Why I Fired My $25K/Month YouTube Agency
Neil Patel fired his $25K/month YouTube agency over misaligned scripts with fear-driven hooks like "bombtastic," poor communication, and lack of recurring value despite good editing. He discusses DIY alternatives like Loom notes and teleprompter bullets, then shifts to how AI is changing search and why content strategy needs to focus on transactional value and measurable business outcomes instead of vanity metrics.
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And I was just fed up with it.
I'm like, you're fired.
Yeah.
All right, so I thought we'd start today talking about YouTube 'cause Neil just fired his YouTube agency. And ironically, or maybe it's not so ironic, but right after this recording, I'm going straight to the studio in Century City to record, which is where Neil records as well. And I'm enjoying my YouTube right now, but I'm very appreciative that Neil spent this money on his YouTube agency 'cause we took a lot of inspiration from what they do. And it's a lot of it's working for our stuff, but we're doing it in our own way, which I'll talk about in a second. But why'd you fire your YouTube agency?
Yeah, so Eric knew me going into this that there was a chance that I wouldn't end up working with them for a long time. Their editing quality is amazing. The problem that I have with them is, or what I ended up learning from this process, let's actually go back there and then I'll tell the problem. What I learned from this process to do really well about YouTube, it's all about the script. And the agency would help me with the script, But in reality, I would create my own script because they would give me a topic. Once they give me a topic, I then record, call it 10 minutes on the low end, 30 minutes on the high end of notes for that video. And over time, they would then take those, those voice recordings and turn it, or video recordings, 'cause sometimes I would screen share and turn it into a script. And in their scripts, some of it was bombtastic. And I like taking that word, you know, Ramit Sethi taught me that word a long time ago. When I say bombtastic, things like, if you don't do this, you won't achieve a million dollars income. Like a lot of it's money related, how to get rich related. And I hated that.
It's how to get rich. And, and, uh, it's also fear driven sometimes.
Yes. Bingo. Fear driven was also another one. Uh, urgency was another one. Scarcity was another one. And I figured out how to fine-tune the scripts over time because over time, instead of me just recording a video note on a topic, I would actually go into Google Docs or Grammarly or Microsoft Word, whatever you want to call it, and outline what I'm going to talk about in order so it'd be more logical. And then I would record the video notes. So it started getting to a point where I was just pretty much making the whole script. And what they were doing is adding in the hooks. So then when they would then send me a script and I was going in studio, there's a teleprompter so I could just read off the teleprompter. But because I created this script, I would just mainly use their hook and then I would riff, hook and then riff. And I really wasn't riffing because I already knew the script because I created it myself and I outlined it before I created the voice notes. And just some of the things that they would put in the script because they weren't necessarily technical in certain parts of marketing. The script didn't always make sense. I was just doing it on my own, and I still would be paying them to this date if it wasn't for things being bombastic. The video editing quality was great, but I would record a video on things like seven social media trends that you got to follow in 2025, and I would break down what's changing, why businesses need app, and I would include a lot of stats and data. What ended up happening is is I record the video. They would edit it and they'd put it up on YouTube. And right away the title was, where is it? I actually have the text thread with the guy who owns this company. And where is it? I said, they made the headline, these 2025 social media trends will make you rich. And I straight up texted, why rich in the headline? The video isn't about that. And I told him, I'm like, my team and I want to cut, you know, his company name because it's too bombtastic. And I was just fed up with it. I didn't once talk about in the video that if you do these things, you're going to make more money or get rich or any of that. And they kept doing it. And I told them so many times. And at one point, a lot of the topics were about quote unquote how to get rich, tried it their way, didn't work, went back to marketing. And when I went back to marketing, I never talked about money, but yet— they included money in the title majority of the time and I was just fed up with it.
I'm like, you're fired. Yeah. So I think there's a couple lessons from this one. One is if you're hiring, if you're, let's say you're an agency or you're, you're consulting with someone, if your client wants it some way, you're going to have to do it their way or else they're going to get rid of you. Um, it doesn't matter if you have a better formula or whatever, because ultimately a lot of times they're, sometimes they're going to think they know better than you do. Right. And so to, to, Maybe it's a good thing or a bad thing, but one, you got to be open to feedback. You got to listen to feedback. You've given them feedback so many times, they didn't listen. The other thing too is you have to provide more perceived value. The only perceived value that I saw was, yes, they really understood hooks and they had good editing. But at a certain point that doesn't hold up anymore because whatever you're paying, a healthy 5 figures a month, the reason why their churn was so high, and yes, they work with all the big names out there and they still continue to, It's because they don't have something that, that's unique. And the other thing is, I think the people that are paying them, that continue to pay them, it's a— I think they've gotten addicted to the views. And I don't think that's the right way for them either. 'Cause for a lot of these people, that's not their main business, but they've, they've been chasing the wrong thing. Now you're not getting trapped into that. You're just like, dude, like I wanna do it this way. And the other thing I'll say is I look at other YouTubes. These guys might say, yeah, that the rich stuff that works, it gets a larger tab and all that. But when I look at other YouTubers that just focus on marketing, they're still getting 200,000, 300,000 views per video. And that's what we're saying. Like, there are examples of that. And I remember when I talked to this guy on the phone, he's like, oh no, you gotta show me some examples. I pulled up literally 5 examples that I showed Relix. I literally screen shared with him and he is like, oh yeah, you know, we just do it this way or whatever. I'm like, dude, this guy's not gonna listen. So I'm like, well, at least Neil's gonna work with him, so I'll see how it goes. And I knew 99% chance you're gonna churn. So, yeah.
Yes.
And you do too, because you're like, hey, like, I'll leave it at that.
No. And before Eric even hired him, because he knew I was talking to him, I told him straight up, I'm like, dude, save your money. Let me go through it first. And I'll let you know what I learned and don't learn and then go from there. And I ended up breaking down the learnings to you, right? I think early on, I ended up breaking down the process and stuff. And we're just like, oh, cool. So the reason this works is we just pretty much have to put in the majority of our own time to to script. It has nothing to do with the agency doing everything for you. It is really for YouTube and social to do well. Eric and I were putting, or started putting in a lot of our own energy to make it work versus just outsourcing. That was the biggest takeaway I would say that I got from paying them money. The editing quality, you know, I'm assuming you agree, is amazing. They do some of the best editing work for YouTube. But high quality editing doesn't guarantee views. I can do a topic on something that's really gnarly of a topic like AI and marketing or Google, um, you know, I/O and their event. And I bet you if I just screen shared and broke things down, I would get more views without the fancy editing.
Yep. So, and, and interesting enough, that's where we're transitioning to. So I might, when I go over there today, I might do an intro, but then I'm going to go home and record a screen share and it's going to just do the screen share. 'Cause the thing is, um, someone on, on the team called it out too. When you and I are teaching at a conference, for example, or doing a webinar, we're kind of just teaching and it comes off very natural and people like that. And I see a lot of people doing that on, on YouTube and that's gonna work. But I, I do wanna give us some credit though, because some of the things you told me that we've adopted. So literally we just looked at your editing style and I, our team just started copying it. So it might be like 80% there. It's not 100% there. Yeah. It's good enough though. The other thing I'll say is I copied you on the Loom thing, right? So you're like, oh, like I just record a 10 to 30 minute Loom. I literally do the same thing and that comes up with the outlines and that helps a lot. And I didn't use a teleprompter, never used a teleprompter before. I think, no, we tried to do that in the office and I just never really like followed it. Um, but now I use a teleprompter and just, it's just the bullets, right? And I kind of riff off of those, which is what you and I are used to anyway. So I do want to give credit there. Yes, the hooks matter and yes, we try to put it to the next video. We try to, Have open loops as well and all that. Um, but you know, again, at a certain point, like if there's not monthly recurring value, they don't deserve monthly recurring revenue. So I think, um, what you paid was like good up to a certain point, but at a certain— if you're not getting much more, it's time to go. Yeah.
And I don't want to keep spending $25,800 a month. Like that's a lot of cash.
Yeah.
And especially when I'm doing a lot of work and people aren't following my instructions. My biggest pet peeve, and they'd never adapted on this one, Was for me to communicate through or to communicate with them, I was required to use Slack. So let's say if there was a new video for VeeEdit, they would post it in Slack and they wouldn't email me. So I would tell them, hey, why don't you guys just email me? They would say, this is not the way we communicate with our team and our people. So you need to communicate with us on Slack.
How about I just stop paying you $26,000 a month? Yeah.
And I'm like, wait, wait, wait. I'm like, and then when I was asking them who they work with, it's not really large corporations. And my feedback to them is I was like, and I'm not saying we're a large corporation, but my feedback was, if you're not willing to communicate with email and the general business communication methods that companies are used to, you're not going to land larger corporations.
Yeah.
Because we all use email. Yes, there's Slack for communication, but putting in there, hey, there's a new video for you to check out, and slacking that instead of willing to email that, And this is like, dude, why can't you just send an email? It—
see, that is— that goes back to customer service again. Because when I think about Carrot, like there's one customer in there that, that's paying us each month right now and they don't use Slack at all. And we're okay with that. Some prefer WhatsApp, some use Slack or whatever, and then some just want email. And that's okay because that's how they prefer to communicate. And sometimes client wants things cert— like you're here to serve the client at the end of the day. Yeah. And if you're not willing to adapt, I think this is why I didn't wanna work with this guy when he, Originally started the company, like four five. He's like he showed me a communication thread, and I basically I didn't think it was worth it, right? And I think it was like a culmination of these things where I just like yeah, this doesn't make sense. So thank you for for giving me the download. But I will say though, the way we're doing it now, our videos probably get anywhere from five to seven times more views. And then when we do pop, sometimes we'll have one that pops off. Like we had one that popped off recently, 130,000 views or so. And then you have some that like did really well, like 500,000 views or so. But the ones that popped off for us, they're not necessarily the ones that drive good leads. They might drive a lot of leads, but when I look at the leads that come through like YouTube or whatever, they're not nearly as strong as the ones that come through LinkedIn. So.
I, I agree with that. If I had to pick the best thing that I got from these guys, and this was something I never did and I should have done, we never turned on YouTube ads. Never cared to.
Why, why, why would you turn YouTube ads on?
They just by default turned them on. And I don't know why. It didn't really affect the views in a positive or a negative way. So they turned on YouTube ads and—
Oh, you mean for your monetization so you can get more views, right? Is that what you mean?
Yes, but what we found is when you turn on YouTube ads, you don't necessarily get more views or less. We think, I don't have any definitive data on this. I think it stays roughly the same. You know, you would think that, A, for YouTube, it benefits them to promote ones with ads turned on because they make more money. But again, I have no definitive proof.
Is it on now?
It's still on and it paid for some of the costs. And I was like, oh yeah, we should just keep on the YouTube ads.
Yeah, it pays for your content team, your content—
It pays for the content team. So that way at least we don't lose any money on—
And don't get me wrong, I will say like we've got, we have gotten some good leads on the YouTube side, especially for Karat or ClickFlow. Um, so it, it's good, right? But, uh, I think again, the trap guys is if you get trapped into going for views or showing off like, um, oh, this is gonna get you rich or showing off your ripped body or something like that.
Yeah.
That is gonna trap you in the wrong place. The thing for us is we're constantly focused on business. So at least on my side, I'm really talking about still marketing, but I am talking about, cuz I experiment so much with the AI stuff, I am talking about how I'm, I'm applying it to business, right? Um, and I think there's, there's a niche for that. And so YouTube will find a niche for you if, as long as you stay consistent with it. And yes, when we stay consistent on marketing, like the views eventually come. So I'm not too concerned about that, nor are you. But I think the reminder for everyone here is don't chase the views, um, because they'll get you distracted from your business, which is what we've seen with a lot of these influencers. And, and these guys work with a lot of these influencers too.
Yes. The other thing I learned from YouTube monetization is there's very little to no revenue in Shorts. Doesn't matter how many views you get, the ad revenue just sucks. And the reason I believe that's the case, because we see both ends of it, because you and I both run ads. Shorts don't monetize as well running ads in them compared to just longer form videos. It doesn't mean that you shouldn't run ads on Shorts. It is also much more affordable, but long form videos tend to convert at a much higher percentage from what we've seen. Hence, They cost a lot more.
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Yeah, let's do it.
Yeah. You want to start first or I can start? I can kick it off here.
Go for it. Kick it off.
I actually watched that Sundar interview with David Friedberg from All-In. Did you listen to that one?
I did not.
Okay, so it was pretty good. Like basically, Uh, Friedberg from the All-In Podcast is pushing Sundar, the CEO of Google, and they both started at Google at the same time, except Sundar became CEO. Um, and then Friedberg became a successful investor and a podcaster, but, uh, an entrepreneur. An entrepreneur. Yeah. Very suc— both very successful. And, um, you know, Friedberg kind of positioned this as, hey, there's this AI dilemma for you guys right now. And then Sundar's like, I don't see it as a dilemma. I see it as an opportunity. And this is before they launched all the things they launched this week with AI mode and all that. Um, and so what he called out was that, um, he said that the, the, the main thing is this innovator's dilemma thing, right? Because they have this, this cash cow that's printing all this money right now. And so you can't necessarily shift everything, even though Gemini has some of the best models out there, especially for coding. Um, and then this week what happened was that, uh, Google launched a bunch of things, but AI mode is the thing that sticks out. It's like, Yeah. Basically it's like, It's basically like an LLM that you log. It's like using a Gemini. It's like using a ChatGPT or whatever. That's what you're going to— the default, it's going to become the default search experience. It's not default yet. So the thing I want to call out here is the innovator's dilemma is at what point do you switch it to this new thing to not disrupt your cash cow? And I think what they're doing, which is smart of them, is they're turning this AI mode on, but it's not default. And then they're going to look at all the data and figure out when it's time to kind of shift more.
Oh.
There, there, because they're seeing behavior shift a lot more. They are seeing though, a lot more— you and I are probably asking a lot more questions now. You would agree with that, right? I might ask on Google and then I might switch to ChatGPT or whatever. I don't know if you saw this. You watch CNBC a lot, but did you just see the Cloudflare CEO discuss how the visitors per scrape has changed over time?
Visitors per scrape?
Yeah. So anytime Google crawls, it's scraping a page, right? So It used to be for 1 website visitor, there were 2 scrapes per Google search. Okay. Um, and then it shifted to, um, it shifted to 1 in 6.
Okay.
So every 6 scrapes you get 1 visitor.
Okay.
This was like a couple months ago, maybe 6 months ago or so. Now it's every 15 scrapes, there's 1 visitor, right? And not only that, I'll give you one more before we go into it. Um, OpenAI was 1 in 250. Um, so what, every 250 results you get 1 visitor to a website. Now it's 1 in 1,500.
And that's for OpenAI.
So you're talking about, uh, once for Google, once for OpenAI. Yeah.
Yeah. So Google is 1 to 15. OpenAI is now for every visitor they drive, they scrape a website 1,500 times.
Yeah. Wow.
I did not, uh, realize that.
So, so it's like a couple things. I think SEO attribution is completely effed and I think website traffic is gonna continue to be toast over time.
Yeah, when I look at the data, because we looked at AI overviews and how it's affecting traffic, we saw traffic declines in both B2B and B2C. But what was interesting in B2B, we actually saw a slight increase in revenue. B2C, we saw a slight decrease in revenue. Now there could be external factors like tariffs or economic conditions or algorithm updates that can affect traffic. But from a revenue standpoint, What we're seeing is a lot of the traffic that websites would've got, it's traffic that never really drove any revenue in the first place. Um, if you look at how most people are searching, and Google talked a little about this, there's a great Search Engine Journal article on it as well. Users are typing in longer and longer tail search queries. Most of them are question-based. So it used to be before roughly 8% of Google search queries were questions. I don't know what the percentage is these days, but it must be a much, much larger number because you can ask anything. And I was with a buddy who is visiting from Seattle, hedge fund guy. And, you know, him and I were talking 2 days ago, um, in person. And as we were walking, we were talking about Apple stock. And if you look at Apple stock, I believe the number is roughly, you know, today there's some news, uh, Trump made an announcement that Apple should be tariff more of their product shit. So it's causing their stock to go down. But generally speaking, the last time I looked at it, if you exclude today, Apple's stock, their company, in the last 3 years, the revenue has pretty much been flat. Profit's been roughly the same. So the company's not growing. Stock's gone up 40%. So I was telling my buddy this, who's a hedge fund guy, and he's just like, well, one of the reasons is share buybacks. Now they haven't brought back 40% of the shares, but right away he asked Grok while we were walking, hey Grok, what percent of, uh, or how many shares has Apple bought back each year for the last 10 years? And it just mapped it all out. And he's like, oh, look, it was, I think it was the number was like 21, 22, or 23 million shares that they eventually had called roughly 10 years ago. To the most recent numbers where is, um, they're now at 14-point-something million or billion shares.
I bet you Buffett influenced that a little bit.
Yeah, probably. But when you look at it from that perspective, dude, the shares are just getting bought back. Um, and those weren't all buybacks in the last 3 years, but that's an example of a search that we now can easily run where that data, when you have done a Google search, It is very hard to get that from an exact webpage. They're getting it from so many different sources to get you the exact answer. And that works out really well for a consumer, but that's not a search that would really generate any revenue for anyone. And we are seeing AI impact those kind of searches when we look at navigational and transactional searches. And I have a chart on my Twitter on this. There's really not that many transactional searches that are happening on OpenAI percentage-wise. The number of searches that OpenAI is getting, almost all of it is informational. And let me see if I can actually pull up the chart. Neil Patel ChatGPT versus Google informational searches chart. And let's see if I can pull up the image on this. Dude, so check this out. How people search on Google versus ChatGPT. Look, this is just absolute percentage. It's actually not the total number of searches because of course Google has way more searches, but 93.7% of the searches on ChatGPT are purely informational searches. This is not the stuff that's causing direct revenue. I agree traffic is changing from this standpoint, but when we look at revenue change, revenue change hasn't really been impacted. A lot of this is just informational-based searches.
Yeah, let me, let me think about this. Let me share an anecdote here. So when I think about buying things, like for example, we went to a resort recently. Uh, I didn't go through ChatGPT or anything. I still use Google for that. Um, and so—
But what'd you do specifically to buy?
I was, I was looking for reviews on the best, uh, the best resorts nearby. And I wanted, I wanted to see actual reviews. That's the thing, right? And so Google has a lot of those reviews, whereas ChatGPT, I, I at least haven't seen it yet. Um, I did ask ChatGPT, what are the best resorts? And here's my plan. And it actually helped me plan out things. But then when I wanted to go deeper into more transactions, I actually moved over to Google. Um, and that's just one anecdote. I'm not saying I'm right or wrong, but I think what we can agree on is that the way we're behaving is changing. 'Cause the, the whole, like, by the way, 1 in 2 and then 1 in 6 and then 1 in 15 now. I think people are just asking more questions now.
Yes.
'Cause even when I was walking to the office yesterday, I was, I was doing, I was like using my ChatGPT for CFO and then I was using it for health and I was using it for like, and then as I was, I was about to walk into the door, I was like, man, I just did things that would've cost me hundreds or thousands of dollars and I did it in minutes. And I think what's happening is we're just asking more questions cuz we're all getting smarter.
Uh-huh. And when I look at my search history now, you know, I also have a 3-year-old, but my 3-year-old asks a lot of questions each and every single day. I don't use ChatGPT for it. I use Google cuz Google has AI or, And he has questions like, what's the bite force of a megalodon versus a great white shark?
How does he know what bite force is at 3 years old?
I don't know.
Oh my God.
And then how much weight can a camel carry on its back versus a donkey? And he wants to compare. How much can a polar bear lift versus a grizzly bear? No joke, he has like 30 to 40 of these questions a day. I probably do like 15 to 20 of them. My wife probably does another 15 to 20. This is daily.
Yeah.
All right. Um, and then I also have a lot more questions too, just generally speaking, like in life, but I'm getting answers now to stuff quicker from, you know, all these AI platforms. And I think that's the big thing that's changed in which users are searching way more than ever because we can get what we're looking for easier. While before, dude, it was more so we would do a search, like if we want to figure out how much Apple's doing share buybacks, We'd have to go to like 5 or 10 or 20 different articles.
And you, you give up at a certain point 'cause you're just like, I don't care that much.
Yes.
Now you get it quick.
Yes. And not just that, dude, we would have to go through all the articles, sift through 'em, and it would probably take us 20, 30 minutes to really figure out what the answer was. 'Cause we would have to copy paste, put in spreadsheets. It's just too much work. It wasn't worth it. But now we just ask the question, we get an answer right away and we're like, cool, sounds good.
Well, so this is what we talked about too. This is new work that wasn't possible before. It would've taken too much time. It just wasn't practical. It's no different than the coach I have that's coaching people on how to work on higher leverage priorities, right? Or like a, a, a, a me that's trained to go coach you on how to do a one-on-one or like in, in sales. There's like mini versions of me everywhere, right? Um, no, I think that, that, that's a whole nother conversation with like, when does that go too far? But again, we're talking about creating new work now. And the other thing I think we can, we can spot here, like, 'cause I, I know a lot of SEOs are worried and maybe we should talk about this, um, but homepage traffic is starting to go up.
Right? Yes.
And so I'm noticing you're seeing the same thing too.
We are.
Which means that's a good thing because people are asking more questions and they're learning more about us. And I'll tell you what, here's what I like about AI mode. I went, first question I asked, what's the best, what's the best marketing podcast out there? We're still in there. Okay. And then if I, if I ask, um, you know, who are the best digital marketing agencies or SEO agencies, right? Um, NP Digital is in there. Whatever we're ranking well for right now on page 1, if we're top 3, like we're still there, right? So that at least is going to hold for a little bit. But I think let's maybe let's talk about what people should do about attribution and how they should adapt.
Well, before we go to attribution, let's actually talk about blog articles that you and I have written for so many years. Dude, you and I are known for writing. When we got into marketing, we were known for creating tons of content, getting Google traffic for it, and that's how our brands got out there. You agree with this statement, correct?
You? Yeah. I didn't get my brand out there. I did. I did that for brands to grow them. But yeah, same thing.
But you did it also for Single Grain.
Yes. Yes.
Right? And that is how you generate a lot of your revenue and leads.
Yes.
Right?
Yeah.
May have been at a different scale than me, but that is actually what built Single Grain. Do you agree with that, Samhoy?
Yeah.
All right. When you think about all the articles that you created, we have a lot of articles like, what is SEO? And the list goes on and on, these informational topics. I'm assuming you guys track your revenue and leads from your pages.
Yep.
Did you really close a lot of revenue from those informational?
Never. And those are all tanking now.
A lot of those are taken by AI.
Yeah.
Totally agree with that. When we went back into our CRM, because we see in Salesforce where we're getting leads from, like what exact page and what's driving revenue. I understand that there's attribution stuff and we'll get into that in a little bit. But most those pieces of content that are being affected by AI, I still think it's worth creating those articles because it gets your brand out there and you're getting cited. and it's also helping you be seen more as authority. But those kind of pieces of content never really drove us revenue in the first place.
Mm-hmm.
And when I look at our traffic, our SEO traffic, and a lot of this was deliberate, not all of it, there was some algorithm updates, but a lot of it was deliberate. Our traffic has gone down, I don't know the exact number, let's call it 4, 5, 6x organic over the years. But our RFP count, You know, and I've talked about this on this podcast, you know, in 2023, just in the United States, we had 16 RFPs. 2024, we had 25. I haven't looked at the 2025 numbers. We're March or May 23rd when, as of recording this podcast, but the last time I checked, we're at 2020 or we are at 22 or 23 RFPs. just in the United States alone. So how is it that our informational traffic is going down, but yet we're getting more larger companies hitting us up? And when we look at each RFP, not only are we getting more, but the average dollar size that each RFP is coming for is actually larger than each year prior. So we're growing in not only the number of RFPs, But the RFPs are starting to grow in size where we're getting a lot more RFPs coming in our door that are million-plus dollar deals from day one. And some of them are even $3, $4 million deals from day one.
Yeah. So what do you think it is?
I think it is getting known for specifically what you do. We started focusing more on commercial and transactional related queries, and our marketing started getting very specific to helping large businesses solve very, not just technical, but very challenging business problems in today's environment. For example, how do you expand your marketing into multiple countries and languages before you have people on the ground? Like what are the strategies, the tactics? How do you implement it when you, a corporation will say, hey, we are, I'm going to come up with a company name like Adyen. All right, we want to go after Thailand. We don't generate really much revenue in Thailand from businesses there who are looking for payment processing. For us to build a team out there, it's going to be expensive and the ROI is not going to be worth it for us. But how do we go and expand to all these regions that are up and coming— Indonesia, Thailand, et cetera— and get traction there and then start building teams in those areas? And they can't just go and say, let's go hire tons of agencies to do it for us because that's expensive as well. They have some budget, but they don't have tons of budget. And when we started working on solving these problems for corporations and talking about this from our webinars to speeches, uh, to blog articles, that kind of stuff drove a lot of revenue for us, but it doesn't drive tons of traffic.
Yeah, I, I, I think so. Maybe we should talk about, uh, the website traffic piece is toast and, and what we're doing about it, which is kind of what we're doing right now. And then we can talk about attribution.
I, I wouldn't say that the website traffic is toast. I think it's changing. You're not getting as much top-of-funnel clicks, but you're still getting a lot of traffic to a website that's more bottom of funnel.
I like saying toast because it's a good headline.
Oh, okay.
That's what was said by CNBC, by the Cloudflare, the website traffic is toast. That's why I put it in here. So it's not, so I, I, the way I, I break it down to people is like, it's like a cigar butt business. It's going to continue to decline over time, but it's still viable, right? And it's, it's not to say, oh, we should just throw it away and we should just abandon it as, as SEOs. Um, I think, What we should think about is, okay, the what is traffic or the, the what is content that we've, we've created, that was always good for top of funnel and generating links. Like the, the what is stuff is good for links, right? Like it's, uh, people like linking to the top result and then just kind of compounds on itself, right? And that's how you, you, you build links, um, or one way that you build links. But the other thing too is that we've been talking about quite a bit is this search everywhere optimization approach where you can't just focus on on SEO or, or else you actually are gonna be toast. One, you have to do good work, right?
Yeah.
If you do good work, people talk about it. That's the easiest thing. It's always like, oh, Neil, what, who's a dentist that you use? Or like if I have eye problems, I, I go to my friend, uh, who's, who, who used to be a nurse and owns a bunch of like healthcare business. Oh, what's the best eye doctor? Right? So word of mouth gets around. And the other thing too is people just want reliability cuz people change jobs and they, they like, they'll follow you around if you do cuz it's just easier to pick someone that they worked with in the past. Yeah. Right. Um, and so people forget about that. They think it's all about marketing. No, but like if you do good work, that's also marketing itself. So focus on doing good work, but also diversify your traffic because if you think it's still the same SEO game 15 years ago, it's not because, and these are the people that are complaining the most on Twitter. It's just like, oh, it's so difficult now. It's so hard. It's like, no, it's just changed and you just continue to refuse to change and that's why you're so bitter. Yep. Yeah.
All right.
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