Ep. 3003: MrBeast's SaaS Decision – A Mistake?, Pay-Per-Crawl, Listicles, LLM Ranking, AI Farms

How about this MrBeast SaaS decision? Do you see what— do you know what happened here?

No, I don't even know MrBeast is going to SaaS other than he has a competitor of, uh—

Social Blade.

Social Blade, there you go.

So, okay, Social Blade is like a YouTube or like a social— it shows your social stats basically, right?

Yeah, it does it for multiple social profiles, but people mainly use it for YouTube first and then Instagram second.

So ViewStats is a product that MrBeast came up with. Interestingly enough, I met someone that was supposed to be his partner on this. But apparently it's, you know, he, so apparently I think MrBeast will partner up with you, but like you'll get a very small chunk of equity, like 1% or something like that. But so MrBeast, he posted this to Twitter.

Really quickly, ViewStats gets 2.1 million visitors according to SimilarBlade.

SimilarWeb?

I mean, SimilarWeb, sorry, SimilarBlade.

Social Blade.

Okay.

So ViewStats, it's actually a great tool. I pay for it. And it shows you like, it'll come up with like thumbnail ideas for you. You'll see outliers and things like that. It's a great YouTube tool. You want to see something?

No.

Okay. So he tweets this out. This is on June 26th, right? So not that long ago. So, hey guys, hey guys, thanks for your feedback on ViewStats AI thumbnail tool. We pulled it and added a funnel for creators to find real thumbnail artists to commission. What happened was he launched an AI thumbnail creator in the product, right? Which I don't think is a bad idea. But a bunch of YouTubers pushed back or creators pushed back saying, oh, this is not good for us. This is going to take jobs, whatever. And so he's like, oh, so he removed it and they created a funnel for creators to find real thumbnail artists to commission. I think this is an impulsive decision.

I think that's a bad decision.

Right after that, a bunch of people just started creating and giving it away for free.

Yeah. I'm like, I would go back to the other one.

This is reactionary, right? And so I think MrBeast is fantastic. I think this is a situation where it's like, hey, when you're in SaaS, You typically want to validate it by how people are engaging with that specific feature. And you could look at the qualitative numbers and you could also look at the, which is the feedback from people, but you also have to look at the quantitative numbers. Yeah.

So he should just do what's best for the software. If he does what's best for the software and what's best for the end users who are paying, he will make more money and create a better software. And if he doesn't do this to please people, someone else will and start eating his lunch.

Yeah. And I think that is the thing. Like, I think it's sometimes you might apply the lens of, oh, if he, if a video is loved by many people and has a lot of views, like it is important, that part's important, but you can't apply that to SaaS because usually like it's like the Henry Ford thing. It's like, okay, if you ask people, they would want a faster horse. Like people don't know what they need sometimes.

Correct.

Yeah.

Yeah.

All right.

What's the next topic?

Well, what do you think about that Cloudflare pay-to-play paper crawl? Launching. What do you think about that?

I saw it. I don't know how well it's going to work.

I think it's a terrible idea.

Yeah, I don't know. I'm not a fan of it. I'm not saying it won't work. I'm just not a fan of it.

So my take on this is if you're a big publisher getting millions and millions of visitors per month, maybe this might make sense. But if you're someone, Like they power 20% of the internet. That's a lot of people, right? But most people don't have big websites and website traffic's going down over time. You might as well get crawled by everything.

Correct.

And like have a chance, a fighting chance. 'Cause otherwise if you turn pay-per-crawl on, you're not going to get crawled and you're going to make what, pennies?

Not just that. You're then not going to get recommended by all these AI platforms. So then someone else is going to take your business. The crawling should be free. This shouldn't be a gatekeeper. I get why Cloudflare is doing it because they control so much of the web's traffic that they can be like, oh, this is another easy way for us to monetize and make another way for publishers to monetize as well. But if I'm a publisher, I'm like, so I'd be— I'm happy with this model rolling out. I know that sounds bad because This means that a portion of the people aren't going to be getting crawled because they're not going to get paid. So they're not going to be happy and they'll be like, no, you're not allowed to crawl. And that makes me happy as a marketer because it just means I have less competition.

Yeah. I don't think many people are going to turn this on. I think they'll make some revenue from it. I don't think it's going to change Cloudflare's business. And by the way, I think you and I both use Cloudflare. I think it's a great company, but you actually had, Their stock is still doing well. I think you had a piece—

All-time high, not all-time high. In 2021, they were higher, but for the last few years, they're at all-time highs.

I thought you had a post in here or a topic in here where it talks about what you actually need to rank in LLMs, right?

I posted that on Twitter.

Oh, you did? Maybe it's worth talking about here.

So when you think about LLMs, I kind of had one topic in here.

Yeah, listicles.

And it's about listicles.

Yeah, just go for that.

When you think about listicles, you know, we're seeing with a lot of these LLM platforms, they're not as sophisticated as Google. I don't mean that in a bad way. When you look at Google and someone's typing in, or there's a, you get a link from someone, they know a New York Times link in theory is more valuable than a link from neilpatel.com. Just the reality, New York Times has much more authority. If Your website, your company's around marketing, sure. A link from Neil Patel can be very valuable because it's a similar audience. But other, outside of that, a link usually from New York Times is always going to be neilpatel.com. Now, when you look at Google, they also know an article from New York Times is better than and more trustworthy than abcxyz.com. I'm making up a domain name, right? Because New York Times has more authority. But what we're seeing with the LLMs is if I just bombard the internet with listicles of like the best ABM software and I keep—

Okay.

Yeah, and I keep mentioning your product and it's on websites that have links, you don't need a lot, but enough where they're getting indexed and I bombard it and there's like, I'm creating like 20 articles a month consistently. And there are other competitors, but you're always number one and you're praised the best. The LLMs are just pulling and you're getting placed way higher. From everything we're seeing, it is the easiest way to get the LLMs to recommend you. It's called guest posting, which is old school SEO tactic, but instead of a link, you're just having them talk about your company or technically you're guest posting. So you're just mentioning your company and you're mentioning it at the top and why it's the best. And then you're mentioning other competitors and you just bombard the internet with it and the LLMs are just pulling from it and they're saying you are the best.

Dude, I have a thesis on this, right? So, okay, here's how I think LLMs will rank you in the future. So when I use GenSpark or Manners or any of these super agents like Perplexity Labs or Deep Research or whatever, they're so powerful at quickly crawling videos and crawling anything, crawling your social profile where I'm like, they will just look at a brand instead of looking at links all the time. It's very easy to tell if this brand is legit, right?

Yeah.

So if what you're saying is true, that listicles are back and you just need to bombard the internet with them, and then maybe have your company at number 1 or whatever. But if you're also a strong brand yourself, like a personal brand like yourself, for example, or like use your name as the author for these, I think you get a double whammy there. You get a double plus. So I'm like, man, we should test this for like 30 days or something where it's just like every article that we put out on our blog.

Oh no, I already tested this out.

Okay, how's it going?

It works.

It works.

Yeah.

There you go. So I do think LLMs are not going to rank so much on links, I think links will still be important, but I think your brand is going to continually rise and it's so easy for these things to just quickly figure out who the heck you are instead of relying on link signals.

Yes. And if you can just end up, like if you bombarded the internet with 1,000 articles talking about different variations, think about prompts people would use and you're always rated highly and talked about the best and it's thorough. It can't just be a crappy—

Make sure it's quality, guys.

Yeah, it has to be quality. It's authentic and real and they can look at other places and see similar stuff. Like, you know, I say the last part because you want to be ethical. Of course, you don't want to just badmouth the competitor. You want to be honest. It just helps you get mentioned in all the LLMs and do well. I do think eventually they will adjust and they'll put different weight on different types of websites.

Yeah, dude.

And they could say they're doing that right now, but we're not saying that. Just being honest.

But it's seeing what?

We're not seeing them put a lot more weight on different publications. We're just seeing that you just blast the web with listicles and you rank for like best ABM software and variations of that. Like, yeah, what software's— what's the best software for B2B SaaS companies to use? You know, and you just always list you in different variations of your ideal customer profile. And then you just get customers.

This is how it's been early days of SEO, guys. So, but we would just say you want to shield yourself by, by making sure it's quality and having a human in the loop ideally. Yeah. Don't just spam the, the, the, the correct, the short way is usually not the way, but this is still a shorter way. Um, by the way, did you see this post? Um, you probably didn't, but this was from, uh, Greg Eisenberg. So, um, he talks about how it's insane how many AI reply bots and AI faceless channels now roam on TikTok, X, and IG. And it's becoming a new normal, right? And he's saying that, look, there's one account that got 2.3 million followers pumping out motivational content and it pulls like 500K views a video. And that's pretty significant.

That's a lot.

And so he's saying, look, we've crossed a weird territory where AI accounts can outrank most humans and followers. People form real emotions with bots. Engagement is higher on synthetic content than on authentic posts. Nobody notices or cares that it's fake. I think that works for like, if you're doing like travel content or like wide TAM content, like health content, motivational content, maybe that works well. I don't know about health.

Depends on the health.

Yeah. Like you want to get it from like a legit doctor.

Yeah.

Like Andrew Huberman. Yeah, maybe that one. It depends.

Unless it's like health, like why you should exercise more.

But travel or like even like even generic relationship advice is what he's saying here. And so he says, look, it reminds me of the demand media era. And I don't know if he's calling it demand media, but that reminds me of eHow. And so my whole thing is, look, if everyone starts making these faceless channels and things like that, so he's like, your competition now is the agent farm that never sleeps and never misses trending audio. I don't know about that yet. I don't know how I feel about it. I don't know about it yet. But this is where I kind of disagreed with it. And he's like, builders who move fast, it might be the biggest attention arbitrage ever. But then I was just like, we tested this with pure AI content, it just doesn't do as well. And I was looking at some of these channels, it's like most of it doesn't do that well right now. I'm all for it if it does well. But even listening to Brett Malinowski and that CEO of Clue.ly talk about it, they're like, it's just not there right now.

Yeah.

I think it's a little overhyped in the moment. Not saying it won't work, but this is where I think sometimes people go a little too far. What do you think?

I agree with that.

I don't think it's a new arbitrage yet.

I don't think it's a new arbitrage yet. And then go find out how easy it is to monetize this content. It is not easy to monetize it. The way I've seen people monetize it the most, and I'm not recommending this, is people creating, and I'm not saying there's anything right or wrong with this, I'm not judging, There's people creating AI content and monetizing it through OnlyFans. I've seen that.

Does it work?

From the data that some of the articles I've read, some of these people are making 8 figures a year from that.

Wow.

Because remember we did dinner in Germany with a guy, with a marketer who—

He managed real OnlyFans people.

He managed real OnlyFans people.

Yeah.

And what was his number one issue?

They were too much of a pain to work with.

Because when he started making them money, they would go off and spend the money.

They're unreliable.

And then they were unreliable and they wouldn't keep working. So then he couldn't make consistent income on his end Because he was taking a percentage of the revenues. So then with AI, you don't have to deal with the person just taking a vacation.

Yeah.

And you can get 'em to continually produce.

You get the cut.

And then imagine someone paying you a lot of money. I don't know how OnlyFans work, but let's say there's a premium feature.

Yeah.

I don't know if you can, like, someone can get personalized content or FaceTime or I don't know, whatever it is. I don't know. And you can now have AI personalize it for that individual.

Yeah.

Because your cost isn't really there and you can scale.

Yeah.

Not just 10 people or 50 people, you can scale to millions of people and you can make even more money. But I read an interesting article, I believe FaceTime is blocking nudity. Was it FaceTime that said that?

FaceTime?

Is it FaceTime?

Wait, wait, they block nudity?

They block nudity.

Wait, how do you block nudity on FaceTime?

You force it usually. It's not necessarily in So it's not the app. And when people are doing nudity, is it— are they sharing like— you're single or you know people. Is it like they're FaceTiming someone else and they're like sex talking or whatever it's called? Is it called sex talking?

I don't know. Sex talking?

Yeah, so monitoring a lot of this live. Ah.

See, Noah knows his stuff here.

Yeah, Noah knows his stuff.

Yeah. Anyway. Well, okay, but look, I think this will proliferate in certain areas and I think it'll, it's just not there in a lot of other areas. So we won't call it an arbitrage on this podcast until we feel like it's an arbitrage and we've seen it.

Where I also think AI, not necessarily content farms, but AI content will help is when the quality's there, be it content, having someone who's the AI face of a corporation will be really useful.

Yeah.

Because what we face right now when we talk to a lot of companies is They don't have a person who could be the face and you struggle, they struggle to find someone and they don't want to, they're like, oh, well they could leave and there could be issues. And then when you have an AI person, it just eliminates a lot of that.

I think the model right now is you hire in-house influencers and you pay them and try to incentivize them to stay. Or you do, I do like the Cluey model. I kind of want to test this where they have 50 content interns and they hired these people, they paid them $20 to $40 per video. Okay. And they, they get bonus if they make a video that has over a million views, you get $1,000 for that. That's a good deal. And his whole argument is if you're like 18 to 21, if you're a broke college kid or whatever, you know how these algorithms work and you want to hire the people who are up-and-comers. And so you just look at your For You page or whatever and you hire these people and you get 50 of these content creators, right? And then eventually I think what's going to happen is you're going to have like an AI spokesperson. And but I think right now, the— especially if you're creating, if you have like a consumer app, I think you can do this 50 interns thing and just see how it goes. I don't know if it'd work for us.

I don't think it works as well in B2B.

I think B2B, the best thing we can drive it to is probably our newsletter.

Yes.

But like not our software or not our services.

Yep.

Yeah, but okay, one more thing before we go, 'cause we're on this topic right now. I don't know if you started doing this, I feel like this is something you're doing too, but this guy talked about this whole concept of GTM engineer. And it's basically like, you know, you have like a person who will, you know, help with reporting on the sales side, more doing, they'll work with tools like Zapier or Clay or N8N or whatever to build these workflows. And I'm just like, We should hire AI automation interns. And so we've been— all these people, we put this job post up, just a job post, and it's all developers that are applying for it. And we just hired someone. I think we might hire 2 more, but they're all in on building these workflows, all in on making things more efficient. I'm just like, oh, this is great. And they're like, dude, we just want to learn. We just want to work harder right now. And the things that they're building are really sophisticated. And I'm just like, how do I get more? Because one of our mutual friends, he's like, he hired these 2 kids out of college and they're all in on AI. They sleep on the office and I'm just like, oh, this is great.

We don't have it to that extent where they sleep in the office, but yes, we have a team of people that just do that.

But are we talking AI automation interns where they're like super young?

They're not interns.

Okay, these are full-timers.

They're full-timers and their goal is to automate workflows and systems and processes and stuff that people are doing. That's, we start with mundane, boring stuff that's easy, replicatable, that has very little like ambiguity, it's more black and white, there's not really much gray. That's the stuff that we have them focus on first, because then it's more likely to succeed.

I think we're, for this team, it's going to be, we're probably gonna have AI content operators join too, which can help like chop up content or, you know, even like do a content farm if possible. But I think this is a nice way, if you don't have a team like how Neil's established right now, you can have these people that are AI native, and then probably have them report to someone technical. And then they're just fixing things throughout your organization. And maybe you're bonusing them on things fixed. How are you bonusing them right now, if at all?

I don't even know how they get paid.

All right.

I didn't hire them. I just know we've been doing this for more than a year.

Yeah. So I think this is great. I think it doesn't have to be N8N. It doesn't have to be like Zapier. You can figure out what you want to use. You can even use Clay for this. But I think my vision of this is this team is AI native to start with. And then eventually in the next 6 to 9 months, we want the entire team to be AI native. So anyway, anything else from your side?

I think that's it. It was a fun session today.

All right, that's it for today, guys. We will see you tomorrow.