How Stupid Content Is Bankrupting Big Companies

This guy works, he hosts a podcast with Professor Galloway. You know Scott Galloway?

Mm-hmm.

Okay, so I'm going to show you these charts because Neil, you like charts. So TBPN average livestream viewership versus clip viewership, what do you see here?

I can't read it, my screen's too small.

Oh my God, do you have like a—

TBPN average livestream viewership versus clip viewership. Live views is 7K, clip views is 257K?

Exactly, which is what we talked about earlier, right? And this is from sources are Colin and Samir and Prof G. So he's basically saying, look, this is, this is where legacy media is like, cute, but clips don't make money. And so he's saying this is where they're wrong. Unlike most media organizations, TBN bakes ads directly into their clips. At the end of each 1-minute snippet, the clip was brought to you by— ads are enabled in TBN to generate $5 million revenue last year, on track for $30 million in 2026. The podcast isn't so much A podcast as a vehicle for— it isn't so much a podcast as a vehicle for generating clips. The same could be said of many podcasts, by the way, but the ingenuity of TBPN is that they're the first organization whose business model actually reflected that. So when I think about some of the podcasts I listen to right now, I was listening to a Peptides episode with Diary of a CEO, and you can tell by the way he's asking questions, it's just to get the clips. It's to get the clips, right? And you can see sometimes when I record, I was like, Neil, let me get that clip. Let me get that clip, right? And so, when we do get that clip, when we take this, like when our clips take off, Neil, you know they take off. It's just we don't— I'll make an open call. If you're amazing at clips, Neil and I, we are looking to have you for the Marketing School Podcast just to amplify what it is we're doing because we've been doing this for such a long time. Now look at this, Neil. So I'm going to read this off. So you look at average livestream viewership versus clip viewership, okay? April 2026. Hasan Piker, don't really know who that is. Nick Fuentes, I think he's a political commentator. And then Klavik. Clavicular. Um, I, I've seen him in clips. So look at this, average livestream viewership, okay, 33K, which I think is a lot. Average clip viewership, 706,000. Nick Fuentes, 612,000, 19K for average livestream. And then, uh, Clavicular, okay, 16K and then 251K.

That's a lot.

Okay, now I think there's one more chart over here, so So it's no secret that legacy media isn't doing well. Over the past 5 years, companies like Disney, Warner Bros., Discovery, and Comcast have lost a lot more than a third of their value. No amount of streaming acquisitions, rebrands, or spinoffs have been able to stop the bleeding. So if you look at this, Neil, we got Comcast going down and to the right, Disney going down and to the right, and then Warner Bros. is actually— they were down before, but they're coming back up.

Dude, it's interesting because I was in New York earlier this week and someone was telling me how all these social creators are making a killing. Some of it's because of their audience, some of it's because of live streaming, like the Twitches of the world and stuff like that. And what they're breaking down is a lot of them got really popular because of certain viral clips, and then from there they started building up their audience. So one of the guys there was talking about IShowSpeed. Have you seen IShowSpeed?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know who that is.

And he always says that phrase, I can beat him, I can beat him, and everything, right?

Yeah.

And I don't know if you saw the chart that breaks down how fast he is if you compared him to any US college men's track star, right? So if you're in a college in the US, he wouldn't even rank in the top 100, top 200. Now, I'm not saying he's not fast. I think it was something like he was ranked somewhere between 300 and 600. I'm not saying he's not fast. He's much quicker than me. He probably can literally run laps around me. But both of them, yes. And the point I'm making here is people assume if you can go viral and get lots and lots of views, you make lots of money. So we were talking about IShowSpeed and they're like, dude, he makes— someone's telling me on the other side of the table, like, he makes over $100 million. I'm like, there's no way IShowSpeed makes over $100 million. Oh, for sure he does. You think he does? You should see how much revenue he makes from—

Well, not $100 million a year. I think he's, he's, he's worth over $100 million. That's what— that was what I was trying to say.

Sure, he could be worth over $100 million, but they're saying he makes over $100 million. A year. And I'm like, that's way too high. Because remember how MrBeast ended up breaking down his monetization of YouTube and he had people guess on X and it was way lower? You and I have seen a lot of YouTube monetization stats. It doesn't do as well as people think. The key here is not necessarily about the number of views, it's the topic you discuss, because the topic you discuss affects how monetizable it is. And if you're just creating content that goes viral about you being fast, There's only so much money you can make. But on the flip side, if I look at my most profitable videos, they were actually me talking about AI from an ad revenue perspective. Now just think about how much companies are talking about AI. The amount of money being dumped into AI right now is so ridiculous. You have so many multi-billion and even trillion-dollar companies that a lot of the world has not heard of. Like there's literally so many AI companies that are worth billions of dollars that generate a lot of revenue that if you ask the average Joe, they'd be like, I don't even know what you're talking about. about. But on the flip side, you ask anyone about IShowSpeed, he's done an amazing job at branding himself, amazing job at marketing. A lot of people know him, but yet the revenue isn't there. It's when you do clipping, I would recommend that you do clips for your ideal audience around the type of content that you're monetizing, not about the stuff that gets views. And if you do that, you won't get as many views, but you may get double or triple than what you used to when you were talking about your content before.

Actually, Neil, that's a good point because I do get quite a bit of outreach now because obviously you've seen it firsthand. All I do is nerd out on AI right now and that's all I like to talk about. And it does generate— people are like, oh, I want to talk about this. I want to talk— literally there's calls and calls and calls where people are just like, hey, we want to do what you're doing, right? And that's from us creating this content about this stuff. And I'm sure it generates hopefully stuff for you guys too. But I want to come back to this for a moment, Neil. If you look at this, so I think he explains a good story, this guy Ed, okay? So look, he's talking about Comcast, Disney, Warner Brothers. He's like, their problem is simple, legacy media over here. People don't watch traditional content anymore. They watch clips. Since before the pandemic, time spent watching video content on social media has more than doubled. And in that same time period, Meta's revenues have nearly tripled and TikTok's have grown tenfold. This really hit home for me the night of the Oscars. I asked my girlfriend, who is a, I think, Timothée Chalamet fan, if she wanted to watch it. And to my surprise, she said no. Why? I asked. Her answer was clarifying. It's too long and boring. I'll just wait for the morning and watch the clips. There's only one path back for legacy media. They have to win the clip economy. The bad news is it'll feel beneath them. The good news is it will be easy. Legacy media is better at original content than anyone. And original content is to clips what Lightspeed Crude is to gasoline. Put another way, Disney and Warner Brothers are sitting on top of a clip field the size of a Permian Basin. I'll give you— dude, Neil, so you know what I do on YouTube Shorts sometimes? I watch The Rock from WWE back in the day, and I just watch all his, all his promos, right? Because it's so funny. That's what these legacy media companies need to do. Quick break for agency owners. You know the content bottleneck. Clients want more content, but writers are more expensive, freelancers are inconsistent, and you Can't scale. ClickFlow fixes that. It creates production-grade content your clients will actually approve, not generic AI slop. It's content that actually matches their voice. One agency using it reported saving 90 hours a month per person. That's margin back in your pocket. Plus, it handles internal linking and content audits, which most agencies charge extra for. There's a 14-day free trial at clickflow.com. Your ops team will thank you. Back to the show.

Dude, on YouTube? Sometimes when I'm bored and sitting in a hotel room and I can't go to sleep, I'll go to YouTube and I'll watch clips of Billions. You know that TV show with Bob Odenkirk?

What is wrong with you, man? You still think about business when you're bored.

So I'm watching like all the business moments, like the clippable moments. Um, same with Landman.

I don't know if you've seen Landman.

It's about selling oil and monetizing it. Great show on Paramount. It's with, uh, Billy Bob Thornton. Um, and there's amazing clips in there as well. It's, it's all about just running an oil business and You know, monopolizing it.

So that's so fun. But, but you and I are experienced even though we're older now. I, I hate to say that we're, you know, I, I'm about to hit my 40s. You're, you're in your 40s. So, um, but it's, it's the world is passing us by because now you're at the age where you're just like, son, at, at, at your age, I was doing this, right? You never thought you would say that before, right?

No, but I do say that.

Dude, you know, um, as you drink your water, have you played around with, uh, ChatGPT Images 2.0. I got to show you this.

I have not. I saw articles about it, but I haven't played. You're talking about their new release? Yesterday was a new release on 5.5, I believe.

Yeah, so they released 3 things this week. 5.5, they released— so ChatGPT 5.5, they released Images. Okay, so that's their like Nano Banana competitor. And then they released Workspace Agents. That's their idea of having agents that can work with you. So let me show you just 2.0 real quick. This is— I was just messing around with this on the couch yesterday, Neil, and this is the new version. I'm like, this is a version of how I might want the Single Brain site to look. So those of you that can't see this right now, this is like a landing page design and it's like your revenue system running 24/7 in 30 days. And I really like Japanese culture. So you can see there's like Japanese sketches here. Even the characters, the agents are Japanese as well. There's like a samurai here. And I was like, by the way, I want you to pull inspiration from fin.ai. I want you to pull inspiration from all these other SaaS sites. I'm like, dude, This is like, you know, 80, 85% there. It needs some cleanup. You know, I'm not a designer per se, but this is, it's not a bad start.

This is for your own website?

Yeah, this would be for singlebrain.com.

Oh, cool.

Yeah, but like you have your own, I'm sure there's certain inspirations you like and things like that and you can get it there. And then the cool thing is you can then work, the best workflow now for ChatGPT Images 2.0 is to do it in ChatGPT Images 2.0 and then bring it over. to Claude Design because Claude Design eats up credits really quickly. So you finish it, like get it close, get your concepts done in Images 2.0 and ChatGPT, and then move it over to Claude Design. And then you combine those 2 and you have something really good. That's a good workflow.

And I don't have data on this, but from what I read, GPT-5.5 is much more efficient on the cost end.

I— so you know what I did do? Let me show you something, Neil. You want to talk about costs? I'll show you my personal cost here. Let me show you something. You'll like this, Neil.

Oh, you got it down from the 7 grand.

This is— and this is my personal cost. Okay. So let me show you this real quick. Let me share my screen. So guys, just for context, just, I was spending $7,500 myself, which some people were laughing at about Instagram. I'm like, more power to you to laugh at it. I just think it's going to go up for everyone. But what do you see in the chart here?

Per month, Eric was spending $7,500 per month on himself.

Dude. But look at this over here. So it was going up. I mean, as high as $413 a day this month. And then it basically, I dropped it down to $30. And I think today, today I figured out how to optimize it. I think it should drop to basically zero per day going forward. So you want to know how I dropped my cost from $7,500 to zero?

You have a Mac Mini that's set up and you're using some open source models?

No, even easier than that, Neil. I don't even need that. In fact, that was stupid money spent so far. All you need to do now, because OpenCLAW and Claude Code, they were shut off or Claude was shut off for a while. You just switch to Claude CLI because they turned it back on now. So if you switch to Claude, you could just use your Mac subscription to $200 you pay a month and just run it through that. And then if that— once you run—

Max subscription of $200? What are you talking about, max subscription?

So Claude has a Claude Max subscription. That's their $200.

I think it's in Mac, like Apple, like Mac.

Yeah. If you want to bring your cost down from $7,500 to $0 using Anthropic, using Claude, all you have to do is switch it to the CLI version and then just use your subscription. And then you might be thinking, oh, if I run out of tokens, what am I going to do? Here's what you do. If you're paying for OpenAI, which I am, the $200, You have a fallback that switches to the OpenAI OAuth, which switches to 5.5, and only then, if both of them fail, if you run out of tokens, then you switch it to the API.

Yeah, they're losing so much money on you.

But you know what's crazy, Neil? Dude, I listened to another Patel today, Dylan Patel. He runs, um, Semiconductors Analysis. You've heard this guy, right?

No.

Okay, so he, he apparently, he does all the semiconductor analysis, like a research firm. And I think they probably do like $100 million a year. So last year he was saying he was spending tens of thousands a year on tokens. He said this year they're on track to spend $7 million as a research firm. Okay. And he's like, their payroll's like $25 million a year. So I have to assume they're doing like $100 or something like that. Okay. Um, and so I was talking to one of our mutual friends and I was like, how much do you think you're gonna spend on tokens this year? He's like, at least, at least a million. I'm like, I'm like, dude, you're gonna be spending a lot more. So how much do you think you guys are gonna spend this year on tokens?

Um, Low end, if I had to guess, maybe $5, $6 million. High end, maybe $15 million.

Yeah, exactly right. I think it's just going to go up because the thing is we all want the best intelligence, and so we're willing to pay for the frontier models even though whatever is like open source is like pretty close. I'm like, not close enough. You want the best of the best.

I think we'll see a switch on our end this year in which a lot of the frontier models will not be needed as much for a lot of the work that marketers are doing.

Yeah, I mean, what I would recommend doing is you can work with whatever agent you have and build a smart router where it's like, if it's not strategic work or it's not building or you're not coding, it should fall back to some of these other models that are open source that won't cost you as much. So I think you're still going to need to do that, but at least right now with this, guys, use the CLI, okay, Claude CLI, or use, uh, use your, your max, your, uh, your ChatGPT subscriptions and then have it fall back to the API. You're going to save a lot of money.

Dude, we were talking to, or we surveyed, I believe it was 300 companies, 100 SMB, 100 mid-sized businesses, 100 large corporations. You want to take a guess how most of these people are building agents?

How?

They're outsourcing it to either agencies or freelancers.

Isn't that ironic?

It is. Very few people are building agents internally. It's almost all outsourced work.

Yeah, dude, when we talk to people right now on these agent calls, I'm like, so what are you guys doing? They, one, they want us to build the agents because they wanted to also make their people more AI fluent. So because we do a pilot process where we're onboarding them, um, they're like, oh, we're down for that, right? Because they want to learn. So I don't think agencies are going anywhere. I think they're going to be more in demand than ever, um, with kind of what we're seeing. I'm sure you guys are seeing the same thing too.

Yeah.

Yeah. So, okay.

Now it's— dude, I was talking to Andrew Dumas. You know Andrew Dumas?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I've met him many times.

Yeah.

And we were talking, we're just like, we're starting to feel like SaaS companies, we were texting about this the other day, are becoming like dinosaurs. You know, a lot of them aren't adapting. A lot of them aren't really needed in this new world. I'm not talking about the ones that are controlling the data. I know there's a lot of publicly traded companies that are adapting, but I'm talking about a lot of the smaller ones. And then what we're finding from a marketing angle, when you look at a lot of the SMB SaaS companies, They're much harder to market these days than they ever have been before. And the main reason is, is when you think about marketing, it's all about solving problems and showcasing the benefits. It's really hard to do with traditional SaaS that hasn't adapted because people don't want to look at dashboards as much anymore. They just want software to just solve the problem for them. I'm not talking about AI. I'm not talking about traditional SaaS. When I say people just want the problem solved for them, they don't give a crap if it's AI or traditional software. They just want to click buttons and then just the software or AI or whatever you want to call it just does it on their own. And you can classify it however you want, but the end consumer just wants to pay and something solve it for them in the least amount of work, the quickest amount of time, the most cost efficient, and Do it accurately and produce the best results. And it's hard to do, of course, all of that through technology in today's world, but it's getting better and better.

I think the world we're going to go to in terms of pricing is you're going to have— even when I look at ChatGPT, how they're pricing their workspace agents. So right now it's free until May 6th. And the way the workspace agents are, their agents, you pay the $20 a month or $25 a month for your, like, the team accounts for ChatGPT, and then you can enable the agents. Then they're going to charge you based on credits or tokens, right? And then that's how they're going to make their money there. Because with the agents, it's kind of, sometimes it's hard to attribute the outcomes that you're driving. Now, if you're an agency, like Neil and I both have agencies, in some cases, maybe you still charge a base fee and maybe there's like a token overage that you might tack on with your clients. In some cases, you can add on outcomes if it's easy to track, but that's harder to track for the majority of people. And most enterprises aren't willing to do that unless you have a really good relationship with them, but even then, still tougher. But I think that's where things are going. By the way, I'll give you a fun thing here, Neil. Someone said in the chat over here, 'cause we're live, someone said, Carl Rau, why Neil looks sad? Let me tell you why he looks sad, because it's his birthday today. He feels a little older, that's why he looks sad. Okay, so anyway, let me show you some stats over here, Neil, because you like graphs. You ready?

Yeah.

Okay, so check this out. All right, so check this out. The economy is splitting, AI is the fault line. So on Ramp, November 2022 to November 2025, so they're the credit cards company, Uh, tech finance company. Annualized revenue growth by AI intensity. So this is comparing heavy AI users versus moderate AI versus no AI spend. These are the companies, okay? So look at this. If you're a heavy AI use company, 27% growth, okay? Annualized revenue growth by AI intensity. Moderate AI, 18%, okay? Which is pretty good still. No AI spend, 3%, which is US nominal GDP. Look at this over here. Right. I just find that fascinating. Yeah.

I didn't know Ramp tracks finances. I thought they just track credit card spending.

Yeah, I, I know they track everything. So we're actually switching over to Ramp right now because they have an API versus bill.com or something like that doesn't. So you can query whatever you want and you can spin up, you know, virtual cards and control your expenses a lot tighter. Dude, imagine talking to an agent within Slack, asking about your expense stuff, asking about your finance stuff. You're going to be able to move a lot faster. So that's what we're doing with it.

Yeah, I think I told you on one of the previous podcasts, I've been so loyal to American Express for years. You know, I think their marketing is great. Their product's great. From the business end, you know, they just switched to Ramp, or I'm pretty sure it was Ramp. And I was shocked because someone told me I'm getting a new credit card and I'm like, what am I getting a new credit card for? They're like, yeah, we're using, I believe it's Ramp for our corporate cards. But I don't think, and I've never used Ramp personally, from outside of just a credit card, because I've been with some other companies that have given me ramp credit cards, but outside of that, I've never used them for accounting or anything like that. We still stick with NetSuite, which is really expensive, but yeah, it works well for enterprise.

And that being said, we will catch you all later. Goodbye. Have a great weekend.