How one influencer tanked a stock by 80%, The fall of a $5.7B company, and more

How one influencer tanked a stock by 80%. Eric, you want to guess who the influencer is? Uh, yeah. MKHB. I don't even know what MKHB is.

Marcus Brownlee on Fisker?

No, uh, Oprah Winfrey.

Okay, so what happened with Oprah? So we have 2 actually now, so go, go with Oprah Winfrey first.

All right, so Oprah Winfrey has been on the Weight Watchers board for a long time. She also bought, I think, 10% of the company years and years ago. So Overall, the you know the stock has been declining. Markets have shifted, and the big reason markets have shifted is things like Ozempic. Are you familiar with Ozempic, the weight loss drug?

GLP one.

Yeah.

There you go. You inject yourself. You end up losing quite a bit of weight.

This is how Neil and I are so skinny because we take Ozempic.

Just kidding. Nothing wrong with Ozempic, but yeah, we don't take any of those drugs. I have the opposite problem. I have I struggle to gain weight. And what Oprah pretty much ended up saying is, hey, I'm leaving the Weight Watchers board, which she did. The stock didn't just tank from that. It's been tanking over time. And a lot of it has to do with the weight loss drugs. And then Oprah pretty much publicly stated that she is taking weight loss drugs. So instead of the Weight Watchers, eat healthy, you get points for different types of foods, you're using calculators and all these programs, She just went to using drugs. And I'm not saying there's anything wrong with using the drugs or not, but that goes against what Weight Watchers does. So that pretty much tanked the stock. That's the power of influencer marketing.

So, okay, when did she do this? Because it said Weight Watchers CEO just sent an internal memo. When did she leave the board?

It was recently. The stock has been going down over time, you know, even before all of this. If you look at, if you go back—

So past month down -44%, year to date down 75%.

Yeah, it's down quite a bit. And if you look at six months, it's down even more. But she's been, you know, she's just been using a drug. And look, there's nothing wrong with that, but that goes against the mission of the company.

Here, there's one from the Wall Street Journal: Weight Watchers stock jumps after Oprah clarifies weight loss drug comments. And this was this happened October ninth of two thousand twenty-three. I didn't know about this. Did you read the Wall Street Journal piece?

I did not. Either way, she left the board, and she's admitted that she uses drugs.

So, but I mean, the other thing too is is so Marcus Brown. John Lee, he's one of the most powerful, I would say, because he has a lot of followers, a lot of viewers. He's like a tech reviewer, right? He reviews a lot of cool products. And so, Fisker, which is an electric motor company, he basically said— so, Fisker wouldn't give him a demo car to review. And everyone, like when you launch a new product, he's the guy that you want to go to because he's going to push a lot of reach, right? And so, Fisker wouldn't give him a car. They're like, no, we're not ready, blah, blah, blah. So he went ahead and he went to go get a Fisker car on his own, get a demo car, and he's like, this is the worst car I've ever driven. This is like by far the worst I've ever driven. And so when you look at Fisker stock, and I don't even know if they should be a publicly traded company because not a lot of people are out there driving Fiskers. They've had a lot of troubles over the years, but I think this basically sealed their fate. And I think it's, you know, when one of the world's most powerful reviewers wants to get their hands on your product and you're not willing to do it, That's a negative signal. And what do you think is going to happen? Of course, they're going to go out there and they're going to go get a version that they can use.

So, dude, if you look at Fisker, last 5 days down 54%, 1 month 76%, 6 months 97%. You know, I don't know how much you can get lower than that, but the stock at one point, dude, this thing came out on market at $10 and it's $0.17 and the market cap is less than $100 million.

By the way, Neil and I have an agency owners group called the Agency Owners Association. All you have to do, just go to marketingschool.io/agency. Once again, it's marketingschool.io/agency to learn more. And now back to the show. Speaking of falls of companies, I mean, there's another one where you've heard of Vice, right?

Yeah, Vice was the media company and they did something, I think it was with Disney or something like that. And it was just, it backfired.

They've done a lot of things. And to be fair, I think their journalism's pretty good. I mean, I remember watching some of their stuff on YouTube where they'll have like drug dealers behind the scenes or like sharing their stories or like prostitutes behind the scenes or people that would hold up like poker games, right? And people that were like legit killers, but then— or cartel people and you would like hear their stories, right? And here's the interesting thing for Vice. I'm looking at vice.com on Ahrefs right now. 1.2 million visits per month, right? They rank for what, about 1.6 million keywords. There's a lot of traffic that they drive, but here's the thing. This was— the headline here is, how did a Brooklyn media giant valued at $5.7 billion just a few years ago wind up going bankrupt and folding its newsroom? So basically Vice is gone now, right? And so, it's this whole interesting story, but at the end of the day, so Disney, by the way, Bob Iger held talks with Shane Smith, I believe, who's one of the co-founders, about buying the company for $3.4 billion. And so recently, June 23rd, an announcement went out that a bankruptcy court had approved a $350 million sale of Vice to one of its prior investors, which is hedge fund Fortress Group. And yeah, I think it just goes to show you that not everything is all sunshine and rainbows at the end of the day. It's really hard to run a media company, especially when you just rely on ads. For monetization.

Media companies are one of the worst business models. Same with newsletter businesses. Oh, I'm charging you to subscribe to my newsletter. You're going to make more money selling to your audience than you are by monetizing through subscriptions of newsletter subscribers or by monetizing through ad revenue on your website, unless you're a massive platform like TikTok, Google, Facebook, et cetera.

Yep. Dude, I'm just looking at this Vice. Oh, because— guys, by the way, since Neil and I are recording virtually, I can share my screen here. So, when you look at this valuation cliff over here, check this out. So, 2013, $1.4 billion. Rupert Murdoch's 21st Century Fox paid $70 million for a 5% stake.

Okay.

So, then you do the math, it's $1.4 billion. $2.5 billion in 2014, A&E Networks paid $250 million for a 10% share while venture capital fund Crossover Ventures spent another $250 million for a 10% stake. So everyone's buying pieces. I'm sure he's getting some secondaries here too, where he's taking some money off the table. And then $4 billion. So Disney made 2— makes 2 bets of $200 million each in late 2015. These later wrote down the investments to the tune of $157 and $353 million impairment charge. And then $5.7 billion in 2017, private equity firm TPG injects $450 million into the company. And in 2023, $350 million is the valuation after filing for bankruptcy protection. And they make a winning bid for the company. So it just goes to show you again, like, by the way, 2013 to 2017, that's when the zero interest rate policy era, right? Everything's going well, everything's going up into the right, bigger, bigger, bigger, bigger. And then 2023, it's like, not really.

So speaking of interest rates, you know, now they're projecting that it's only going to go down 3 times this year. The inflation, at least in the US, has been pretty stubborn and has come down quite a bit when you look at it a year ago. Compared to now, but it's not getting to that 2% mark as quick as they want.

From what I read, it was the intention has always been 3 cuts, but it's just going to be later in the year. That's what I've read.

Yeah, but they're also saying that the Fed usually doesn't make cuts too close to the election because they don't want to sway voters from one candidate to another.

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. I think you have a topic here on what do we do in a continued changing environment, right?

Yeah, dude, it's so funny because if you think about marketing, there's so many things that are changing. TikTok maybe gets banned. You have AI and you have people like Sam Altman saying that, oh, 95% of agency services are pretty much going to go away. You have stocks like Google that tank because of images that are portrayed incorrectly, right? When you say, you know, create an image of our founding fathers, it is creating something drastically different. In marketing, just so many things are changing so fast. You know, it is tough to stay ahead because you don't know what actually is going to be permanent and what's going to stick around versus what's not. And it's funny because a lot of people have been telling me like, yeah, we stay ahead by reading. I don't think reading actually keeps it where you're staying ahead. You know, just look at Google. Reading what ChatGPT is doing and OpenAI is doing is not going to keep you ahead. You got to go and execute. But I think the big thing that helps companies stay ahead that they don't do enough of, and you and I do quite a bit of this, is experimentation. Some of these things will stick and stay around, some of them won't, and they'll be fads. You know, neither Eric or I think AI is a fad, but if you're not experimenting and testing things out, you're just not going to do well in this market.

You know, I was thinking this morning, so I was walking back from the gym, I was like, I wonder what Neil's doing with all the, You know, how you can use what Neil can do with Ubersuggest and the AnswerThePublic data to train different models, right? So what are you doing around that right now?

Dude, so we're taking so much of our data, taking private instances and having AI compute, analyze, help us find out trends.

And then we're running experiments based on the data that we're seeing.

And we're doing this for both SEO, paid, and social.

So, but couldn't you build products around all the data that you're ingesting?

Yes, but we don't, A, want to give away the data.

And yeah, so you wouldn't sell your data?

We wouldn't sell our data. And B, we don't want to end up running the business of, hey, you take the data and then you educate people based off of it. We want to end up going with, you take the data, You build something that helps people get the results in the most convenient automated way as possible. And I say as possible because it's not going to be all 100% automated. And then you help people just achieve their end goal versus education and training or any of that.

Dude, speaking of SEO products, there's a tweet here from Gael Brenton. Wait, I don't know if I pronounced his last name. Gael Brenton from Authority Hackers. So check this out. I'm going to share my screen over here for everyone. And basically Semrush is crushing it. I'm not talking about their tool. I'm talking about their SEO. So when you look at Semrush, look at this, 24 million visits. Ironically, this is an Ahrefs screenshot of Semrush. But 24 million visits. Look, their traffic is going up and to the right. They rank for 1.1 million keywords. Their domain rating is 91. And so Gail says here, I don't think you can deny— I don't think their tool is very good, but you can't deny that Semrush SEO is on fire right now. And then here's another one, Backlinko, which was purchased by Semrush, 778,000 visitors per month, 171,000. And you can see it's slowly going up into the right. It's not as hockey stick-ish as the last graph. So let's talk about this. Yeah.

What a lot of these guys are doing, and if you look at like Backlinko and Semrush, a lot of what they're doing and what I'm seeing at least is they're updating quite a bit of old content. And it's a Wikipedia strategy. It's worked so well for Wikipedia, but for some weird reason, a lot of people don't do this in marketing. It's like consolidate your pages, update them, keep making the content amazing, especially the ones that are ranking, and you'll do well in the long run. The other thing that we've seen over the years, and I know you've seen this too, the algorithms really do prefer brands over non-brands. And Semrush being public, getting tons of news and press, the stock pricing going up and down and all these kinds of things, It does help with the branding as well.

I'm going to go in. The best thing, Neil, in my opinion here, I've kind of cheated already. I already know people have done research in the comments. So let's look at the comments. So basically this guy, Egal Stolper, says the /website folder has a lot to do with it. The cool thing, by the way, if you are using Ahrefs and you look at any website, click on the site structure. There's a button to click on site structure and you can see which pages are actually, or which subdomains or subfolders I should say, are driving the bulk of the traffic, right? And so what else are people saying here? I think a lot of people are seeing a lot of programmatic SEO and I have seen them push a lot on programmatic SEO. Translations would be another one. And what else?

What the—

these aren't even relevant comments. What's going on here? Elon. Okay, here we go. Show more replies. I was like, what is this? Okay. They're ranking for thousands of domain names that have lots of search volume and no competition, just their top pages. And then Gail says, not only. And then Deepak, this guy says, here's the other thing. It seems like they rank for irrelevant stuff too. So what is this? This competitor's page, this paraphrasing tool drives 400,000 visitors per month. This one, 1.2 million visitors per month. So it's a lot of like—

Yeah.

random competitors' pages. But, and then finally, before we move on from this, Gail says this, that's their blog without any of the PSEO, 2 million traffic and going up to the right fast. Similar story for their tool subfolder. It's not just the PSEO that's going well for them. So.

Dude, they've been doing really well as a company and they're profitable. But yeah, also, You know, if you look at the traffic growth, it is a lot of irrelevant traffic because if you look at that chart versus their revenue growth, it's not aligning one-to-one.

Yep. Anyway, food for thought on this one.

I think this is a good place.

What's that?

I was saying that's still good for them.

Yeah. Look, that is it for today. That's good food for thought. By the way, go to, if you want us, if you want to hang out with Neil and I to help you grow your agency, We got an online community, we got a live community. Just go to marketingschool.io/agency to learn more about it. And also, please don't forget to rate, review, and subscribe to this podcast. We spend a lot of time preparing. Neil and I spend extra time with each other just to help you grow your business more. So that is it for today, and we'll see you tomorrow.