Eightify uses AI to get 70M users, LA Times walkout, Google web stories, & more

Did you hear about this company that drove 70 million visitors in one year using AI content?

No.

Okay, so this company—

Wait, wait, wait, did they get whacked?

No, no, they didn't get whacked yet. That's the other company. There's a company, that site was causal.app, right? The word causal. And they bragged about the SEO heist, right? It's like, oh, we stole all this traffic and then it's getting like hundreds of thousands of visits a month. And it was using the tool byword.ai, I believe. And so, but this other company, ateify.app, so it's ateify.app. They— what they do is they're a Chrome extension. And what they do is they summarize YouTube videos. And how do they— how do they show off their product? Their product? They summarize all the best YouTube videos and they put them on their website and they put them into like different categories. But it's just tons and tons and tons of summaries coming out.

Yeah.

And so when you look at their Ahrefs graph, it's like tens of thousands of new pages being published every month or getting indexed and just like 2.1 million pages overall. And on SimilarWeb, it shows over the last 12 months, 70 million visitors. On Ahrefs, they're getting like hundreds of thousands of visitors per month. I think this is really interesting because at least even with our content, using a summarizer tool, look at the ones that perform well. If the ones that perform well, you just put in a human editor and then upgrade it, that's like a really easy way to create more top-of-funnel content.

I bet you this won't last more than a year.

It won't. But if you take advantage of it right now—

But dude, okay, so you and I have been doing this for quite a while, specifically SEO. And I used to take tons of shortcuts. I don't know how many shortcuts you used to take, but from my recollection— I used to take a few. You used to take shortcuts as well. And it's both bit us in the butt. Like, dude, just think about it. If we go back time, if we just used long-term strategies that we knew would last and what's best for the users, we would've been way further in our careers, our businesses, and we would've made way more money. So I look at things like this Yes, in the short run, it can get me that, you know, that addiction. It's like taking—

It's a dopamine hit. Yes.

It's not like I'm not into drugs, but it's like crack or whatever gives you a quick high, right? Or cocaine. I don't know what gives people a high. And if anyone's addicted to drugs, I'm sorry for the references. But the point I'm trying to make is like, you want long-term gains. You know, it's like those people who are trying to lose weight and get a 6-pack.

Ozempic.

Yeah, Ozempic. Everyone's taking Ozempic right now to just lose tons of weight.

Well, what happens when you go off of this stuff? Yeah.

What you need to change is your diet and be healthy so then that way in the long term, you feel and look the way you want.

Yeah.

And I look at this kind of stuff, yeah, you can get 70 million visitors in a year, but let's look at 2 things. One, I bet you the amount of revenue that they make from that 70 million visits isn't that much in the grand scheme of things. I'm not saying they're not making thousands of dollars, even millions in profit, but in the grand scheme of things, it's not that big of a business. And 2, it's not going to last forever. So might as well spend your time and energy on stuff that's really going to pay dividends in the future.

You know what's interesting? This team, this Edify team, as you said, that just reminded me, it's only a team of 3 people. It's like the main person, there's like 2 like side developers and like, that's it. That's the app, right? So it's a good one-person business. And to your point, I don't think it's going to last like in its current form. My thing always has been like, if you're going to do this type of stuff, do it in a— do the black hat stuff in a white hat way and you'll forever do a better job. Like, do you remember like the link wheels back in the day where like you have these Web2 properties that link to like this one and then that one? What if they were all strong websites that linked to each other and they linked to the main one? Like, then you get like double or triple or 10x the results, right? So I think my take on this is like, okay, so how do you do this in the white hat way? Well, you can do the summaries, right, for your own content maybe. And again, the ones that perform, just upgrade the content. And you don't need to go for like most— the vast majority of people don't need to publish like tens of thousands of pages per month.

No. And I think you nailed it. You know, Ryan, have you ever met Ryan Deiss?

Yeah.

So Ryan Deiss from Digital Marketer, I went to Austin to go visit him. long time ago, pre-COVID. And Ryan told me something that was interesting. He's like, Neil, you're in a legitimate business. Take the tactics that a lot of shady marketers use, and apply them to legitimate businesses using tactics that are really good. And you'll grow your legitimate business way faster.

Yeah.

And these tactics aren't like breaking rules or anything like that. Like what these guys are doing isn't really breaking any rules. But you make a good point. If you can end up Taking the video content you have and you can end up summarizing it or podcast content. You're now creating useful information for people and have a human verify it and review it before it's published. And you can get more traffic and it's much more likely to last over time.

Yep. And look, I think the last thing to say about this is like there's going to be a lot of chat, like people are talking about programmatic SEO, AI-assisted content and all that. It's just like, if you're confident that what you're publishing is good, then great. But if not, if you feel like you're spammy, it probably is spammy.

So check this out. So right before we came down, I published this tweet and it talks about the top 3 SEO opportunities in 2024. And the first opportunity I broke down was don't let AI write your content. Because when I looked at the data, or at least from the survey that I ran on the Neil Patel website, 640 out of 1,051 respondents use AI to write their content. 282 use AI combined with humans. So majority, 640, which is more than 60%, are just using pure AI and not having humans modify their content.

Yep, yep.

And when we looked at human-written content versus AI-written content, 94.12% of the time, the human-written content within the experimental data that we had was ranking higher. And on top of it, we looked at 68 particular websites and how much traffic they're getting from AI versus their AI content versus their human-written one. When you look at the average visitor per article, the AI-written ones had 52 visitors per month The human-written ones had 283 visitors per month.

Wow.

So we believe that that is one of the biggest opportunities. But if you are going to use AI, and I include this in this graph, and it's opportunity 3, it's focused on the ultra long-tail keywords. So when we look at our 2023 revenue versus 2022 revenue and how much of the revenue, when you just look at the SEO bucket, came from keywords that were 7 words or longer, in 2022 it was 31.21% of our revenue came from search terms that were 7 words or more. In 2023, it was 48.95%. So we're seeing, and the 7-word or more keywords make up 24.26% of our SEO traffic, but it's the largest bucket in revenue generation. So we see a huge opportunity in A, don't write AI content, or if you're going to use AI, do AI combined with humans. And if you're going to go after keywords, go after the ultra long tail. Not 3 to 6 words, I'm talking about 7+ word keywords.

Yeah, related to this actually, based on what you're saying too, there should be a human in the loop. But the reality, I mean, here's the other reality. Right now I'm looking at this, LA Times stages walkout for the first time in 142 years. So they have a union for the LA Times paper and I think like 80 writers walked out, right? Wait, for what?

What was the walkout?

The walkout's like, oh, there's going to be layoffs at LA Times. They're walking out to protest that, right? And then Sports Illustrated just laid off all of its staff. I don't know if you saw that today. All their staff are gone. What staff?

I thought they were creating all their content from AI.

So the CEO got fired for that, right? And then they just— they're laying off all their staff, right? So there's like all of this happening. So it's like, I think what we're kind of getting to here is like the best writers and the best editors will have a job, right? The worst ones will not. So it's like you still need to have humans in the loop, but you're probably going to be looking for the best humans in the next couple of years.

Totally agree with that.

Yep. So let's see. I guess here's another thing. Have you heard about Google Web Stories yet?

I've heard about Google Web Stories. It's been out for a long time. It's their version of TikTok or Instagram.

Have you tried it?

No. Have you?

No. So I read the story on— this was on CXL actually. So our good friend Pep. By re— I'm reading this right now on the CXL site. So by researching topics and creating compelling Web Stories, this guy Atif improved 2.2 million— he got 2.2 million organic visitors from Google Discover in 6 months. So the TL;DR here is, uh, he boosted a lot of e-com web traffic, started creating compelling Web Stories, and then people— he just, you know, drove traffic from Google Discover. So I've never seen this before, and, um, it looks exactly— to your point, it looks exactly like Yeah.

And the reason they're doing this is because even a Google VP said when young people are going to search, I'm butchering the— paraphrasing the quote, they're now like, when they're doing a search for, let's say, a place to eat or a restaurant, they're turning to TikTok and Instagram. So what they're worried about is a younger audience.

It actually looks like stories inside. So I was wrong about that. So it says over here, he put the hours in researching topics that people want to click or share. This is the key as Google Discover sends traffic to content that's getting engagement. He used BuzzSumo to measure the number of comments and shares that existing topics in the niche were getting. Then selecting the most engaging. So I mean, you know, I'm looking at this Google graph over here. Yeah, 2.18 million clicks or so. I wonder how many of it led to conversions. That's the other thing. So, but go try it out, everyone. We haven't tried it ourselves. I just thought it was an interesting thing to bring up.

Dude, and that's my biggest problem with marketing. Everyone just wants to focus on traffic and very few people want to focus on bottom of the funnel metrics. And I was at a a corporate event yesterday where I gave a talk just to one company and they had marketers there as well as people like in sales. And lead counts up, lead count up is great, but if it doesn't drop to the bottom line, who cares?

Yep.

Right? I'm not trying to be a prick about it. And we're the ones who made lead count, or us along with their team helped the lead count go up. But it going up or traffic going up is great, but you need it to drop to the bottom line. If you can't, stop focusing on getting more and more visitors. I'm not saying you should decrease what you're doing. You should at least maintain or try to grow, but focus on fixing the rest of the funnel so that way you can actually see the revenue hit the bottom. And if you can't, then you got to adjust the strategy at the top.

You know, we were talking about it this morning, like our traffic is going up and then our number of people that are opening the free consultation on our agency website is going up. Like let's say it's up 25%, right? But then the lead count dropped 25%. So it's basically a wash, right?

Yeah.

And like, you know, obviously there's macro, things to consider right now. Also, like there's the holidays too that bring the numbers down a little bit. But at the end of the day, it's like still like, yeah, I was— we were just talking with our buddy Brad, right? Our buddy Brad over here. So everyone check it out. What's the We Edit podcast?

Record Edit Podcast.

RecordEditPodcast.com. But basically it's like there's one company we talked about this before where they're charging like $35,000 a month and they'll publish like 5,000 pieces for you, which is a lot. And they'll guarantee you like 100 million views or something like that. that in 90 days. And that's good. That's really cool. But then I wonder what the ROI is at the end of the day. So I'm going to check in with one of the clients right now that's paying $35,000 a month in 2 months. And we'll see what happens. But at the end of the day, it's like, okay, we're getting, we're getting all the views, but like, how many conversions are we getting from this thing? Because $420,000 a year is a lot of money.

It's a lot of money. Yeah. At the end of the day, it just depends on what you can do at the bottom. But funny enough, you and I have also talked about adjusting our strategies in this economy. I think SEO is great, paid ads, social media, all that kind of stuff is great, but there's also other ways to grow a company. And we've talked a little about M&A, but you and I were discussing this morning taking other companies and merging them into yours and giving them equity in yours.

Yep. Yep. So let's go through this exercise so maybe people can understand because in this down economy right now, we still believe it's a down economy. There are going to be lots of deals available. Actually, I was watching some of the Davos talks, right? I'm sure you watched some too. And I think David Rubenstein was like he thinks private equity and M&A activity is going to pick up this year. And you know you have you have your M&A team. I've talked to some brokers, and you know they say it's at least the the guys I the brokers I talked to are like oh yeah it's it's ripe for the the taking right now. But it's interesting because I talked to the brokers now; they're like oh yeah this deal this this founder over here he's down to just acquire acquihire him, and you just pay like you know an upfront amount of money, and like you don't even need to pay a high multiple or anything. So it's like A lot of agencies are hurting right now. So we're in the agency game. So I guess this is the context that we'll talk about it in.

Yeah, no, it's just like, why not partner with people that you know have good businesses but are hurting because of things they can't control like the economy? And you do a deal with them where you're giving them equity in your business and no money is swapped. You know, together, if you can fix more problems and grow, why not? For example, if at Single Grain, I'm assuming majority of your revenue is SEO over paid media?

Paid.

Is that right? It's paid?

Uh-huh.

So maybe, and not that much social media, organic?

No social media, paid SEO, CRO.

Okay, so then you take the areas where you're not generating a lot of revenue like social media, you go find a social media agency to partner up with and hopefully that social media agency only does social, right? Hence I said social media agency. And you then sell all your services, SEO, CRO, paid to that company, assuming they're only doing organic social. And then, You take all their customers or all your customers and you sell them social media marketing. So you combine both, you make more money from both clients. When clients start paying for multiple service items like paid advertising and SEO and CRO and social media, etc., your churn also goes down. So you win on multiple fronts. That's how private equity, they make 1 1 3. Yeah, it's expensive. It's hard to do. But I think this is a really good strategy and approach.

And we'll probably spend more time maybe in a future episode, maybe in the next 4 or so talking about how we might, how you might structure these deals and how you might, what there's potential pitfalls as well. So we'll talk through that as well. Um, but yeah, we're in an environment right now to Neil's point where you can take equity. You don't necessarily need to swap cash. If you have cash, like go ahead and use it. Like, you know, sometimes it's expensive to give up equity.

Yeah.

Um, so, and some people might not want to do that. So there's a lot of ways to structure a deal. And often people will say your price, my terms. And so oftentimes the terms are more important than the price itself. Cause it's like, sure, Neil, I'll pay you $10 billion for your company over 10 billion years. Yeah. And it's like, okay, good deal, right?

I'm not going to live that long, so it doesn't matter.

Exactly. Anyway, that's it for today. So check out the next couple of episodes. Maybe we'll talk more about the M&A stuff and we will see you tomorrow. And don't forget to rate, review, subscribe. It helps us grow. Bye.