People are saying they no longer use Google, Creator payouts grew 17% YoY, and more

So I have something interesting to share today. A lot of people are talking about how they don't use Google anymore and they're starting to use ChatGPT instead. I think you've seen this too, Eric, right? Like a lot of people are starting to post about this, at least on X. So we decided to look at some real data and we wanted to see what's really happening. So we looked at first SimilarWeb. If you look at OpenAI, in the month of January, they had 1.639 billion visitors. It was up 7% from the previous month. During the same period, Google had 86.57 billion visitors, up 2.8% from the previous month. So ChatGPT or OpenAI is growing at a faster pace, but it's not like Google is declining. Bing also had growth. They're starting from a much smaller base. They saw 3.9% growth over the previous month. In February, this is where it gets interesting. Both Google and Bing saw declines in traffic, but February had 2 less days than the previous month. If you take the data from February, you divide it by 29, you times it by 31, it ends up being where their traffic is pretty much the same as it was in January. But on the flip side, OpenAI, even with 2 less days, saw 1.9% growth in February. And it's just showing, although there are a lot of people talking about ChatGPT, it skyrocketed to being one of the most popular sites, but its growth is slowing down over time. Now, of course, Google and Bing are both adapting AI, and in what way, who knows? What you'll like, what you won't like over time, that's yet to be seen. But here's where it gets really interesting. Although ChatGPT has grown to be a really popular website, if you just look at it in the last 12 months, and you can see this Google Trends data, Now, a lot of people go directly, so Google Trends doesn't have everything, but if you can look at Google and ChatGPT, ChatGPT is increasing, but it's not increasing at as much of a rapid pace as it once was. Like, I can show you here, ChatGPT, you can end up seeing it, you know, I'll go worldwide, and if I end up going 2004 to present, it skyrocketed, right? It went from nothing to really crazy popularity, But if you just look at the last 12 months, the growth rate isn't that fast anymore, right? It went from, you know, start of the year at roughly 84 and it peaked at 99 or 100. It's still growing, it's just not growing as fast as it used to be. So all in all, the point I'm trying to make is if you look at the data, ChatGPT is growing. It's going to be a new channel just like There's Facebook and then there's Instagram and YouTube and TikTok and more and more social networks come up, but it doesn't mean that Facebook's dead. It's just people have multiple options. Do I think some use cases will shift from people primarily using Google to ChatGPT over time? Definitely is a possibility and I think that will happen, at least for me and maybe some other people I know, but the data's clearly showing that Google's nowhere near from dying and people are like, oh, the 10 blue links, Google's going to get crushed. I've seen that everywhere. Like you even look at a lot of the VCs out there, some of the other podcasts that are tech podcasts talking about it's just going to crush them. Well, the data's showing that ChatGPT's been around for a while now. If it's been around and it does so many amazing things, which I think the product is great by the way, it hasn't, Google hasn't seen a decrease in traffic. It hasn't crushed them yet. I get ChatGPT is changing in the future, But Google is also evolving in the future at the same time.

Yeah, I just think in tech, we're in the business of— tech is very optimistic. We're here to try to predict the future, right? Especially on these podcasts, people have to give a point of view. So I by no means think Google's going to get crushed, and nor do you. I do think they're going to lose market share over time, but it's also— I don't even think we're in the first inning right now. I think this stuff takes time too. I think the data's correct. But these people, they're in the business of making predictions. Also, that's how it gets headlines too, right? So, you know, you have to use negative words like crushed. You can't say, oh, you know, Google's slowly losing share. Like that's not going to get headlines. You know what I mean? Like anyway, going back to the last episode, so.

Yeah, but on top of that, I think a bigger impact for marketers is not ChatGPT crushing Google, it's the US banning TikTok and no one buying them. I do think someone's going to buy them if, you know, the US votes on banning TikTok. So, you know, marketers will still have that channel. But if marketers in the United States didn't have TikTok as a channel, it would hurt them.

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 creators, I actually have something pulled up from Alexis Ohanian. So check this out. So Alexis Ohanian was one of the co-founders of Reddit, which just went public. Recently. So hopefully congrats to him, but check back on these numbers in 5 years. So this is how this graph over here, those of you that can't see on YouTube, go subscribe on YouTube. It's the channel with 2,000 subs or so, but how creators make their money. So basically a research firm, eMarketer, projects creators will make $13.7 billion on social media this year, up 17% from 2023. That's really the headline that you have to look at. You can see Look, sponsored content was $7 billion last year. It's projected $8.1 billion this year. Platform payout, $2.9 billion to $3.2 billion. Affiliate content, $894 million to $1.1 billion. And then it just goes on and on, right? Like subscriptions, $212 to $274, which is a significant growth rate. What's 60 on $212? 64 on $212. That's a 30% growth rate, by the way. Tipping, gifting, all this other stuff, right? And so Alexis is basically saying, This growth rate is going to continue to accelerate and this just continues to reinforce that creators are going to have more leverage over time because we're seeing the debundling of media, right? We're seeing a lot of the attention go to these influencers and that's been happening for the last decade or so.

Dude, for sure. I think it's going to continually increase. There's going to be more money to be made in the creator economy. And even though the number's going to rise, what I think you're also going to see Is it's starting to become more like how the US wealth system is. If you look at—

Inequal?

Yeah. If you look at, you know, the US, what made the United States amazing was a strong middle class. And it's becoming more and more polarizing where you have a lot of rich people and they're really rich and you have a lot of poor people and the middle class is depleting. And, you know, I've seen it firsthand. Eric has as well. And like, you can walk down the streets in Los Angeles and you can just see tons and tons of people who are homeless and struggling, you know? And it's funny because like sometimes I'll be out with breakfast and my 4-year-old will be like, Daddy, Daddy, why is that person? And then, you know, I have to explain they're homeless. Not everyone is privileged. You need to help people and other people are struggling. And when you say help, it's not just money, right? There's a lot of different types of help that different people need. But as humans, we should be compassionate. But the point I'm trying to get at is when you look at influencers and creators, when it first started, there were a lot of people making money. And what happened with marketers and corporations is they realized that there's some people that produce amazing ROI and there's a lot of people that don't produce much of ROI. And more money is going to the people that produce ROI and there's less and less money going to people who are just being creators because there's so many to choose from. So the money's floating to, you know, the top 1%. And when I mean the top 1%, I'm not talking about the Kardashians who have the most amount of followers. Sure, they are getting money as well, but I'm talking about the people who are known within a sector and have a good amount of influence and engagement within that industry specifically. Not necessarily a niche, more specifically a specific industry. And you're going to see more of that divide happen within the next 5 years.

For sure. And here's the thing, I do think like, for example, this podcast, we're still in the very early innings right now. I think it's just going to become bigger and bigger. So the key thing is if you're going to start, have an angle, think about what your angle— like our angle here is marketing. And the other podcast is more so my angle. I like talking to people about their business more so than anything. Like I don't want to talk about any politics, right? I just want to talk about their business, right? And so think about what your angle is. That's what's going to help you stand out. And just understand that it might take you 3 years to start to build an audience, but if you want to build something really great, it might take you 10 years plus. We're not even on year 10 for this podcast yet. We're still year 7 right now, I believe, maybe coming up on 8. So it takes time. So that's why Alexis is even saying, check back on these numbers in 5 years. And then I have another, I have a friend here, Sieva. He says, so he has, you met him by the way, when we sat at that dinner, he sat to your right. And he has private equity. He focuses on buying businesses. What he's trying to do is he's trying to partner up with creators to go buy other businesses because they'll handle the operations piece. The creator can drive distribution. I think we're going to see a lot of mistakes made in the next couple years with this stuff, but eventually it's going to even out. So this message is brought to you by Leveling Up Founders. And Leveling Up Founders is an invite-only event for founders. It happens once a year, usually during August. And past attendees include people such as Ali Abdaal, Cody Sanchez, Neil Patel, Vanessa Lau, and the list goes on and on. And ultimately it comes down to the quality of the group of the people. We try to keep the group high caliber. That's why it's invite only. So if you are a founder at the top of your game, you can go to levelingup.com/founders to learn more about it, and then you can apply and we'll see you on the other side.

And speaking of content creators, here's some 3 stats that I think will really be eye-opening for you guys. One, in the last 30 days, from what we've seen in our database, 94.29% of the webpages indexed in Google got zero traffic from SEO. When we did a 5-month study of AI versus human content, human-written content had 5.44x more traffic. It doesn't mean AI content is bad or it sucks. It has a lot to do with the prompts that people are using to create AI content sucks. And 2, It doesn't have as much heat in there. So if you're going to use AI, you need to modify the content to make it way better. And 3, and this one's really interesting because we're talking about creators, 59.41% of the content we analyzed over the last 30 days had no engagement on social media. When I say no engagement, I'm not just talking about likes, I'm talking about likes, shares, comments, literally no engagement. It's just like— Why'd you even post the content then? And I'm not talking about accounts who had zero followers, right? This is from accounts that actually have followers.

So what do you think people can action from this?

So if I had to sum it up, if you're not good at prompt engineering, you should have humans write your content and make sure you're talking about new stuff. Talk about your experience, your expertise, authority, and trust, and showcase that within your content. You need to use tools to do keyword research if you're focusing on SEO content. 15% of the searches on a daily basis on Google, so there's roughly 8.5 billion searches on Google. What's 15%? Is that around 1.2, 1.3? It is 1.275. So 1.275 billion of the searches on Google each day are brand new keywords that have never been searched ever before in Google's whole history. Just think about that. Funny enough, that's why we bought AnswerThePublic because it showcases these kind of keywords to people and we're like, oh cool, these guys just aren't doing a good job on the marketing, hence we bought it. And the big thing I would also sum up is if you're going to create content for social, Just don't create content for the sake of it and put it out there. You can't just use tools like Tweet Hunter and be like, oh, here's what people use that's worked in the past. Let me just create something similar. People want to hear new stuff that hasn't been talked about that could pique their curiosity and interest. And if you can't come up with content like that, you're just going to drown in a sea of noise.

You know what's interesting? So I interviewed the writing guy, so Dave Perell. So he's got like 400 or 500K followers on Twitter. And last week, so he's really thoughtful. He's careful with how he uses his words. I'm kind of talking like him right now. And so, you and I, I talk faster. I use like a lot. And so, for him, here's what he mentioned. So, when he does these podcasts, he does podcasts with Marc Andreessen, Sam Altman, Chamath Palihapitiya, Tim Ferriss, all these people, right? And I was like, okay, so what are you doing with your creative process? And he's like, I edit a lot. And so, he did one interview with a very prominent, let's just call him a prominent figure, and he actually cut 60% of the podcast. That's a lot. And he edits a lot of it, right? And then, I listened to one of his episodes recently where he talks about Paul Graham, where Paul Graham focuses. So, Paul Graham, he founded Y Combinator. He writes a lot. And that's actually how he got his— he formed his first seed fund for Y Combinator, I believe. And Paul focuses on deleting, deleting, deleting, editing, editing, editing. And that's, if you want to be best of the best, that's what it takes. I don't do that. I don't think you do it a lot, Neil. We try to edit just to make sure we can publish it. And we probably edit a lot less than we should. They edit to the level where I don't think I can ever get to that level. But just to know, that is what it takes to become a generational or a writer that stands out.

What's funny is I edit a lot like that when it comes to blogging. Not podcasting. Podcasting, actually, you already know this, I don't edit anything. It's whatever the team or you guys do is what we have.

No, I'm talking about both. He edits for all forms of content that he creates, both the podcast and writing. That's a level of detail-oriented. And by the way, Neil, when we did the personality test, Neil's like 99% detail-oriented. I'm like 6%. So take that for what it is. By the way, one more thing, Neil, before we move on from this. Your tweets now, you added a comment to it at the end of it. So This one says, tired of trial and error? I've got a whole library of on-demand webinars to help you grow. How do your tweets help your on-demand webinars?

So it's a little bit different. So we use, I don't know what the tool's called, HyperFury or something?

HypeFury. HypeFury.

There you go. So we use HypeFury and we try a lot of different call to actions. The purpose of a call to action is to get more leads for our agency, NP Digital. So when we're doing this, we tried everything to sending them to consulting pages, to webinars, to ebooks. And, you know, I was tweeting out, or I was Skyping Salo, who helps run marketing, and I was like, dude, Salo, I literally messaged him this morning, all right? So he, I'm like, you should post the Twitter comment within 10 minutes of me posting. And he's like, we have some options to trigger the CTA. He has to see if there's time triggers. And I'm like, dude, some of them come up in 10 hours later. You should, or just base it on something like small, like 500 views, right? Because I'll get that in like a few minutes. And he's going to review it today and change it ASAP. And I told him, you'll get at least double the leads. He's like, my goal is to get at least 200 leads for the United States. So I don't know if that is—

Over what period of time?

Yeah, exactly. I don't know if that's per week or per day or per month. Or any of that. I'm trying to see if where he talks about Hype Fury, maybe I can find the stats.

Why don't you just post the Hype Fury and let the call to action happen?

Hype Fury. Let's see. Solo. What did he end up saying? Okay, I got data on this. All right, here, I'll share my screen so people can actually see what my team is sending me. So they know it's not full of bullcrap. We do end up testing a lot, 'cause I got an email from HypeFury. I'm like, what's this receipt? Eric knows this 'cause he's worked with me in the past. I don't like bills, you know? This was 549,000 reais, so call it $100. I'm like, what am I paying $100 a month for? I am a penny pincher. I know that sounds bad. In my personal life, people who work with me, I take care of them, but like in business expenses, It's true.

I don't need them.

I penny pinch. I don't care if it's $5. So Saulo says he purchased this. It was for the automated tweets, which I already knew about. I just didn't know it was called HypeFury. So results within 5 days. So far generating 49 leads, 11 to the United States, 38 for international divisions. My forecast for April is to generate 300 net new leads from Twitter, 25% United States, 75% international. Nonetheless, I believe we can generate, uh, 5K.

Solo's legit.

Yeah, he tracks all this. But look, here's a problem, dude. So you can still see my screen or no?

Yep.

Share this tab. Actually, let me share this tab. All right, so let me go to my Twitter. Look at this. 10 hours ago, lo-fi content, the most overlooked marketing trend, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. 3 hours later, he's then posting like, it's just too late. Yeah, that'd be fast. And then what you need to do is, I looked at a lot of the call to actions. You know, this one's fine. I'm talking about lo-fi content. The best content will help you if no one sees it. Put together a free guide. The call to action should be more related. If it was, it would do better. Like this. This is why a 14-year-old kid in Missouri can go viral and a Harvard exec can't. And then it's like, is your digital strategy not working? Stop guessing, embrace Marketing as a science, like the call to action isn't that related.

It sounds salesy.

Yeah, so it's not done right. And then what we've also found is any of the call to actions that are sending people straight to consulting, it's not converting well, but eBooks and webinars convert better. But what we don't have data from is even if consulting generates less leads, is it generating more revenue per lead? And does that make up for less leads? Versus just sending to eBay, getting more leads and the conversions being a lot lower.

So we have to run now, we're at 18 minutes, but just to clarify, a lead is an actual hand raiser that wants services or someone that goes to your email list?

No, lead is them filling out, it's not necessarily a hand raiser because in this form, typically in our business, we consider a lead someone who's raising their hand, but when Salo's looking at what we're getting from Twitter specifically, and we haven't tested the call to actions out enough or we haven't even tried it on the other social networks. He's asking for name, email, phone number, revenue, marketing budget.

I don't know if he's asking— So it's a lead, it's a lead, it's like a lead that has a little more forms, like an email lead that has more forms. Yeah, yeah, got it.

Yes, exactly.

Cool, okay, we got to run. So please don't forget to rate, rate, and subscribe. Also subscribe to us on Twitter, sorry, YouTube as well. And go to marketingschool.io/agency if you want to grow your agency faster. That's what we're doing here, and we'll see you tomorrow.