Your ChatGPT Searches Were Temporarily Visibile in Google Search Results | Ep. 3019

Did you see ChatGPT searches were temporarily visible in Google search results?

Oh, I thought that was a new feature. I thought they're just going to allow it.

Search Engine Land talks about it. TechCrunch had an article in which ChatGPT said, ah, it's, you know, it's reverted or fixed back or whatever it was. And no longer are your—

All these SEOs were celebrating on LinkedIn.

Well, I was pissed. I was like, if my ChatGPT searches I pay are In Google searches, I'd be really pissed.

Well, no, it's— it's my understanding was if you hit the share button, it makes the link public, which shouldn't be a thing.

No, it shouldn't be a thing.

Yeah. Because maybe you want to share a private chat with your data to your team.

Yes.

Like, that's not something that should be public. I just started thinking about it now.

So yeah, no, no, I would have been pissed if my data was going public. Like if I'm uploading important information like financials or whatever and having them do analysis and I share it you know, within our company and someone just uses it, I would be pissed on that.

Yep.

Interesting here. So I've been publishing YouTube content. You have too. I don't know if you've noticed this because a lot of your YouTube videos are AI-related.

You're looking at your RPM?

My revenue per—

Milli?

My revenue from AI-related videos, when you look at it on an impression basis, is roughly 4x higher on my AI videos than non-AI videos.

I'm looking at mine right now, but that's interesting. So are you making more AI videos now?

No, I don't really care for the YouTube videos, but it just goes to show anything related to AI, companies are spending an arm and a leg on marketing, which means if you're a publisher, you can— or a creator, you can end up making way more ad revenue. But as a business, if you're in the AI space bidding for that audience, you're going to spend an arm and a leg right now based on This data.

Yeah. So the RPM on this one, I made a Madness video, it got 176,000 views. The RPM, so revenue per 1,000 views was $3.25, which is not that high. I'm going to pick another one, but that one wasn't that high, but that one got a lot of views.

I don't really talk about Madness too much, but when I talk about ChatGPT or a lot of those other products out there, my ad revenue is pretty good.

Yeah. So I have one here on ChatGPT that I'm pulling up. So revenue, On this one, $6.42.

So that's good. Yeah.

What was the one that you saw, the RPM?

Do you remember? No, because my team's the one who told me it was 4x. I don't ever check the revenue numbers.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, your revenue numbers, I mean, our revenue numbers on this thing just goes back to funding the team. Yeah, and then on this one, ChatGPT, the right way to use ChatGPT, revenue per milli, $6.75.

Yeah, I know we're getting, what my team's told me is we're getting closer to 10 grand a month in revenue from YouTube. We're not at 10 grand yet, but we're getting closer.

And I was like, I still can't pay for your costs.

No, still can't pay for the cost. Sadly, nowhere near. How is your—

do you feel that your YouTube is doing better now that you've kind of— are you getting in a groove with it? What I realized with mine is like, we— I need to have more control over the packaging, which means I want 4 headlines and 4 thumbnail concepts before— get the idea down first before we start. Like, the editing only does so much at the end of the day. It's nice, but I think the idea matters a lot more and the packaging matters a lot more.

It's been working out really well for me, and I'll give you a example on this. You know, Nick heads up my sales. I don't know if it's US or globally, but it's in some region. Pretty sure it's globally. And he sent me a message on Wednesday, new video on AI traffic is very good. Already sent it to a prospect. I usually don't get—

Oh cool, he sends it to prospects. That's a good idea.

Yeah, right? And then I got a message from Hormozi. I should respond to him. Was a good one. And same thing.

What does it say? What did you talk about there?

The new SEO, winning in AI's trust, not just ranking. I don't know what the rest of the title was. Thanks. Hope all is well. I just texted him back. He sent me that text on Wednesday. My bad, Alex, if you're listening.

That's okay.

But yeah, so we're not focusing on just pure views. Like, of course, if I talk about how to get rich from AI, I'm going to get more views, or in theory, I should get more views. I more so am optimizing for our ideal customer type. And what we found is the exact formula or the best formula is I spend, I don't know how many minutes now per video, call it 30 minutes to hour per video scripting. AJ, who you know, spends another 5 hours taking that to get the script down even more.

For each video?

For each video on top of my time. That's a long time.

Yeah.

And then the editing, AJ's very anal on the editing. I think he does a— his team does an exceptionally good job, but the cost per hour on that is just through the roof.

My take on it is, so from you doing the Loom outlines, I think that's really important. But now what I'm going to integrate into that is, hey, I'm going to— it takes me like maybe anywhere from 10 to 20 minutes to workshop packaging that I like. And then ChatGPT can create images, right? So for thumbnails I like, I think, MrBeast obsesses over that. I'm like, whenever I've done that in the past, it's done well. So I'm like, I'm going to go back to doing that on top of the Loom outline to help it do even better. Because it's like, there's no reason why it's like, why does the madness one have 176,000 views? And then some of these other ones, like not that much.

And the content is just as good.

Yeah, it comes out. I think some of my other content is better, right? Like you just, you feel like it's better. You know, it's better, but it comes down to the packaging. Yes.

And we do a lot of tests with headlines and we also do a test, a lot of tests with images and we go over them before we even publish the video. Yeah. Can we try to get somewhat of a consensus internally of which ones we want to test?

That's important. Like, I don't think we spend enough time on that internally. And so we're going to spend more time on it.

And then even with the scripting, we spend a lot of time with how are we going to get good soundbites in advance? And which ones are we going to cut and use for social before we even start recording?

You know that the other tools, so you know Manus, right? And you know, GenSpark, the other one, the other Chinese company. So they saw my Manus video, and then they like So their CEO got on a call with me and their marketing leader got on a call with me and they're looking at trying to figure out how to sponsor this podcast or whatever, because they see that we're like, we're just nerding out on AI all the time, right? And I said, hey, I basically said we wanted a DreamHost deal, but—

Are they well-funded?

$100 million.

Oh, they're well-funded.

Decent, decent, yeah. But anyway— They can afford the DreamHost deal. Yeah, they can afford the DreamHost deal. But the CEO was like, smart guy, very crafty. He's like, well, you know, instead of paying you guys, how about I just like get you all these other AI people onto your podcast or whatever? I'm like, oh, very, very cheeky. I'm like, But no, we're not going to do— I can get those people myself. Like, why do I need your help for that?

Right.

But, but it's, it just goes to show you that these, these videos will help you not only attract clients, but also potential partnerships because there are angles to work with him other than just like a content thing. Right. And that's, that's how we're talking. So you never know where these things take you. I think a lot of people, especially in the agency world, it's like, okay, private equity, private equity will reach out to you and they'll say, okay, we're going to give you some money and then you're going to become a platform company and then you're going to go acquire other agencies and then you're going to exit. You're going to take one exit. Then you're going to take a second bite of the apple, right? And I think you've been approached by private equity before. Same for me. I've even been approached by VC for the agency. Really?

Venture capitalists?

Yeah.

I've never got that one. Actually, no, I've got that one, but it really wasn't. The only VC call I think I had was Sequoia.

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I think it depends where you are in life. Like, I don't do well with people telling me what to do.

Exactly.

So that's private equity or another type of company, or like a holding company buying me. But if it's enough money, I have my price because I'm a capitalist. You pay me enough, I'll deal with it.

The question is how long.

Yeah, there's always a price. There's always a price. We bank with a really good bank right now. So there's this bank out of Canada called CIBC. They also have a, I think they're headquarters is like Chicago or Missouri or one of these places. It's like a $50-ish billion market cap bank, USD, right? So it's not the biggest, like a JP Morgan, but any company worth $50 billion, I would consider that a big company. And CIBC has been an amazing bank for us. They've backed us through thick and thin in the early days of our company and have a great relationship with a guy named Nick Deliver. I'm maybe mispronouncing his last name. He deals with private equity lending for the bank. So all the private equity funds. So I get a lot of really cool insights from him. He's not telling me anything that's confidential, of course. You know, he of course goes by the rules. And one interesting thing he's told me is, because he's met a lot of companies, he's met a lot of private equity companies because he's been doing this for a very, very long time, much older than I am. I think his kids are in college at this point. And he's just like, your management team is one of the best management teams we've seen.

Mm-hmm.

All right. And he's like, private equity would love your management team. So Mike and I were talking the other day about private equity and why we think they're mediocre, even though they can pay you a lot of money. If you look at their returns as an LP, you're lucky if you get 20%. Mike and I strive for more than 20% returns on our own company. And if you average it out from when we started, our returns are astronomical compared to private equity. We've had bad years as well though, just being very honest. And we're definitely not beating private equity. Well, technically private equity's not performing well in this market either, so we probably are at least keeping up with them or maybe even the ones that invested in our peers, we're probably outperforming them right now. And the reason my issue with private equity is, and Mike and I were talking about this, you've met some of my management team. Would you agree that they're good?

Yeah, very good. World-class.

Yes. I think I have some of the best executive leaderships in the marketing space. Mike and I, if we were doing this all over again tomorrow, we would hire them. But when you look at private equity, they look at leaders like we have are great, and that's what you need to keep scaling and growing a company. But we disagree with private equity on how companies are run because even though we think we have a great team and without them we wouldn't have built a big enough business, we don't think our team would've built a big enough business without us.

Mm-hmm.

Because we think like you as an entrepreneur.

Mm-hmm.

If we look at our organization, they'll tell us stuff like, oh yeah, creative for SMB, it's really hard to do. Mike and I are much quicker. My CEO's also named Mike. I'm talking about my co-founder, Mike Camo, at this moment. Mike Camo and I are much quicker at like, oh cool, in the next 2 hours we're just going to drop everything and we're going to go try out a lot of the tools and go figure this out ourselves and then go call up our team and be like, this is how you do it. Go and execute on it. Let me know if you need help with it and I'll redo it. Or, oh, our sales pitch is off on this area. Oh yeah, our team, we're going to go, we're going to figure this out. Mike and I, or Mike will just sit there and be like, let's go and just figure this out and we'll go redo all of this. Or he'll just do it himself. Like, cool. Brainstorm with him. He's like, I redid the whole deck and he'll spend a day on it. What do you guys think? Where are the holes? And then like, all right, let's go get on a call with our sales team and let's work on practice pitching this. And then I want you guys to roll this out.

Yep.

Even like the software, I was talking with our team when we're trying to compete with Ahrefs and SEMrush, and I'm like, guys, you guys have been doing development for years. And if you look, we've been playing feature catch-up with Ahrefs and SEMrush. I'm just being very transparent on this, which is why they generate a lot more revenue than us. But the market's changing, even though traditional SEO generates way more revenue, everyone wants to talk about the shiny object on AI SEO. Why not let's just beat them to the market, give away more of these features for free, make it more usable, and we can actually gobble up a lot of their market share because they're really expensive compared to us. And when I got involved in Ubersuggest and ATP and pushing them every single day, and you've seen some of the text threads.

Yeah.

We're doing stuff in weeks that were taking my team 6 months to a year, and I just met up Lou, who runs product for us at Ubersuggest and AnswerThePublic, and I asked her, I'm like, you've been with us since maybe the beginning of the year. I'm like, why the heck has crap been moving slow for like 5, 6 months and now it's been moving fast? And people, when we ask them this, don't always— almost always they don't have an answer. But what's really helped is Mike and I getting involved in the company and every piece that we see an issue and we just go in and change and fix, and we don't care what people say.

Yeah.

the whole NP Digital website. I was like, I don't like any of it. I'm redoing it all. And my team was just like, you have to get people involved and their politics. Some people are like, I like this, I like that. And I'm like, no, forget any of this. It's my company. My company. I know there's a few people in the organization that would be upset if they weren't involved and they provide value. So I just took those 2 people because I also want their input. And I hit up my buddy Gajan who owns Spiralize. And I was like, dude, who can I hire? CRO? I don't want to spend a lot of money. I just need homepage help copy. I can write a lot of the copy too, but I just need brainstorming. He's like, dude, I'll just do it for free for you. We'll just do the homepage. Let's crank it out next week. Let's all get on the phone. And I already sent him the points 1 through 6, what I want to focus on, what I want to remove. And then we'll go back and forth, all of us on the phone. He'll mock it up, get it designed. And then once he does the homepage, I'll finish the rest of the site with my team, but I'll mainly try to write the copy. And then our internal designers will just follow the format. We have good designers and can just carry the rest. I didn't want to spend even $2,000 on it. I figured out how to get it done scrappy myself. Keep in mind, I'm well networked.

Yeah, yeah.

And Gajon's one of the best CRO, not just companies, but individually, he's one of the best CROs globally, right? But this is why I'm getting back to it to tie it all in. My issue with private equity is the way they run businesses is very cookie cutter. And I think, and I'm not trying to talk crap on my leadership, I think they're amazing and they do stuff way better than Micah and I at certain things. But I think that entrepreneur viewpoint and the way we run a company is also needed and very good. And you're not going to grow as fast unless you have that. So I think the real balance is you need both of those things. But the moment a company is owned by private equity, they tend to run it more like a private equity shop because their formula works for them and they lack that entrepreneurship element and there's not really enough motivation to really push that entrepreneur.

And so here's my take on it. You kind of hit the nail on the head, but I don't think it's worth it, at least for me, to sell my company to private equity. Obviously there's a price for everything, right? But I don't necessarily— I'm not chasing the liquidity or anything like that. That's one piece, right? But the second piece is, to your point, they have a formula that works for them. It's like, okay, we're going to have a platform company, we're going to take on debt, we're going to take on a few turns, we're going to lever up, right? And we're going to buy some other companies. And then hopefully there's a, there's a larger multiple. But And then their multiple— their game is like, okay, well, we know what works for this. Okay, you're gonna have to cut over here. You're gonna have to run things our way. And to your point, I don't do well with somebody telling me what to do, right?

Yes.

And so I'm not gonna have fun anymore. And then we do this partly, obviously, to add value to the world and also to make money too. But we do it because it's really fun, right? And so I wouldn't like— if I don't necessarily need or want the liquidity right now and I like what I do, then why do I need to change how I'm doing things in that respect?

So I have a few questions for you before we end. One, you've gotten hit up by private equity. If you had to guess roughly how many times?

I, I, there's a lot of emails that keep popping up.

But like conversations you've had, not the emails.

Oh, probably like 3 or 4 conversations.

Like solid conversations where people are interested in buying you and you're talking to 'em and going over. If you had to name the 3 biggest reasons why you decided not to do it other than you want to control and you don't want to answer to someone, what are the 3 biggest reasons I think it's one, the control thing is it has to be number one. No, no, I'm saying outside of control.

Yeah, but it is number one though, right?

It's like it.

So when I think about one of the conversations that I had, it's like, okay, well, one, I'm not going to get to do things my way. That's, that's part of control. Okay. 2, I'm not going to enjoy coming into work anymore. Okay. And then 3, If that's the case, then like, why am I doing this?

So it sounds like your biggest issue on why you said no is actually just control, 'cause the other 2 are kind of related to control.

It's control, but also it's, it's, it's not a good offer either.

Okay. But even if you had a good offer, your still big issue is control, correct?

Yeah. It's, it's, if I don't have control, I'm not gonna have fun anymore. Yeah.

Okay. So you wanting control, can you gimme an example of One or 2 things that you did with the business that you were able to do because you controlled it that you wouldn't have been able to do if you had private equity backing?

The last couple years having to save this business again. If there was PE back, we would've shut the thing down, right?

No, they would've cut costs.

Would've cut costs, but I don't think that we would've reinjected capital back into the thing.

I don't think you would've recovered.

Yeah, there would've been—

You've more than recovered and you've done well because you reinjected it and you operated it at Break even to loss.

It was sweat equity and like monetary equity.

Yeah. You started personally putting in money and investing in Carrot and other divisions to try to not only recuperate the losses but grow the business.

And I don't think Carrot would have became a thing.

No. Yeah, that's true. They would have never let you do Carrot with— because that's reinvesting.

Yep.

They would have let you put your own money in.

Yeah. And so like, again, they have a formula. There's, there's no right or wrong. And I think just for you and me, we have a certain way of wanting to do things. And I think, I think I would just say that when I see a lot of agency owners taking the private equity, to me it's kind of like, man, I think they could have built it bigger, but it's a form of like maybe they didn't need— they need liquidity and that's fine, right? They need it for their family and everything. But if they don't, to me it's like a form of tapping out.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So you and I are on a very similar page.

I don't know how to tap out, I think.

So my issue with control isn't because I have a weird feeling when someone owns a majority of a company. Because I've had bad luck with investors and I've had good luck with investors as well. But the second issue is, is when someone owns the majority of the company, if I look at what we've done, this has been a bad economy for agencies. I'm assuming you agree with that. You can look at the jobs report as well.

Yeah.

And a lot of companies outside of AI are not really growing, like the Targets of the world, the Walmarts are struggling, right? I'm not talking about their stock price. If you just look at their financials, a lot of these companies are not growing like they used to. And with us, when things got bad, I spent more money and I spent money when I shouldn't have to reinvest and expand globally. But now we get extremely large corporations hitting us up because we did that. But I lost a ton of money doing it. And AJ, AJ told me, I had a call with you the other day. Him and I were doing a lunch meeting, brainstorming our next week topics yesterday.

Yeah.

And AJ asked me if, he wasn't talking about Single Room, but he was just like, if there was another agency that wanted to do what you want to do and go global, Why don't just a lot of 'em do 'em so they get all these RFPs? And I'm like, imagine having to burn $30+ million to do that with no investor, not knowing if it's gonna work out. Yeah. And not knowing how much revenue will come out of it.

PE shop wouldn't have let you do that.

No, they wouldn't have let me do that.

Yeah.

And I had a few conversations with PE when we were going through the process of shopping the company. We actually went through and we had a banker and the moment they all told me I wouldn't be able to do that, and they didn't say they won't be able to, they're like, well, this would just be a discussion and we would have to look at the numbers and what pans out. And that's when I was like, oh, this ain't going to work out. To me it's a yes or no. And I'll tell you, I believe this is the future and why we should do it. And yeah, we're going to lose money. I don't know how much. And that wasn't acceptable. And I'm not saying they're wrong. It was just more so that didn't work out for me. And I was like, I took a bet when others probably wouldn't be able to. And I did it in a really crap economy. I know everyone says economy's strong. You can't look at the economy just based off GDP growth and the stock market going up.

Yeah.

There's a lot of other factors you have to play, but I'm assuming you would agree with me and most of our customers would agree, especially the ones that are in the AI space, which is the majority. Most of them do not say the economy is strong.

No, it's not. And the final thing I'll say here is it's already hard enough to run a business. It's even harder when you have the whims of all these other opinions. And I don't think there's anything wrong with having a board or anything like that. But if all these people start to dissent and start going in a different direction, you're not going to be able to add in your magic as an entrepreneur. And that's just what I think. Right. And so like, look, it depends for everyone. I think it's not for me. It's not for you. But if you give me like billions of dollars, sure, it's for me. So yeah, anyway, that's it for today, guys. Please don't forget to rate, review, subscribe, and we'll see you tomorrow. Bye.