What is Customer-Generated Content (CGC), Ideal YT CTRs for podcasts & more

So let's describe UGC. UGC is user-generated content. So that could be you posting onto like Instagram or Facebook. That's user-generated content for the platform. Now, have you heard of CGC?

No.

CGC is customer-generated content.

Isn't that UGC? Because a lot of UGC is people unboxing a product they get on Amazon.

Customer-generated content could be like, um, yeah, eventually it does become user-generated content in a sense. And so You could say, okay, let's say you're, you're a customer of Aquapana and they wanted you to do a testimonial video. That's customer-generated content. But eventually that gets posted as UGC. Um, the reason I'm saying this right now, this is not necessarily a new thing because I've seen this before. You've seen this too. There's a new platform called uplifted.ai and it's, it seems like it's, uh, they'll help you make customer-generated content using AI. So I thought that was interesting. It's good to bring this stuff back sometimes because the testimonials, the customer stuff tends to convert pretty well. Depending on your niche.

Dude, funny enough, you know, Aquapana hit me up to do a social media campaign.

Really?

Yeah.

Did you say— did you ask for free water?

No, I just said— actually, I didn't even respond to the email. I just ignored them.

Why would you ignore it?

Because I don't care to get paid to post social content.

Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, they're like, you're an influencer paying. Okay, got it, got it, got it. How much were they offering you?

Uh, I don't know, but we get hit up at least like right now it's probably averaging around 4 or 5 times a day.

For, for you to post things for money. We should talk about that too, because, well, we're literally talking about it right now, but it's— we talked about how Alexis Ohanian posted something about creator payouts going up 70%, 17, 1-7% year on year. And creators, I believe, are just going to become more powerful because in the world that we're going into where there's more efficiencies with AI copilots, all this stuff, right? What's valuable? Brand content. People want more human, right? Especially as we— there's not a need for that many more headcount. So what does that mean? Go create content or work with someone that's creating content. You see a lot of operators partnering up with content creators to build businesses. What's that, that PE firm called? TCG, I think they did something with Kevin Espiritu, who has a $30 million a year gardening blog.

TPG or—

I don't think it's TPG. He said, because I said TPG, I was like, do you mean TPG? He's like, no, TCG. I was like, oh, wow. never heard of TCG. But they partnered— like, Kevin was a blogger and they partnered with Kevin and they gave him, you know, the PE playbook. Kevin then went and he went to go buy a product, um, like a gardening product, and maybe this company was doing like $8-9 million a year, and he rolled it into his blog. And now it's becoming like a platform. And I think we're going to see a lot more of that. And I believe that, you know, we're getting offers. I'm getting offers too, saying, Not as many as you, but it's like, yeah, you know, we're just gonna keep compounding this. I'm sure we're gonna get a lot more offers. We get a lot of people hitting us up for the podcast sponsorship stuff.

Do we?

We do.

You do, I'm assuming, or we do for Marketing School?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Both actually.

Huh.

So yeah.

I didn't know that.

Yeah. But what's better, the reason why we don't care so much for the, you know, pay us on one-off to promote Yeti or something is because we make a lot more. You make a lot more Buying businesses, building businesses?

Yeah, it just comes down to, it's like, you know, one of my best influencer sponsors or whatever you want to call it that used to pay me is PayPal. And PayPal would go through Edelman each and every single time. Edelman would reach out.

You did good on that one.

And then they would pay us like $100,000 to $100,000-something every time we post like a 3-minute video. And it could even be shorter. Like they're really flexible and great to work with. And I don't know how many times we posted stuff about PayPal. We did it that often because it was 6 figures every single time. And then I got tired of doing the deals and we still get hit up by them every once in a while. And we just tend not to take on anything. It's not about someone giving us $100 grand. You know, some people are like, I'll give you half a million in equity. And you know this better than anyone else. Half a million in equity doesn't actually mean half a million dollars. It only means if they sell, You're going to get paid. It could be more, it could be less.

It's a lottery ticket. It could be zero. It's a lottery ticket.

Yeah, it's a lottery ticket. And I turned down those as well. I just don't care because it's easier for me to focus my energy on my business than anything else. It's same with like the content. Dude, someone just offered me to go to, I don't know where is it in South America, but it's somewhere in South America to speak for 3 hours for a lecture. It would be recorded, they would sell it at a college, and it was something like $220,000 or $230,000. And I'm like, I got to speak for 3 hours? And they're like, well, half of it will be Q&A and the other half will be speech. I'm like, oh, is this okay?

So here's the thing, like everyone's like, I would do it, right? Here's the thing, when you start doing it for whatever amount, could be for $230,000, even, even, you know, $500 or whatever, the problem with content creators, especially YouTubers, is they're all addicted to the money, the little dopamine hits of money. And I can tell when I meet these YouTubers, they don't know what else to do. They don't know how to build a business, and that's fine, but they should partner up with an operator instead of basically selling themselves for these one-offs because I can tell they're not that happy to promote all these things, nor do they really care about these products.

Dude, I got another one the other day. I'm going to read this message, all right? I'm going to ignore the person's name because I don't want to— Hey, a new app I'm helping is hosting an exclusive pop-up event in LA on April 4th featuring celebs and influencers and brands. It's live streaming, live shopping experience, kind of like QVC style. We would love to have you involved. You can join in, keep all the content for marketing. Also an opportunity for you to connect with top creators like the D'Amelio who created—

D'Amelios.

D'Amelios.

D'Amelios, yeah.

Who will be there, plus many more million, with millions of fans. It's from 6 to 10 PM, promise to be super fun. We'll have a famous musician, promoters too. We have a celebrity event planner building everything out who you may know. Invite only, max 300 invites. Interested? If so, I can send you more details. Top secret. We'll love to invite you and have you as a podcast host. Blank, I'm not going to repeat that person's name, is going. I could also have them pay you $5,000 to $10,000 for you to come be on the podcast for 15 minutes.

I'd rather go to sleep.

Dude, okay, so I really appreciate the invite. Do you think I went or not? Huh?

No. Hell no. Like an emphatic hell no.

I was like, I really appreciate this. But I'm like, I just want to stay home and eat dinner with my kids. I'm like, I already travel a lot. I want to be at home and sit on the dinner table at 6 PM. And I want to eat family style. Not my kid eats something different than my other kid. And then my wife eats something different than me. No, family style. We'll all eat together, no phones. And we talk about our day, even though my 2-year-old doesn't have much to talk about his day. Don't care.

I'd rather do that.

Life isn't always about money. And it's just like this influencer marketing thing. If you want to do it for a living, I think it's great, can pay really well for very little time spent. But Eric and I have always been fans of, it's better to take the long game. If people are willing to pay you X amount of dollars to do something, they're probably making way more in the long run, or they would hope to. You're probably better off figuring out a better way to monetize than just charging per post.

And you know what's, What's ironic, I mean, maybe it's not ironic, but it's— look at it, look at this as a bank account. If you're doing— you're taking these short-term hits, it feels good, but you're constantly withdrawing from the bank account. You're withdrawing goodwill from your audience, right?

No, I wouldn't have to post or anything.

I'm not talking about you. I'm talking about just in general. Yeah, yeah, yeah. In general, when you do that. But when you go along, when you think about 10, 20, 30 years or so, you tend to make better decisions that are— they feel better. And it's also better for your stakeholders. And when your stakeholders, I mean your employees, your shareholders, you, everyone.

Dude, it was so funny because I was thinking, but I'm like, man, this pays for like a fourth of my Model 3 or whatever it's called. And I was like, uh, I can save some money.

You know what's ironic, guys? Those of you listening to the podcast, you hear ads too. So even we're trying to figure it out on this podcast.

Yes, but at the end of the day, you and I Look, there's nothing wrong with our partnership with iHeart.

We love iHeart.

Yeah, they're really nice people. I think if Eric and I had to change things, we don't care for as many ad plays.

Yep.

Right? We believe in the funnel.

The ad load's not that bad right now. It's 3 minutes for every 15 minutes.

Oh, okay.

Yeah.

That's still bad in my eyes.

It's a lot. I mean, I'd rather just push our like free resources we put out or, you know, stuff like that.

Or ideally—

Get people into our funnel.

Or ideally just have like one sponsor, like a Microsoft or something like that. Yeah, Microsoft, you're welcome to come back.

Yeah.

Make less money and not have as many ads.

Yeah, yeah. Or like, I mean, look, if you really want to monetize this well, probably it's like some form of community mechanism or driving them into like a webinar or something like that. But, you know, we're busy.

Aren't we doing something called the agency?

Oh yeah, that, you know, the MRR, guess the MRR on that right now? There's actual MRR.

There's actual MRR? That's great.

And it's, it's, it's a pretty, it's like a very broken funnel, but it's working.

There's a lot of people I didn't even know we were charging. Yeah, yeah.

Wait, see, just let me handle it. It's easier when it's invisible. And once the number looks impressive and it's compounding, then I'll show it to you. Yeah. So you have to know who you're working with too.

Yeah. Eric knows me well. Cause if he tells me like something like, oh, this can make money.

He's like, waste of time. And don't get me wrong.

I do love money like most capitalists, but like, uh, I just, there's nothing wrong with making more money, but I look at life. Because I have a family and kids right now. If I'm going to donate most of my money anyways, and that's what my wife and I decided, might as well do less stuff for money and just focus on spending more time with my family.

How much do your kids get? Just kidding, don't answer that.

But Eric does have a point. No, I'll be honest. We've put money in a trust for them that's irrevocable. So they, you know, assuming they don't screw things up, They don't really ever have to worry about working or making money in their life. But it's not a trust where they can just go not work and just collect checks. The money is more there. So for like, if my kids— I live in an expensive city, I live in Beverly Hills, California. If my kids said, I want to move to Italy, or New York, or Dad, if you buy me a house, I'll live in Beverly Hills next door to you, I'd be like, sold, I'll buy him a house next door. Because I love my kids and I want to be around them for the rest of their lives. And I want to be around their kids. Hopefully they have them one day. And the second thing is, other than like a basic necessity, if my kids said, I want to live in New York and go do a job, they're like, cool, go find your own home. I would only pay for a home literally if they lived really close to me and I would see them all the time. The second thing the trust is there for, let's say if they have cancer or some sort of condition and they can't afford to pay for it, Gladly, I'll pay for it. If they want to buy a car and they want a Mercedes, go buy it on your own. If you want to buy a Honda Civic and you need it to get to point A to point B and you're struggling and you want to be a teacher and you love it, I'll pay for the Honda Civic, no problem, because you're doing a good job that's, you know, hopefully helping, uh, humanity. And on the flip side, if something wrong is happening with Earth and Elon can send people to Mars, but it costs an arm and a leg, cool. You can use the money to go to Mars so you don't die. But it's really restricted. It's more so to just ensure that my kids aren't living on the street.

I think, uh, Warren Buffett's thing is basically not giving much money to his family. I think, you know, enough, right? Charlie Munger's like, I can't resist, take it all. So he gave it to all his family members.

No, he did not. He donated most of his money earlier on.

He— so sorry, I, I'm—

when—

what I'm saying is Charlie Munger gave a lot more to his family than Warren Buffett did. That's what I mean by that.

But Warren Buffett didn't donate early So the stockpile compounded much quicker. And when you look at his family, percentage-wise, it may be low. His kids don't have to really worry though. It's not like, you know, if you look at what I'm giving my kids, I don't know what Warren's giving his kids, but I bet you he's giving them more money than I'm giving my kids. It's like Bill Gates. Remember how he said he's only gonna give his kids—

Initially, it was like, I'm only gonna give you $2 million each. And then I think he— No, $100 million each. Initially, long time ago, it was only two million. I was like, no, I want them to you know understand that you know the struggles in life. I'm just going to give you enough to like be okay, and then it became a hundred million.

And then he got divorced, and you know what his wife said?

What?

I don't think a hundred million dollars is enough for each kid.

Yep. So eventually parents cave.

Yeah, you love your kids. The the goal is not to spoil them like crazy. You know one of my buddies knows.

One of the billionaires.

He's a top 10 billionaire in the world. So really high up. And his kid was going to a baseball— basketball game. And this guy has a jet and a nice jet. So my buddy's flying back on the jet with him. And my buddy's in the hedge fund world. So he's also extremely well off. He did extremely well off, actually, not like millions of dollars, but Forbes list well. And he's just like, dude, why isn't your son on the jet with you? He's like, no, no, my son needs to learn the struggle of life. He can go fly on Southwest. Straight up. And I was like, that's right. But at the same time, this person is also buying their child a home that probably costs $12, $13 million.

Dude, you can't build character without— I mean, without struggle. You think about it at the end of the day. All right, real quick. I need to tell you about the group that Neil and I created called the Agency Owners Association. And this is a group that's similar to entrepreneurial organizations such as YPO or EO. By the way, Neil and I are both in YPO, but we thought it'd be really cool if we're able to create a group that's dedicated to agency owners to helping them scale. So you could be at 6 figures, 7 figures, 8 figures. We have different groups for different levels. All you have to do is go to marketingschool.io/agency. Again, that's marketingschool.io/agency, and you can go there to apply. And I will tell you right now what we're doing is there's an online community. We do calls every now and then. There's stuff that we share in there that we don't share publicly. And you can, at least with the online community, you can cancel at any time. So, you can go there to learn more about it. And that being said, back to the video. By the way, I asked this question on YouTube. Here, I'm going to quiz you. What do you think a good YouTube click-through rate is for podcasts?

You're talking about an episode, a video on YouTube that is like this where we're just filming and doing a podcast episode? When you're saying click-through, are you talking about someone just, you know, doing a search or looking at a video on the recommended and just clicking a video?

This is what happens when Neil doesn't use YouTube Studio. He doesn't know what I'm asking.

No, I know what you're talking about. But there's click-through from search. And there's also click-through from different channels.

No, it's just literally when you log into YouTube Studio, it says click-through rate, CTR.

Yeah, but you can also look at your search traffic and you can see the click-through rate.

It doesn't get granular. You can go granular, but just the high level. You would know what I'm talking about if you use YouTube Studio.

All right, my guess is, I don't log into YouTube Studio. He is right. The last time I probably logged in was probably like 5, 6 months ago, maybe even 8 months.

Maybe longer than that. Yeah.

I would say 4%.

Close.

You're doing good.

Close. Remember the guy we had dinner with, Jake Klaus in Boston?

Yeah.

By the way, those of you that will be at HubSpot Inbound, Neil and I will be there. And we're probably planning to do a dinner with entrepreneurs there. So, it's going to— we're going to keep it small, keep it intimate. But anyway, so Jay Clouse said this. So, I can only speak to my own experience understanding that we're publishing 35 to 45-minute podcast interviews. Above 5% click-through rate in the first 24 hours is what we want. Typically, they watch 20 to 25% view, which is actually pretty high. Most viewers come from the homepage or recommended. By the way, one side note on this, he mentioned above 5% click-through rate in the first 24 hours. That first 24 hours is actually what people look at because click-through rate comes down over time.

Yeah.

Especially if your video gets recommended by a lot of people. Now, that's one guy, okay? Now, Ryan Hashemi, who I had on the Leveling Up podcast, he says, trying to hit 10% click-through rate on day 1. Average CTR is meaningless. 7% is good. Less than 5% is bad. And you're aiming for an average view duration of greater than 6 minutes. One more. I'm going to add one more over here. Josh, who runs the George Gammon YouTube channel, he sees usually for podcasts 8 to But anyway, food for thought. So let's just call it like 5 to 7% is pretty good.

Yeah. You know how I knew what the click-through percentage was? Why? Because I used to track that back in the day.

Yeah, back in the day. Back in the day.

And then I realized, I'm like, huh, we make more money from RFPs than we do creating YouTube videos.

But you know, for our videos like this, when we go general, sometimes we're getting like 8 to 12% because we're more general, like we're more newsy topics. Yeah.

Yeah.

So food for thought.

Dude, it's funny. I was recording social media content. I think yesterday was one of these. I think, I actually think it was yesterday. So when I was recording it, my team was telling me, they're like, dude, this video did on this general topic, it got great engagement. Look at these comments. They're like, you should go create more videos like this. I'm like, but how much revenue did we generate? They're like, oh, we knew you were going to say that. And then they were just like, Neil, did you see this video that we posted on TikTok for you? You know, 'cause I recorded it and you, TikTok SEO feature. And they're like, it drove 2.6 million views or something in like just on TikTok in the first 4 or 5 days.

Yeah.

You know, my question to them was, how much money?

Yeah.

I was like, how much money? They're like, well, there's 2 of them, like probably zero.

It's, it's, it's like these things, no, you're right. In the short term, like probably nothing. But in the long term, the point I made, I was at a lunch today. Um, and I was like, who knows? Someone watching your stuff right now, if they keep watching your stuff— by the way, there's people reach out that like they've been listening to our podcast since day one. And imagine they're like 15 years old. 10 years later, they become— they start something and maybe they raise a bunch of money for it or maybe they become a VP somewhere. Then they actually control budget, right? That's— it's like long, long term, is there an angle there? Because we think about the rule of 7, the rule of 14, like that is one impression. Yeah.

Right?

Yes.

But here's what's funny. You know, when we do our sales calls for every single customer, you know, we actually ask them how they learned about us. So not only just tracking in the CRM on what caused them to convert, how they heard about us and all that kind of stuff. Do you know what drives the most revenue when we look at our social content?

Your social content?

Yeah, just content in general. We're creating content for social media, whether it's Instagram, LinkedIn, because we get granular and we ask people, you want to guess what kind of content drives the most revenue for us?

Your webinars?

So type of content specifically?

Oh, the type of like you talking about boring shit before. So for example, what I mean by boring shit is not Neil being boring. It's more so talking about, oh, blog migrations, or, you know, you know, internationalization and things like that.

Bingo, and stuff with a lot of stats and data. But Eric's spot on. It's the boring subjects. And he doesn't mean it in an offensive way. The boring stuff with a lot of stats and data and like, Here's, we created AI content and human-generated content. Here's what happened over a 5-month period and comparing the stats. Most people don't care to read about that kind of stuff. That's the kind of stuff that is actually driving us the most revenue, not in the short run, but in the long run. And when we cover basic stuff like, here's what happens when you add your year to the title tag, or here's some title tag hacks, that kind of stuff doesn't do well.

Mm-hmm.

It does well in view count, But it doesn't, it does well in view count compared to more of the boring stuff. But when we get super technical, we get the least amount of views, we generate the most amount of revenue.

Yeah, I mean, let me ask you this, a separate question. How many lead magnets do you have? How many webinars do you have? How many on-demand webinars are sitting around? How many lead magnets actively do you have right now?

A lot.

Yeah.

It's too many to count. So for example, when we filmed our social content yesterday, My team has me film a lot of ads. So when we create webinars, I'm filming ads for those webinars that they put on my Facebook.

Oh, you guys are running paid traffic to the webinars?

And we do paid traffic. It costs us a little bit more than $11 per registrant from the United States.

How much are you spending per webinar?

It's small. I think we're only spending like $7,000.

Okay, $7,000 per webinar.

Yeah. And then once we get closed numbers from it, then we'll start ramping up.

And $11 a registrant, that's on—

US traffic.

LinkedIn?

Instagram.

Oh, interesting.

Instagram, and it's average for all social networks.

That's actually pretty good. And you're just collecting email, I'm assuming, just to get them to opt in initially?

No, a webinar registration is name, email address, phone number, company size.

Oh, that's really good.

It goes revenue, all that kind of stuff. And then we also, like, I also, I did webinar ads, and then I recorded, it was either 11 or 12 ads, I actually think it was 12, for HVAC and roofing companies. So 6 for HVAC, 6 for roofing companies, 2 15-second ads, 2 30-second ads, 2 1-minute ads, so it was 12. And each time I record social content, which is multiple times a month, my team also throws in a lot more ads for different industries. Hotel industry, we go on and on and on. And most people are like, why would you want to record ads for HVAC? Well, there's a lot of companies out there that own—

HVAC roll-ups.

Yes, there's a lot of companies out there that are like, we own 30 HVAC businesses and we do $200 million a year in revenue. Right? Like, there's some really big businesses out there that we tend to take for granted.

And the reason why I ask this for everyone is understand that you probably— so we're cranking out a lot more lead magnets, webinars, we're planning on driving more paid traffic to it. You need multiple touchpoints, you need multiple lead magnets, and there's also people at different points in the funnel too. And these things also build more trust at the end of the day. And by the way, like Neil has a big email list, you're not just hitting your email list. You're probably hitting your email list multiple times to get signups, but you're also driving more paid traffic. And that's how you get more new fresh blood into the funnel. And most people underestimate how the old stuff still works really well.

The old stuff works extremely well and we take it for granted. You look at Codie Sanchez, she talks about newsletters. They're a hot business according in her words, right? She talks about how it's an amazing business and there's quite a few that sold. I think Morning Brew was an email. Business.

Yeah, $75 million and Hustle is like $27 million.

Yeah. And they're good businesses. Anyone who makes $25 or $75 million, that's a lot of cash. And if you look at what she's doing with her content, a lot of it is sending it to an email list because it works. It's not sexy, but it works. It says what John Reese used to say from income.com back in the day. He's like, yeah, when I need money and want to buy a Lamborghini or whatnot, I just hit up the ATM.

I'm like, you ring the register.

Yes. And his ATM was his email list.

Yep. But you still have to keep providing value to your email list, by the way. Alright, so I wanted to take a second to tell you about Leveling Up Founders. This is an event/mastermind for people doing 7, 8, 9 figures. These are founders that are doing that amount. And we've been doing this event for a couple years now. We've had amazing speakers. But more than anything, it's about the people. What I mean by that is like-minded people want to hang out with like-minded people. And this is the best spot to connect with people of a certain caliber. And we vet every single person that comes through. So if people are— even though they make a lot of money, but their character, we don't really align with that, we're not necessarily going to let them in. We do this event in Beverly Hills, and it's happening in the beginning of August. All you have to do to learn more about it is just go to levelingup.com/founders. Again, it's levelingup.com/founders if you want to hang out with amazing people. Neil, my podcast co-host, is going to be there. I'm going to be there. People like Syed Balkhi, he will be there as well. And again, it's going to be a great time. levelingup.com/founders to learn more and we'll see you inside. Do you know J.K. Rowling?

Yeah, the Harry Potter.

Harry Potter. Okay, so check this out. This guy's Twitter is @thehereticalliberal. Is it heretic? Heretical? Heretical. Yeah, liberal. So anyway, that's his name. So I guess this is where we're starting with it. It's hard to overstate how important and strategically brilliant J.K. Rowling's power move was today, a first-move checkmate that effectively neutered Scotland's dangerous new hate crime bill. So we're not going to talk about hate crimes or anything, but what she basically did here was she said— Today's posts by J.K. Rowling were calculated to cause maximum impact on a day when a law protecting trans people came into effect in Scotland. Her canon of posts, particularly against So and so, which she continues to communicate through despite my advice that she take them down, is a deliberate act of defiance. J.K. Rowling has challenged the police of Scotland and the procurator fiscal service to take action. If this new legislation is to have any meaningful impact, the police of Scotland must mount a full investigation. Basically, the way I'm looking at this is her big brand of like 2.5 million plus followers or whatever it is. I mean, everyone's read Harry Potter, right? She's able to kind of effectively stop this bill because of the power of her brand. Now, we're not saying we support or—

So the bill is on— is a hate crime bill? Yes. And it's to give certain people rights?

I don't know enough about it, but it's hate crime. And all I know is hate crime, hate crime, and it's involving trans people.

And she pretty much said no-go on the bill.

Yeah, I'm going to block this and I'm going to use the power of my brand to block it. And it seems like it slowed it down. I don't know what happened to it, to this afterwards. But basically, you think about the population of Scotland is like 5.5 million people. Yeah. But her, like, it's way more than 12.5 million people know who she is.

So way more than that. But yes. So she pretty much told everyone to what, not vote for it or to decline it or— yeah, how'd she use her social power?

Well, I don't— this is, this is like a really detailed post. I mean, this guy goes into his ideologies. Okay, here, let me read this. So, well, looks like J.K. Rowling did in fact place the Scottish authorities in checkmate with one move. They've capitulated already. These cowards know they can't defend this law. They were desperately hoping they could use it to silence and intimidate the public without ever having to actually defend it. Rowling recognized what they were doing and called their bluff. Truly a masterclass in the strategic and tactical execution in winning political battles in the information age. So here's what she said. I hope every— she tweeted this— I hope every woman in Scotland who wishes to speak up for the reality and importance of biological sex will be reassured by this announcement, and I trust that all women, irrespective of profile or financial means, will be treated equally under the law. And J.K. Rowling— so this is a BBC News thing that she tweets, um, there's, there's a link, um, it says J.K. Rowling hate crimes— hate crime tweets not criminal, police. So yeah, her tweets seem to have stopped, whatever it was.

That's crazy. Speaking of brands, did you see how Forbes is getting a little bit tarnished, at least in the advertising and marketing world?

They've been tarnished in the advertising and marketing world for a while.

No, but did you see what they did with ads?

No, what happened?

So Forbes sells premium advertising to large brands like Microsoft, Ford, Disney, Johnson Johnson for years, but they've been putting the ads on a spammy subdomain without telling advertisers. So they use www.3.

Ah.

Where people may see 200 ads during this single page view, while a normal article typically has 3 to 10 ads throughout an article.

Oh.

So they crammed them in to start making way more money. And advertisers are pissed off because, dude, you have 200 ads on a page. What's the chances that they're going to click on your ad? Very little.

That's low integrity business practice when you do stuff like that because people can't trust you anymore. And Forbes is a trusted brand. Like you earlier in this episode, you talked about the Forbes list, right? Forbes has the Midas list too.

Yes.

They have all these billionaire lists. But when, when they do stuff just focused on the short term to try to make money, you start to optimize for decisions like this and ultimately it hurts you in the long term. Anyway, that's it for today. Let us know what you think about this longer episode. We'll probably chop it up a little bit for, for YouTube. And that is it for today. And also don't forget, go to marketingschool.io/agency to learn more about the Agency Owners Association. That's where we help agency owners grow. And hopefully we get it to a place where we don't need to have ads on this podcast anymore. So yeah, there's that for you. Goodbye.