The Affiliate SEO Site That Does $400M A Year

So let's talk about the affiliate SEO site that does $400 million a year. So this site is, without naming the name first, this is really interesting because they had— this is an affiliate company that partnered with a brand that we all know, which we'll reveal in a second. So wait till the end of this. But basically they said, hey, we will basically make these sections on your website and generate affiliate revenue. So it could be like credit cards, it could be like different types of offers, right? So credit cards do really well. Like, you know, insurance does really well as well. Like loans do really well too, right? And so basically this This is Forbes. It's called the Forbes Marketplace, right? So it's not exactly Forbes. It's like the affiliate company said, hey, we'll call it Forbes Marketplace. And they created, I believe it was subdomains and they controlled all of it. They started going into other areas too. They started going to like home goods. They started going into like all these like electronics and things like that. Basically the way it works is like when you search for like best credit card for business or whatever, Forbes will pop up. They're leveraging Forbes domain authority. You can call it parasite SEO. when you have stronger domain authority, whatever you publish, you're going to rank well for it, right? So this is, they call it Forbes Marketplace, the parasite SEO company trying to devour its host. It's become so profitable, if it's doing $400 million a year, or I don't know if it's per quarter or whatever, it's getting to the level where it can actually buy Forbes, right? And this piece by Lars Lofgren was really good. It talks about all the drama that's happening behind it, but basically they're making boatloads of money and they haven't, Well, no, sorry. Prior to this article going out, they hadn't been hit by Google and everyone was calling them out. After this article went out, a manual action was slapped on Forbes Marketplace. I don't know if you know that.

I do.

Yeah.

So we don't do work specifically with this marketplace, but we, we know this model really well. What ends up happening is corporations go to these large publications like ABC or whatnot, pick a domain, I'm not going to mention ones that we theory are familiar with, because I don't want to get anyone called out. And what they'll do is they'll have a deal with ABC or Forbes or whoever, and they say, we're going to create this site, we're going to pay you X dollars or a commission, and we're going to run everything and we're going to pay for all the expenses. And that's typically the model. And then that company will hire marketers to boost the rankings and the traffic, and they just mainly focus on the deal. It's a very profitable model.

Yeah. And I don't know how much longer this will work for in the next 5, 10 years or so. So I'm glad that they're making the most of it. But I'm pretty sure they've thought about diversifying in the last couple of years and they probably have. So this isn't like a new model or anything like that. It's been going on for a very long time. And a lot of people do this and a lot of people do well with it. But also some people we know have also been crushed by this model. So it's not a permanent thing.

I'm guessing they got whacked after the article.

They got whacked after the article.

Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. So like they call this back in the SEO days, Yeah, and I know Lars personally.

I don't think he had the intention of getting the site whacked, but this is why I don't like publishing those kind of articles. Look, if entrepreneurs want to do whatever to make money, it's Google's problem. They can figure it out. The last thing I want to do is draw attention to people who are making a killing from a loophole. Yep.

Agency owners, if you want to grow faster, my partner Neil Patel and I, we are hosting live agency owner workshops in Beverly Hills, and you're going to learn how to get more clients, You're going to learn how to take yourself out of the day-to-day. You're going to learn how to recruit the right people, and you're going to be hanging out with like-minded people such as yourself. So if you want to learn more, just go to marketingschool.io/agency. Again, it's marketingschool.io/agency, and we'll see you on the other side. Dude, let's go talking about businesses that might be hurting. But there's a discussion on Reddit on call centers, you know, in the age of AI, people basically saying people working at call centers. So this person said, I work in a call center. So do 17 million people around the world. 95% of costs associated with call centers are due to staffing. And it's a $300 billion industry. I've recently been made aware of a demo with a new call center AI agent, and I immediately started looking for a different career.

Wow.

The bad part is my job and everyone else's in this industry is over. The good part is you will never be put on hold again. The AI agent will likely already know who you are when you call, have predicted the issue you are most likely having, and be ready to offer the solution to that issue. Most people will not be able to tell they're talking to an AI agent. 2 years max for the call centers to train these friendly, helpful AIs on every possible scenario. Implement them and fire everyone. AI will take all our jobs. Fine by me. Working in a call center sucks. So, I agree with most of that. I think the last part is AI will take all our jobs. That part I don't really align with. I think it will force people to reskill. Because when you think about the industrial age, people had to reskill after that, right? Like, you think people— most people were farmers back then and they had to learn how to become blue-collar workers, right? So, I agree with this person, you know, working in a call center sucks. This person will be forced to reskill into something else that maybe they enjoy doing. And it's work that they enjoy doing versus being doing, you know, soul-sucking work.

It also depends on the type of call centers too, because what I found is I've had AI try to respond to me and it just takes me forever to get what I'm looking for versus just talking to a human that's competent.

I agree with this person though. I think 2 to 5 years out, like it'll be way better. Right now we're probably facing a lot of like, it's early days right now, you know, it's very early adopters. We're not quite there yet.

Yeah. Did you see that article on TechCrunch when it was talking about AI? One of the Stanford ladies who's like one of the most prominent figures on AI, who's heavily venture-funded, was talking about— dude, I'm losing the acronym right now.

AGI?

AGI, there you go. And she was talking about AGI and she's like, the reality is, is none of these people actually know what AGI looks like and none of them are admitting it.

Yep.

And can this potentially happen? Maybe. Will it work for some industries? Definitely. Will it work for all? Probably not. What is the balance going to be? Who knows? I just think everyone is assuming the best when we don't really know what's going to be the reality. Because if, even if you look at AI right now, like ChatGPT, look at all the new versions that are coming out and how much more has it improved recently? It actually hasn't improved that much for most of the tasks that people like you and me and others are doing on a daily basis compared to When it first started rolling out, it was big noticeable changes in the quality.

I'll just speak from my experience. I mean, go finish your thought first.

Yeah, and as they keep rolling out updates, quality is improving, but not that substantially yet, versus like, okay, this is amazing, error-free, where it could just replace humans. The big issue is a lot of times it's just off.

I think the problem for you and me is we're very much, very focused on operating right now. So we don't get as much time as before to kind of explore what we want. But when I do get those pockets pockets of time where I've mentioned— so I use the new ChatGPT-01. That's their preview model. It's way more detailed, right? And I compared it to the 4.0 one or the 4.0, and it's just night and day difference. It's way more detailed because it thinks, right? When I ask questions, it's way more accurate. For example, I ask questions about— I take a picture of the food. I'm like, hey, how many calories are in this, right? Blah, blah, blah. But when I ask more detailed questions for the 01, it actually gave me One answer gave me 400 calories. The other one answer said, the other answer said 600 calories. That's a significant difference, right? That's one example. But now with like Replit or Cursor, for example, I use Replit. It basically makes me a front-end developer so I can make things very quickly. And I asked my developers, I was like, guys, like how helpful is it that someone that's creative, like a marketer like me that's non-technical, that I can now create these mockups quickly that, and then I tweak them within 5 minutes and it's basically like 80% there.

He's like, infinitely helpful.

Like, we'll move a lot faster doing this. So I think it's, um, it's happening slowly. I agree with that. But, um, it's happening faster than you and I think, because we're not having enough time to explore as much as we would in the past, maybe 10 years ago.

But like, my team runs a lot of tests on ChatGPT, even the latest version. And what they were telling me is, and they test everything from products that are coming out in beta and everything like that. Literally, the last word that I got from them was, Hey, with a lot of the marketing tasks that we're giving it, it's off almost 30% of the time. That's a big amount. That needs to go down not to 10%, it needs to go down to like 1%. The question is, how long is it going to take there? And I think that last 5-10% is going to be extremely hard.

And that's why we've been saying on this podcast, you still need a human in the loop for the next 2 to 5 years at minimum. 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 could just go to npdigital.com to learn more about it. And now back to the episode. Let's go into another direction now. Tech revenue per employee. I don't know if you saw this one. OnlyFans, Revenue per employee is $30.1 million. Craigslist is $13.9 million. Netflix is $2.6 million. Apple is $2.4 million. OnlyFans only has 42 employees. Craigslist only has 50. So I thought that was interesting.

You know who has a lot of revenue per employee?

Who?

And is highly profitable? Jane Street.

Jane Street?

Yeah, you know Jane Street?

I've heard of it. What did they do again?

Trading firm.

Uh-huh.

Financial. They have more than 2,000 employees, but their revenue per employee is ridiculously high. You should look them up.

I will.

One of the most profitable financial companies out there.

In 2023, OnlyFans creators received a stunning $5.3 billion in payout. As a point of comparison, total NBA salaries during 2023 to 2024 season was $4.9 billion.

Didn't Facebook just recently release an article on how much they paid out creators? It was a few billion bucks.

I don't know, but the Premier League, so football or soccer, was just under $5.3 $3 billion and the cap for the NFL was $7.2 billion. So OnlyFans creators have collected over $15 billion. Incidentally, OnlyFans high revenue share rate is— well, it gets cut off there. But yeah, food for thought.

How much was it in the last year? $5 billion?

Yeah.

Facebook. In the past year, Facebook has paid content creators more than $2 billion for videos, reels, photos, and text posts. This is in 2024. This was posted October 2nd.

Yep. So I think what we can learn from OnlyFans or like a Jane Street or whatever is if you have a product that's in high demand, it's going to do Same with Craigslist too. A lot of people use it, right? You don't necessarily need tens of thousands of employees and, you know, just food for thought.

By the way, look up Jane Street, you'll fall in love with them. It's one of those boring, ugly companies no one talks about that just prints a crap ton of cash.

I'll check it out. We talked about this on the phone, but I think it might be helpful. So the question is, should you have an assistant or not? And Jason Fried tweeted this. So he says, no, I don't have an assistant. No, I don't have an AI or anyone reading or answering my emails or posts on my behalf. Yes, my email address is It's very public. Yes, I get as many emails as you do, probably more. Yes, I have time to get back to people who write me, not instantly, but eventually within reason. A big part of my job, this is the highlight for me, a big part of my job is being accessible to customers, readers, followers, etc. That's what a CEO should be doing, staying in touch, hearing from people directly, responding to folks personally, sharing the pulse. If you don't have time, cut other things, don't cut this. If you're an entrepreneur and you outsource your availability, actually this piece is, if you're an entrepreneur and you outsource your availability, You're hurting yourself and your business, especially as you're getting going. So that part, I think that's what I personally struggled with in the past where I let the EA take advantage or not take advantage, take control of my full schedule. And I just had random things showing up right onto my calendar. Your calendar is managed pretty well, I would say. And I don't think you outsource your availability. I think you outsource more so it's jobs that you don't have the time to do. Yeah.

Correct. I think we actually discussed this on a podcast episode.

No, we didn't.

I'm pretty sure.

We discussed this on the phone. It was like a 1-hour phone call. So, this went into the phone call. See, Neil's not functioning, guys. Usually he's pretty sharp but he's only on 2 hours of sleep.

I'm on 2 hours of sleep and I haven't been sleeping for the past like 3, 4 days.

Yup. Here, I'll continue on here. Let me carry a little more as we work through this. We've kind of talked about this in the past but we've seen this resurface. It's like people that brag about, Oh, we don't spend money on advertising, as if it's like really skillful of them, right? But the reality is, if you're not spending money on advertising, but you can and your competitors are, that means you are leaving money on the table and you're hurting not only your business, you're hurting your people, you're also hurting your customers if you have a really good product.

Dude, I'm with you. I look at it as, oh, we don't spend money on advertising, as, oh, your competitors do and they're making money from a channel that you're not. Good for you.

So you're bragging about not having the skill to hire the right people to help you run this stuff.

It's like saying, oh, we make all our money from product-led growth. You should do product-led growth. You should do marketing. You should do sales. You should leverage any channel that you can make profitable. It's not one is better than the other. Even if one generates more revenue or more profit than the other, you do them all as long as you can make them profitable.

Yep. 100%. All right. That's a good place to end. So that is it for today. Please don't forget to rate, review, and subscribe. And go to marketingschool.io/agency if you want to learn more about the Agency Owners Association, where Neil and I will help you get more clients and grow your agency. Goodbye.