— let's finish off the helpful content update thing. So there's this tweet here from Lily Rae. And so she often will tweet about sites that have been hit by these Google updates, right? So she's pulled— she pulled the data, she pulled together data from Sistrix and BuiltWith to look at 1,500 sites and that had the greatest percentage decrease between the helpful content update and now. So just for a refresher for everyone, Google's helpful content update, it hit a lot of sites. We had a lot of friends that were hit and a lot of people haven't recovered. So BuiltWith indicates that 97% of these sites that got hit, what do you think was the one thing that they had in common if you were to guess?

AI-generated content.

Try one more time.

Old, not updated content.

Try one more time. You're kind of on the right path.

Thin content.

No.

Okay.

They all had ads.

Oh, okay.

Right? And you could call ads thin content too if you want. Not really, but kind of. So she says, okay, and also 40% of these sites apparently use AdSense, right? So if you're loading your site with a bunch of pop-ups, a bunch of ads, that's not a good user experience at the end of the day. And that's not helpful content. And so by definition, these sites deserve to get hit, right? Now, some sites, we have mutual friends that got hit, maybe didn't deserve to get hit. So take it for what it is.

With the Helpful Content Update, I've seen sites that are good that got hit. I've seen sites that are crap that did not get hit. It's a luck of the draw with any algorithm change. The way you got to look at it is you got to adapt for what's best for the user. And in the long run, you should do You can do fine, but you can't optimize, you know, every day or every month based on an algorithm change.

You got to diversify.

Yeah, not just diversify, but you got to play the long game with SEO, right? Because if you're doing what's right in the long range, long run, you should see your traffic go up and to the right.

I still think we should diversify too. The reason for that is because even Google themselves, they don't even know where SEO is going in the next 5, 10 years. I had a conversation on Saturday. It's like the guy, there's a guy that has an SEO tool, right? And he's like, And actually, after we hung out, he asked me, he emailed me and he's like, hey, like, do you know who else is in the space? Because I don't, I don't, I'm not sure where things are going, right? And so for the product leader to say that is kind of scary. And even the other, it was actually a lunch with 3 SEOs, right? And everyone's like, yeah, don't know where it's going. So that's a scary place to be if you don't know where things are going. Yes, play the long, long game with SEO, but you still have to diversify a little bit.

So I told you, right? Months ago I sat with a Google engineer to go over their changes with AI.

No.

And this engineer was high up.

No, go.

You know what they said on what's going to be the future with SEO and everything? Let's hear it. They don't see a future where there's no organic results because there's different use cases for different queries, which I agree with that. But what's going to be the future with AI? Honestly, they don't know themselves either. They look at it as one big experiment. They're going to release a lot of iterative changes.

Yep.

See how users interact. See how it affects their revenue, see how it affects the user experience, and then they'll tweak. They're not looking at this as a 1-month change, 6 months, 1 year, or even 5 years. They think it's going to be very iterative over many, many, many years before they really figure it out.

They better hope it is.

Yeah.

For their sake.

Yeah. And look, their numbers are still climbing, but here's the kicker. And I posted about this on Twitter a few weeks ago and we talked about it on the podcast. Dude, Google is still growing in popularity. Google is not declining. Have you seen the Google Trends for ChatGPT versus Google? No. Dude, load it up on your computer.

Google Trends versus what?

Okay, go to Google Trends and type in Google as one of the words. Okay. And then go type in ChatGPT.

Oh, Google versus ChatGPT?

Yes, you do worldwide. Instead of past day, go look at it for like—

Last 5 years?

No. Last year? Past 12 months. Okay. Right? If you look at past, okay, so actually first go 2004 to present. You see the spike? ChatGPT went from nothing to something. And then look at Google, right? And just because a trend line is going up or down, it doesn't mean necessarily someone's getting less or more traffic.

But it's just— I think you might need to tell people how to read these Google Trends charts too.

Yeah, so the way Google Trends charts work is these are all the people that are typing in this search query on Google. Like they're typing in ChatGPT or they're typing in Google. Over time, people go direct to the source. So even if the trend line decreases, it doesn't mean That less people are going to the website.

Yeah. Right?

But if you look at the last 12 months, ChatGPT, the amount of people typing it into Google hasn't increased much. It's gone from a 9 to a 12. This is out of 100. And the reason it's out of 100 is because Google was 100 at one point and is at 85 right now.

And just for people to know too, 100 means that, to Neil's point, that's the highest point that's ever been searched, right? It doesn't necessarily mean it's like, Oh, it's fading away.

Correct. And 100 is in comparison with whatever is there in the chart, right? So Google, because it's more popular, that would be out of 100 and ChatGPT would be lower. But all I'm getting at is ChatGPT's growth rate is slowing down. If you actually look at SimilarWeb and you look at OpenAI and their traffic stats, I don't know if you've looked at them. I check them on a monthly basis.

No.

But their total visit count has been— their growth has been slowing down. So last month over month change was pretty good, 8%. But the month before that, it was much slower. It went from 1.6 to 1.7. The big things that increased ChatGPT's growth is releasing new features. So like if they're saying, hey, you can now create videos, et cetera. And this is analytics for OpenAI. It's not just the ChatGPT part of the site. But when they do anything like that, we're seeing massive increases in traffic. Like if they're like, hey, You no longer have to check your emails and respond to them. OpenAI does it for you. They'll see a massive spike in traffic anytime they release anything like that.

I think this is exciting. I mean, main, main thing for me is like there's a lot of competition. Google feels competition now and they're forced to innovate. OpenAI is launching a lot of new features. You have, you have Perplexity, all these things, right? They're all launching new products all the time and new features all the time. Now to wrap this helpful content thing up real quick, do you know The average percentage change, I'm just going to list the top 3 here. The types of sites that got hit the hardest are news. So average percentage change is down -61%. Okay. And then the second would be pets. Okay. And then the third would be adult, interestingly enough. So.

Yeah. And by the way, speaking of Perplexity, to go back to AI, dude, they are growing at the fastest rate for a large AI site. I don't know if you've seen their stats.

We talked about this last time. Yeah. Yeah. You were surprised by their traffic.

Their traffic is going up at a really rapid pace. Now, of course, they don't have a billion visitors like ChatGPT, but if you're at 100+ million visitors and you're growing 20+% month over month, that's ridiculous.

All right everyone, quick message from the Agency Owners Association. So this is the peer group for agency owners that Neil and I both put together. This is for people that are doing 6 figures, 7 figures, 8 figures, even 9 figures as well. And we're all here to help you grow your agency faster. In this group, we share leads, we share learnings with each other. It's a community where people can ask questions, their most burning questions personally, professionally. We'll share templates, reports, things like that. We're constantly adding more value to the group. I will tell you that the price is continuing to increase. The good news is that there's no long-term commitment, so you can just learn more by going to marketingschool.io/agency. Once again, that's marketingschool.io/agency to learn more, and we hope to see you inside.

8 newspaper publishers sue Microsoft and OpenAI over copyright, but I think this is going to go along for a very, very long time and I was reading on X, some of these guys were complaining, well, doesn't Google do the same thing and just scrape the web and put it on there as well? And it's the same.

They do.

Yeah.

But it's whoever gets sued.

It's whoever gets sued. It's a different purpose. Also, the big difference is, is Google, in many cases, not all, it used to be almost all cases, is driving traffic back to the people that they're scraping content from.

Yeah. So it's like a symbiotic relationship.

Yes.

You know, they took all the law— I mean, YouTube would've been dead if Google didn't buy it because they took on the brunt of the lawsuits.

It was another player before Google. Was it Veo? Veo? There was a guy in San Diego who ended up creating a company right before YouTube, very similar model. He got sued like crazy. He actually paved the way for YouTube to be successful.

Did he? So he took the brunt, but then YouTube themselves, they still had a lot of losses.

They did.

And they couldn't manage the infrastructure too. They needed the scale of Google. Yes.

YouTube was a more usable, better product overall, but someone went through the door first getting really bloody with all the legal issues. Huh. Yeah, most people don't know about that. And without that, there would've been a lot less likelihood of a chance of YouTube succeeding.

I want to take a second to tell you about my podcast co-host's agency. So NP Digital, so Neil Patel Digital. What they do is they do a whole host of marketing services. and they are global, they're worldwide. They have SMB services as well. They have mid-market to enterprise services as well. They cover the entire gamut. So you can just go to mpdigital.com to learn more about it. And now back to the episode. CNET and Best Buy did a partnership because they're trying out this new, I don't think I've seen a partnership like this before. You can correct me if I'm wrong. But this guy, Steven Reginald, posted this on LinkedIn. CNET plus Best Buy, new era for media. The merge of content and commerce hit an inflection point this week. Media company CNET has committed to a first-of-its-kind partnership with Best Buy. CNET will publish articles on bestbuy.com. Ads from Best Buy will run sitewide on CNET, reaching millions of readers. I haven't read CNET in years. Um, the deal represents the first time a publisher and retailer have combined data in this way. Why is this a big deal? Because CNET and Best Buy have worked together for a year in a test phase. The goal was to lean into strengths both entities have and combine them toward a bigger whole. So now there will be in-store content by editors at CNET, the product reviews and coverage of new tech offer, third-party validation for shoppers. And basically here's— I'm going to give you some stats so we can react to this. So CNET is a top tech publisher. I'm air quoting right now. Best Buy has 1,000 retail stores, 50 million+ audience combined. I don't really know what that means. New commerce media model template. CNET content on TV walls at Best Buy. The goal is to enhance the shopping experience. And the trend is signals rise in publisher-retailer partnerships.

It's smart, but do you know who Sina is owned by?

No.

RedBridge.

RedBridge, yeah, yeah.

Which is their model, their performance marketing shop, their agency.

Affiliate?

Yes, kind of. It's an agency like Eric and I's. Yes, they do affiliate, but it's actually a very unique deal where they say, hey, you are Best Buy, we'll work with you. We actually control a lot of the traffic to just drive you sales. And they work on very different models They can do some stuff on affiliate, but a lot of theirs is like contractual basis where they're getting paid out X amount of dollars.

I think it's good. I mean, I like the way how this is being presented to you like it's a PR release. It's basically signing a new client, right? And it's a PR release. So it's marketing them getting a client. Yes, but it seems like it's a smart thing. So it really matters how you package something.

Totally agree. Did you see this stat here? 70% of millennials are really Ah, 70% of millennials are relating to creators over celebrities. It was from Adweek.

No. You read a lot of CNET and Adweek, I noticed.

CNET?

Sorry, CNET, just because we're talking about CNET. You read a lot of CNBC and Adweek.

CNBC, Adweek, Ad Age, Economist, TechCrunch, MediaPost.

Wall Street Journal?

Wall Street Journal I read quite a bit. Campaign I read quite a bit. But yeah, dude, and this totally makes sense because, dude, the problem with the celebrity stuff is, Everyone knows, especially millennials more than older people, they know that these people were paid for. And when they look at content creators, creators, the content that they're creating is more authentic. The celebrities, it's the question is who's paying them the biggest bucks? Or is it their own product or service that they're shelling out? Which I don't blame them. I would do the same thing if I was them.

Yeah. I mean, that's why we've been talking about the last couple weeks, more and more people are We've talked about the creator payments growing 70% year on year, and we think it's going to grow a lot faster. And also, creators are— I believe that a lot of them are heavily undermonetized right now because they rely so much on sponsorships. They don't know how to build businesses, right? And this is a trend I got from doing the podcast in the last, I don't know, 8 months or whatever. A lot of these creators that have millions of subscribers, millions of views per month, they all resort to sponsorships. And when I start to talk to them about business, it's like deer in headlights, kind of. So I think that's going to change. I mean, when you look at like, uh, you know, MrBeast, he— I think, um, his manager raised money from this, this, um, private equity firm, and they're just looking to partner up e-commerce operators with these creators, these influencers. So that's the model. It's distribution at the end of the day.

Dude, it is. Here's an interesting stat. So my buddy Mike owns this company called Legion Athletics. It's a supplement company, like protein powder, fish oil, you get the drift. But like, they focus on people who who want to live a healthier lifestyle and people who are like going to a gym and lifting weights and building muscle. So Mike is an influencer, has a lot of books, got an advance for a book. He sells like crazy on Amazon. Well, some of the most popular fitness books are his on Amazon.

Yeah.

All right. He also has a podcast. As a content creator, how much revenue do you think he drives to his business? It's a multimillion-dollar business, not like a million a year, more than a million a month. Like it's substantial, much bigger than that even.

Okay, so let's say he does $120 million a year.

I'm not gonna— I can't say the revenue.

Okay. Oh, you know the revenue. Okay, I'm just gonna say he does $120 million a year. I would say maybe he drives 60 to 70%.

So his revenue that he's driving, trackable revenue, okay, and there's probably more than what's trackable from the podcast, the books, um, social media, $30,000 to $40,000 a month in revenue.

That's it?

That's it.

Wow.

Okay.

But trackable revenue.

Trackable revenue. So there's more. They also leverage influencers, micro-influencers who are well-known, not like a Kardashian who has 100 million followers. They leverage someone like Eric Siu living in Century City and being like, this is how I live a fit life in LA, lifting weights, my morning routine. You walk to Equinox every morning, I think, when you're in town. You get your smoothie. Half the time I'm talking to you, I hear a blender in the background. No, I make my smoothie. Yeah, that's a blender in the background. And you live a fit lifestyle. Okay. So they're paying a lot of micro influencers. How much revenue do you think the influencers are driving on a monthly basis? And it's profitable?

Much more than that.

Yes, $400,000 to $500,000 a month.

Okay.

In revenue, they're scaling it up. They got a little bit more than 700 influencers. So when you actually look at the dollar amount per influencer, it's not as much as his own brand. But it's way more scalable. Yes, it's work, you got to outreach to them, but he can go get from 750 or 700, he can go get another 700 or 1,000 or 5,000 and just scale up the process.

I always forget these marketplaces you can go to get these micro influencers. Do you remember them?

There was one called like influence.co. I think it shut down or something. I don't know what happened to that.

There's still a bunch that they'll do everything soup to nuts for you. They'll help you find influencers and they'll IZEA?

You could do an Instructable video. That was one of them, right? IZEA?

I forgot.

PaperPost, I think they were called.

I forgot.

IZEA's publicly traded, by the way.

Yeah.

I don't think it's that great of a platform. But dude, still, I've looked at these platforms. I still think it's just better to go out there and manually reach out to each of these influencers and work out a deal.

Establish that relationship, yeah.

Yeah, because then what you can do is, the key, and this is where people screw up, they have all these influencers, they pay them, and they're just like, yeah, promote my product. But then they don't put the influencer on the landing page so it doesn't look like it's fully tied into the marketing message and it doesn't convert But the moment you tie them in throughout the whole funnel, the conversions and the numbers just go through the roof.

I think with influencers, this is a very buy low, sell high opportunity. So you can buy it because a lot of people, they don't know, they still don't know how to monetize themselves very well. So if you can negotiate a no-brainer deal with them and then prove that you can drive results, it's a good symbiotic relationship. They know, like, and trust you. It can be something that lasts for a very long time. And let's use an example, right? You're an influencer in the marketing space, right? So like, what percentage of your business actually comes in from your brand?

We used to track it. It used to be around— when we first started off, our first year of revenue was around $5 million. Almost all of it came from me. Our second year, I believe it was either $16 or $18 million in revenue. Of that, around $10 million came from me. And then as we started scaling up, because we grew substantially from there, No more than $10 million. It caps at $10 million. For me, it's capped at $10 million. For someone like Kylie Jenner, she was able to produce way more. But it's less than 10% of our revenue.

Yep. Which is interesting. People would think that it's a lot more. But no, the reality is it all comes down to the product or service at the end of the day. If the product or service does a really good job, that's how you get referrals. And that's how you get those other deals coming, those bigger deals coming. So, and then you have to play the game too. There's other stuff.

Yeah. And people look at like influencers like, Kylie Jenner or Rihanna and like, wow, look what she's done and look what Kim Kardashian has done in Skims. I'm not knocking them. They've done an amazing job.

Yep.

They've gotten great traction. Good for them. But if you look at the biggest businesses in their space, the way they make money is old school systems, processes, distribution. You can't forget about those other channels because those other channels are what's built timeless companies that are worth $30, $40, $50, $100+ billion.

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