YouTube in the next decade, LinkedIn's issues, Reddit's paid media potential, & Perplexity ads in Q4

The question is, is YouTube the bet for the next decade? So I have this screenshot over here from Colin and Samir, and basically here's what it shows. So YouTube becomes first streaming platform to break 10% of total TV viewing, right? So you can see Netflix, so YouTube's at 10.4%, Netflix is at 8.4%, Amazon Prime Video is 3.4%, 2.7% Hulu. And so look, Tom Brady's got a YouTube channel, Ronaldo started a YouTube channel, first day 20 million subs, right? Oh, Neil's not happy. What are you gonna say?

Dude, they all have For all social media channels, for Instagram to TikTok, there's not much of a difference.

It's just the signal says that they see the importance of it. So I think it's the best bet for the next decade with what we have in front of us.

I don't think it's the best bet for the next decade.

I think it's the best. When I say the best bet, I mean the best bet for social media for the next decade. That's what I think.

YouTube hasn't cracked social shopping. I would say Instagram and TikTok are better for a lot of these celebrities because it's social commerce.

If you had to bet on one social platform for the next decade, what would it be?

Instagram.

Okay, I bet on YouTube. So in 10 years, when you're 49— are you 49? You'll be 49, right? I'll be 48. Okay, whoever loses owes what?

I don't know, you pick.

Okay, Taco Bell. You have to eat Taco Bell.

Sure.

Okay, great.

Instagram is newer than YouTube. Instagram is bigger than YouTube in ad revenue, from my understanding. Is it?

Yes.

Last time I checked, Brad, what do you think? YouTube for sure.

That's right. YouTube could crush Spotify social video. Brad's my tiebreaker here.

Okay, YouTube ad revenue. YouTube's advertising for the first quarter was $8.1 billion.

They're bigger than Netflix. But I think you're right. I think IG might be bigger.

It is bigger. $11 billion.

Once the models stop posting all the thirst traps, then the reach will go down.

The first half of 2022, Instagram did $16.5 billion. That's 2022. So it's much larger than—

What a good acquisition. What a good acquisition. All right guys. So anyway, that's— do you want to say something else? You look like you want to say something.

No, but assuming Instagram is bigger, it's newer, and with social commerce, Instagram is going to explode. They're going to take a chunk out of Amazon and all these other places. Thanks for subscribing to us on YouTube.

YouTube, guys. There's another thing I wanted to pull up around just the insufferableness of LinkedIn, right? And so, we can pull up this post over here from Trung Pham. So, just search for Quincy Hall on LinkedIn. This is during the Olympics. And man, it hasn't even been an hour since he won the race. So, this person posts this. It says, during the men's 400-meter Olympic race, Quincy Hall was in 4th place with 30 meters left and he still won gold.

How?

Clearly, it was his mindset. The same mindset you need to close deals in B2B SaaS sales, right? This type of stuff, guys, not all reach is worth it and sometimes you should just not say these things.

I'm confused. What did they say that made people pissed off on that one?

That one's just insufferable. Like, you're using the Olympics to try to get reach and you're trying to tie the Olympics to B2B SaaS sales. I agree.

It's a nonsense post. It has nothing to do with mindset on why you're going to do better in B2B sales.

No. And I'm just saying like, okay, when it's clear that you're trying to engagement farm for both of these posts. Have a little more judgment. You know what I mean? Because it makes you look bad.

The worst is like when people are passing away, like, oh my God, you know, and then people end up saying like, you know, here's the best thing Steve Jobs ever did or whatever. It's like, dude, just—

You're taking advantage. You're just, you're clout chasing. That's kind of what it is. Yeah. Yeah.

But I do believe like if someone passed away and you worked with them for a long time and you learned something, you'd be like, look, these are the memories I have.

And this is the best lesson Yeah, if you got some good stories to tell, then go for it.

Exactly. Yeah, but I agree with you, especially with the dude who got cheated on by his boss or CEO or whatever it's called. Yeah, it sucks for him. I hope that never happens to anyone. Yeah, you know, um, it doesn't matter how bad a relationship is, toxic is, is people should have just split and just bounced, you know what I mean?

I gotta— okay, here, here, here. Okay, uh, so, so check this out. He even put it on Substack too. Oh my God, it's a collaboration on Substack. Okay, check this out. So Um, the CEO of a startup I worked for seduced my wife in direct retaliation for my pushback in the office, directly leading to my divorce. And it's because the vice president of Amazon—

Dude, okay, that's too far. And when I say that is whether he cheated or not, right? I don't have any proof of it. I don't know this story. But to say that someone slept with your wife because they didn't like what you had to say at work, that's really a far stretch.

This wasn't worth it because his 5 learnings were when you have a good manager, lean in and take advantage of it. 2, spot the snakes. 3, do excellent work even for nasty leaders. 4, don't confront the snakes directly. 5, don't become a snake. Was not worth it, man. Sorry.

No, it also makes him look really bad. He's making a judgment call and saying, you cheated because of X, Y, and Z reason. The reach is not worth it. And the real reality is, is unless she says why she cheated and why the boss did it, you don't really know. He's just making an assumption.

Yep. Yep. And then someone responds here, Alex Cohen. Sounds like someone familiar, famous. So he responds in a tweet and he's like, there's no amount of money you can pay me to admit this on the internet, let alone write a thread about lessons learned. So anyway, we'll leave that at what it is. Is Reddit the next big paid media opportunity? So it says here, Reddit's ad business grew 41% last quarter. Marketers still want it to do more. So it's growing in a big way, right? It's hosting about 91.2 million daily active users, right? I read Reddit a lot. I love it. Its ad revenue in the second quarter total $253 million, a minuscule sum compared with the $38 billion in ad sales at Facebook. But I am seeing companies like Klaviyo, they're advertising and the ad units look pretty interesting. I actually clicked on one of the ads. So I think it's an untapped opportunity potentially, potentially, not for everyone, but potentially.

Reddit doesn't have enough eyeballs. I know that number seems big to most people, but you have to remember when you're marketing, you're marketing within a specific vertical or niche, so it's a subsection of that. that, and then a subsection of those people see the ads, a subsection of those people will then click on it. So it's really hard to get the volume. In total, yes, for Reddit, it adds up to a pretty chunk of change. But Google, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, from everything we've tested, it's easier to convince their users to buy than it is to convince Redditors to buy something.

Yeah, I mean, the second part of this headline here, marketers still want it to do more. Really, what we're talking about here is reach. They need a lot more reach. But Look, I think if you've got a smaller business, right, might work out for you.

So Meta, X, Pinterest, Snap, a lot of these places are cheap sources for advertising that a lot of marketers tend to ignore that you shouldn't when you're starting off.

You know, on the Agency Owners Association call today, we had a guy on the call, Brennan. He was just showing how they run conversation ads and they're actually fairly, fairly cheap. Basically, like the leads are, they come in a really good— oh, Neil's falling asleep. Sorry, guys. So, so It's, you pay a couple hundred dollars for like a qualified lead. That's actually pretty good. And the offer—

What's— yeah, what industry?

It's an agency offering to travel companies.

So agency that is marketing, $100 or a couple hundred dollars?

Couple hundred dollars. Yeah.

That's expensive for a lead. It's hard to make that—

The way it ends up, the ROI for the first year ends up being like a, like a— want to talk LTV to CAC ratio is like a 10 to 1. For the year. So it's pretty good.

So it's profitable, highly profitable.

Highly profitable. And then the offer is basically a gift card.

Huh.

$105 Amazon gift card to get on a call.

$105?

Yeah. I was like, why do you use $100? Why does the $5 make a difference? He's like, it's psychology, Eric, you should know. I'm like, okay, all right.

Yeah, I don't think there's much difference from $100 and $105.

Yeah. So he like had paid like a coach to do it or whatever. But I just thought that was interesting. Like there's so many different ways to skin it and you guys don't have to do every marketing channel that we talk about. Neil and I don't do everything. We just kind of try to Double down on what works.

Like, I'm not going to try that out. It probably does work well for him and, or her, and they can make a ton of money.

You can try the 4-day work week. Let me know how that goes.

No, no, no, no, no, no, no.

We should rock, paper, scissors, and whoever loses has to do a 4-day work week.

How about we just have Brad here try the 4-day work week?

Oh yeah, Brad, you want to try that? All right, Brad's good at it.

During the Olympics, I know the Olympics are over now, we were seeing so many people who are trying to create the perfect marketing campaign and perfect ads. They wanted like a perfect 10. Adweek even had an article around this and we were getting hit up by so many corporations before Olympics being like, yeah, we want the most amazing, perfect ad out there. And I would always tell people, there's no such thing as a perfect ad. And they're like, why? Well, what works now won't keep working. You can't just keep using the same thing.

I have a friend, Andrew Chen, who likes to talk about the law of shitty click-throughs. So eventually everything goes down.

Yes. And you need to look at marketing not as how do you create something that's perfect, but more so how do you create something that's iterative and continually gets better and improves?

Yeah.

Never try to optimize for perfect because perfect is in the eye of the beholder, right? Some people may be like, this is perfect from a branding perspective, but then I would look at it and say, what's my ROI? Because I'm very numbers-oriented.

Right.

And you need to think of things as iterative when it comes to marketing. How can you make something work but continually get better? Because if you strive to make something perfect, you'll waste too much time. You won't execute fast enough and you'll find that you'll spend way more money than you need to.

If you don't have an experimental mindset when it comes to marketing, what happens is you end up with all this gut feeling. And what happens is you're not tracking your metrics, okay? You're kind of spraying and praying when it comes to your ideas. And what happens is you get subpar results. And if you don't fix that, that will happen for the rest of your career. So you have to fix that. And a lot of people don't fix it. They might fix it for a little bit and then they disappear and then everything falls apart again. By the way, I have one more over here. Um, Gary Tan tweeted this. So did you know that Perplexity is coming in? They're going to charge CPM prices of $50. They're going to start running ads in Q4. Um, so Gary says Perplexity users are pretty leading edge, so high CPM wouldn't surprise me. Also, I wonder if there's a new kind of ad unit, one that takes advantage of the LLMs being able to read and write and know more about the user's intention. A much deeper level of targeting is now possible. Are we going to go hard on this initially? No. Are we going to test a little bit? Probably. But it's exciting.

I saw this article. I saw this information be reported by all the stock channels.

CNBC.

Yeah, CNBC, Bloomberg, they're all talking about it. And there's one big problem with it. $50 CPMs are really, really expensive. I don't think it's going to do well for Perplexity. The first thing I did is I went to SimilarWeb and checked out their traffic. Of course you did.

What's their traffic?

I could be wrong. I looked up SimilarWeb for Perplexity. Perplexity, as well as OpenAI and Claude. Claude, Claude, whatever you pronounce it. Perplexity, SimilarWeb. All right, let's pull this up. It was less than 100 the last time I checked. There you go.

Yep.

51 million visits, average page views, 51.3.

How much has it been compounding by?

By 4.66. Their growth rate?

Yeah.

Where's the traffic? 47 to 51. Before that was 48. So they had one down month.

Yeah.

But if you look at the amount of visitors, it's not enough. It's not enough to build a business.

Yeah.

1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3. So that's 239. So let's just round to 240. 1, 2, 3 divided by 1,000. So $240,000. If they actually fill up all their inventory, they'll make $12 million a month. $144,000 a year.

Their traffic needs to scale. The problem is it really relies on search engines too. It's, uh—

Google can crush them the next day. That's my opinion.

Using retrieval augmented generation, they're pulling from search engines, right?

Yeah.

So, um, that's it. Please don't forget to rate, review, Go to marketingschool.io/agency to join the Agency Accelerator— Agency Owners Association. All right, talk to you later. Bye.

Bye.