DeepSeek AI: The Game-Changer No One Saw Coming

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Welcome to another episode of the Niche Pursuits News Podcast!
This week Jared Bauman and guest host Thomas Smith tackle the most important industry headlines, share some fantastic tips related to their side hustles, and offer some interesting ideas arising from their weird niche sites.
They dive right into the big news this week: Chinaโs release of its DeepSeek AI, which is a rival to OpenAI.
They give some background information and talk about the aftermath of the announcement. They talk about the cost, what tech leaders are saying, and how it has disrupted the AI market. They discuss how DeepSeek got its data as well as OpenAIโs rebuttal.
Watch the Full Episode
Do you agree with their assessment on how DeepSeek was trained? Do you also believe that OpenAI is being hypocritical? Thomas shares what he thinks is the bigger story. What do you think?
Moving on, they talk about the amazing resource Hubspot once was and how its organic traffic is essentially plummeting. They talk about how the community is responding to the news and share theories and takeaways.
What does Jared reveal about the companyโs stats? What does this mean for SEO?
The next topic they talk about is how Googleโs Quality Ratersโ guidelines have been updated.
Jared jumps right to the key takeaways from this news item and then they discuss them.
Do you agree that Google is cracking down on reputation abuse? How do you view the changes in the guidelines?
And lastly, Jared and Thomas talk briefly about TikTok and Microsoftโs bid to keep the app in the US. What do they think about the companyโs decision? Tune in to hear their thoughts.
When itโs time for some Shiny Object Shenanigans, Jared gives an update on his calculator websites. He talks about the keywords theyโre targeting and their current rankings.
He also offers an update on the newsletter he created from an HCU-hit website along with Thomas. They talk about the changes theyโve made, how theyโre growing the list, and how to use segments and sequences effectively.
When itโs Thomasโs turn, he talks about his Medium side hustle and the changes that have been happening. He talks about how the rise of AI has impacted the site and Mediumโs response to it.
He also shares the strategy thatโs been working for him.
Next come the Weird Niche Sites, and Jared goes first with Mouse Mingle, a dating site for Disney fans.
He gives some background for the site, its stats in Ahrefs, and monetization efforts, and offers some interesting conclusions about starting a site around a popular passion.
When itโs Thomasโs turn, he shares Wild Turkey Lab, a content site about wild turkeys. He talks about its unique characteristics, from the depth of the content to the EEAT-inspired photos.
And that brings us to the end of another episode of the Niche Pursuits News Podcast. We hope you feel informed, inspired, and ready to use the ideas you heard here in your own business.
Transcript
Jared: All right. Welcome back to another week of niche pursuits news. My name is Jared Bauman another week, another bevy of topics in the online world to dive into, uh, the big story today, clearly deep seek, uh, this cutting edge Chinese AI reasoning model that was released, everyone is wondering how this technology was built so fast and so cheap.
And we're really just learning about all of its capabilities. Uh, we'll dive pretty deep, pun intended, into all the storylines around this. Uh, but we've got some other topics still to get to. Uh, a long standing bastion of SEO success in the content world has come to the limelight this week. Um, and for its dramatic organic traffic losses.
HubSpot. Uh, it's the latest major website to see a nosedive, and there's a lot of opinions out there about this. Uh, and then Google, they recently updated their Search Quality Rater Guidelines, and they definitely have a specific focus that they're going after. So we'll get to all these stories, plus an update on some side hustles.
Of course, two very weird niches. Mine is actually all about dating, which is weird that I'm covering in and out in and of itself, because I haven't been on a first date in, I think over 18 years now at this point. So anyways, with that segue here to talk through all this, you've got Thomas Smith back in the ghosting seat.
Thomas, welcome.
Thomas: It's great to be here.
Jared: Yeah, we were talking before we hit record about this weird niche site that I'm going to be talking about. And, um, it's, it's, it's in the dating world. So it's, it's very interesting. I think there's some different ideas for a lot of people out there, and I know you're probably thinking what the heck, but I will get to them.
I can't wait for this segment, but anyways, okay, we've got a lot to get through. I've got about 20 tabs open, so let's go ahead and dive in. And of course, this big story, I know you're eager to talk about this, Thomas, is this, um. This, this kind of deep seek release. Uh, it was, I think just over a week ago, but nonetheless, we didn't have enough time to really get into it last week.
And a deep seek R1 is this cutting edge Chinese reasoning model that is rivaling open AI. Uh, and their 01 model it's free to download and again, downloads one of the keywords here, but let me read you a couple of things, a couple of lines from it, because you've got a bunch of different storylines to go into as it relates to this.
It's not just about the release. It's about a lot of other things, folks. So on Monday, um, yeah. So this is about a little over a week ago, Chinese AI lab, deep seek released its new R1 model family under an open MIT license. And its largest version contains 671 billion parameters. Uh, Thomas, I'm hoping you can help us put that in perspective.
But, um, uh, these distilled models are based on existing open source architectures, like Quen and Llama, trained using gen, uh, data generated from the full R1 model. Smallest version can run a laptop, while the full model requires much more substantial computing resources. Um, so here's kind of some of the storylines here.
Release immediately caught the attention of the AI community because most existing open weight models, which can be run in fine tune on local hardware have lagged behind proprietary models like opening eyes Oh one in their reasoning benchmarks. So having these capabilities available in an MIT licensed model that anyone can study.
Modify or use commercially, potentially marks a shift in what's possible. Um, and so then, you know, we've got quotes here in this article that we featured, um, online, uh, are on the screen here in front of us. Um, I got a lot of the topics we're going to get into here. How open AI is responding, what's unique about this, but just from the announcement from what it did, um, even to like us stock market, uh, the kind of.
Kind of provided like Thomas, what are, what are some thoughts I haven't added here about this topic?
Thomas: So the first thing I would say is that I think that deep seek is a big deal, but for completely different reasons than most people think and the markets think, and we'll get into exactly why that is. I personally, I'm going to start by saying I'm not.
I'm impressed by parts of it. And there's parts of it that I think are much less impressive than most people think it is. So, I mean, the impact is, has been huge. So this came out and it really, I think, prompted this. Uh, awakening or reckoning within the AI industry that basically the strategy, at least here in America, has been pour as many resources as you can into this billions of dollars, build huge data centers, ingest the whole internet, pay people for content, like access everything you can to train.
These models, and that's how we're going to make them commercially successful. It's how we're going to make them smarter and bigger and better. Just basically throw all the money at it, essentially. And that was the business model that's driven places like OpenAI. And then also all these suppliers to them, like NVIDIA, for example, that sells the chips that are used to train these giant models.
And they were expecting this was going to be the next 10 years. Just keep making them bigger and bigger. And when DeepSeek came along, they claimed that they trained their model for 6 million in contrast to the tens of billions that have been spent on other models. Now, I believe that there's some, there's some complexity to that.
We'll get into that. I don't buy that that's anywhere comparable to what some of these big places are doing. Again, we'll get to that, but it kind of woke people up to the fact that, hey, we've been spending billions of dollars on AI. This little company in China has come along and created something that at the surface level seems to be pretty comparable in its performance, or giving it away for free, and so that the markets freaked out, basically, is what happened this week.
Um, Nvidia lost, I think, 580 billion dollars, was the largest Wall Street drop in history. Of its of its value, because, you know, if you don't need to buy all these chips to build a model, then they're not going to have to be able to sell so many of those chips. So it's been a huge week, just because this thing exists.
But as an AI expert, if somebody has been using these models for a long time. I have some pretty deep reservations and I think there's a lot more to the story than people are seeing on the surface,
Jared: you know, you mentioned the cost. And I think that was 1 of the big things is that this was built for a fraction of the cost.
Um, it touted at 6. What was it? Uh, say it again.
Thomas: It was 6 million dollars, right? That they said they spent versus. I don't think it open AI is fully disclosed it, but it's in the tens of billions would be that, uh, that, you know, these big companies are spending
Jared: to say it doesn't pay to say it pales in comparison, or it isn't even in the same hemisphere would be, uh, an under exaggeration.
Right? And it's just, it's kind of fascinating at the cost and the speed with which they built. And if you're wondering about the success. Um, uh, here we have an article from the Atlantic and here is a lot of different things in this Atlantic article. One of the things I'll pull out deep seek dash R1 overtook chat.
GPT is the number one free app on Apple's app store in the U S last week. Um, you've got a lot of tech leaders kind of praising it as this amazing breakthrough, uh, um, Mark Andreessen, uh, uh, a couple others. Um, and it's, it's really disrupted though, the way that people think about AI going forward. Um, Let's, let's just quickly, we can circle back on some of those reactions as well, but I do want to share this, um, this, this statement, if you will, uh, because I think it's, it's apropos to mention it.
We can talk about how it weaves into the storyline, open AI. So open AI, what are they going to, what are they, what do they think about all this? Um, and so we've got a story here in the New York times up that says open AI. It says DeepSeek may have improperly harvested its data. And, um, again, you know, the big thing here is that, where are they getting all this data from?
Where is DeepSeek getting this data if they're not spending billions and billions of dollars to build up models that crawl the internet and then, you know, do what they do with them? Um, and here, this article says, OpenAI says it's reviewing evidence that the Chinese startup DeepSeek broke its Terms of Service by harvesting large amounts of data from its AI technologies.
So in other words, Hey, did DeepSeek use OpenAI to then create its model? Basically building AI on top of AI, if you will. Um, OpenAI said that DeepSeek may have used data generated by OpenAI, OpenAI technologies to teach similar skills to its own system. This process called distillation is common across the AI field, but OpenAI's terms of service say the company does not allow anyone to use data generated by its systems to build technologies that compete.
In the same market, it goes on to talk about this. I know you and I've had several conversations this week off air, just in our private messages about this exact concept and not only the topic of his open AI in the right, how would they prove it? Is this where deep seat got his information, but also just.
The viability of an AI platform built off of another, uh, AI or large language model.
Thomas: Yeah, you know, I think the, the storyline, at least in the mainstream media and a lot of discussion is that they did this incredible thing. They must've had some amazing new technology to train something comparable to open AI for 6 million.
I personally didn't buy it for a minute. I know both of us started talking about how do they really do it? And what we both landed on earlier this week was, okay, they must have just taken output from something like OpenAI and then basically trained the model. On that, and I mean, the way I like to think about this is if you wanted to build a search engine, imagine what you would have to do to build a search engine and, you know, you have to basically go out and get all of the data on the internet, crawl every single website, put it all into a data center, somewhere, pay for all of that, create some kind of algorithm that can process that and make sense of it.
You probably have to buy a social network at this point to have user data. To see, you know, what people are clicking on, and it would cost you probably 20 billion is what came out of the Google thing. There's an easier way, right? You could go to Google quietly, and you could go to Bing, and you could see for every query what they're ranking.
And then you could train your model based on what everyone else is doing, and it would be a lot cheaper than 20 billion. And I think that is exactly what DeepSeek has actually done. So rather than building it from scratch, they went and looked at the output that. OpenAI, it sounds like, has spent billions of dollars creating from all this content out there on the open internet.
And they basically said, great, you did all the legwork for us. We'll just pull out all that, all that information. We'll spend a couple million bucks, train a model that takes that really, you know, consistent output and mimics it. And there you go. You have something that on, again, on the surface level looks and behaves a lot like open AI for way less.
Jared: It stands to reason, I mean, you and I were theorizing there. We don't know that yet, at least not in any of the documentation that's come out that I've seen, but it does stand to reason when they're touting 6 million compared to the billions. And it also brings up this ultimate. Irony, if you will, allow me to extrapolate here a little bit, because I'm sure you're going to see the irony because you see these things somewhat similar, but it's ironic that open AI is claiming what they're claiming, given that the very premise of what they do is scrape the Internet and content creators to create their LLM and to create open AI's chat GPT, um, in essence, Uh, you know, I mean, OpenAI is accusing DeepSeek of what they're also being sued for, unauthorized data use.
New York Times, we just had their article up, like, they're suing, uh, OpenAI because they're saying, Hey, you trained your chatbots off of our content. And so it's so ironic that now OpenAI is accusing DeepSeek of doing exactly what I believe they basically did, albeit at hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of X's more expensive than what DeepSeek did.
Thomas: Yes, there's something kind of deeply satisfying as a content creator about you took all my content and trained on it. And you know, they so be it. You did that. But now someone else came along and did it to you. And kind of we're all in the same boat at this point. So yeah, 100 percent see where you're coming from on that.
And to me. The big question is, okay, what does this mean for our industry, right? This is all kind of theoretical about who stole what from who, or who, you know, cribbed what from who I think ultimately what it means though, is that it's not a moat for open AI anymore to have these big models. Someone can come in for a couple million bucks, take the outputs and create their own thing that's relatively comparable and then provide it for free.
So it moves AI and particularly this high level AI. Much more towards just being a commodity, something that any of us can access for almost no cost. And to me, that's the bigger story here. Not so much that they created some incredible technology to train a model from scratch for way, way less, but that they were able to pretty quickly and easily duplicate the work of a company that's now worth, you know, hundreds of billions of dollars and create something they could release onto the open market essentially for free.
And that means for us and our industry. AI probably going to get a lot less expensive as this kind of competition comes up, but it also means that players like OpenAI are, they're not going to be able to compete just on, we built the smartest model. They're going to need to lean into things like operators and agents.
They're going to need to develop things that are smarter, that are more multimodal that can make better video. And for us, that just means again, competition, we're going to have even better software we can access for cheaper.
Jared: It's interesting to see where this is going to go. I mean, you know, OpenAI has a ton of lawsuits filed against them.
I mean, I think I read somewhere over a dozen, so I guess I've heard a ton, but I feel like there's a lot more that are either filed or being filed, and then, you know, we're gonna have to see how this goes. And obviously this is now, you know, between different countries and stuff like that. So there's a lot that's going into this, um, and there's a lot of, there's a lot that built on this because a lot of, Um, you know, stocks, stock prices, you know, uh, trade relations, a lot of this bigger geopolitical, uh, financial stuff, uh, kind of got looped into this.
I feel like we don't ever talk about that stuff. On the podcast and here 2025 hits. And it's like, we cannot stop talking about how our worlds tend to intersect with geopolitical issues right now. So here we are another week and we're kind of doing that again. I mean, um, by the way, we will, I will tease you.
We will check in on Tik TOK here at the very end. I just got to make time for it. Uh, but it's just weird to see this world continually intersecting in the geopolitical, um, international communities.
Thomas: Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, it's. It's, I think it's just, it's everywhere at this point. There's so many changes happening and um, it's having more of a direct impact than this kind of stuff.
And faster too. We talked about that before, that antitrust lawsuits take 10 years to play out. This is happening really minute by minute with something like DeepSeek.
Jared: It's funny because the last couple of weeks with the Tik Tok situation, and now this deep seek situation, I, most people stopped asking most of my neighbors, my friends, they don't even ask me how my work's going and where there's, I don't understand it like that.
Or like, I don't know what you do. I don't know what it is, but for the first time in the last couple of years, I can finally be like, Hey, this, this is, this is kind of the stuff that happens in my world, you know? Well, look, we're famous. Um, I kid, I kid, but it is interesting to see all these intersections.
Um, okay. We're going to park that because we got so many other topics to get to big stuff. Um, would love to hear in the comments. If you have played around with deep seek, we didn't get a chance to talk about that. I think we will in the coming weeks, maybe as Thomas or myself or, um, articles start coming about about people who have really played with it.
I've seen little news flashes and headlines, but this is mainly about the storyline. The launch and then the subsequent aftermath that came from that launch. But if you have used it, man, we'd love to hear something in the comments about it. But for now, let's kind of move on to our next big story. That, that big story is HubSpot.
Um, now I'll say this at the outset, why is this a big story? Well, HubSpot has kind of long been the darling child, certainly of the SEO community in terms of the content. side of SEO and ranking for, uh, for large, uh, informational topics. Um, I know for myself, just in the world of getting a digital marketing in the early, mid and late, um, 2000 decade, right?
2000 to 2010, they were one of the biggest inspirations in terms of some of their modeling of. Top of the funnel, middle of the funnel, bottom of the funnel and their blog just kind of became this gold standard of really helpful information that people would go access from a variety of marketing topics and basically cats out of the bag, but their organic traffic has started to, um, I will say plummet.
Um, I, it's funny as you read these articles, they're kind of like, Hey, it's dropped. Um, from 13. 5 million in November to 8. 6 million in December. Um, but those drops have continued and we're almost into February now. And so I would call these drops really precipitous. I'll show a screenshot here in a second of an up to date look at things.
Um, I will say from the outset that this story also is interesting because for whatever reason, Uh, a lot of different people have wanted to comment on why it happened. And so it's kind of created this online controversy around, um, what is leading to SEO declines for the longest time, you know, especially for people listening to this podcast, but the longest time we were basically just told eight, uh, you know, you small content sites that don't have brand authority, you know, that aren't the toaster guy, as it were referenced to previous podcasts.
Like that's who Google's targeting. They're targeting these. Faceless, nameless, um, hack jobs of websites. And I'm using air quotes because that's certainly how we felt as content creators that are producing good content, but are not on substantially authoritative domains, but in the last couple of months, we have seen big domain after big domain, after big domain fall and seen HubSpot fall has really kind of triggered a lot of people and it seems to have really created a lot of kind of controversy about the why behind it.
Um, uh, I, I have a good article. That I thought did a good job of summarizing some of the reasons why HubSpot might have dropped. But, um, Thomas, first off, like, thoughts on HubSpot, its impact for you, and just seeing it, you know, kind of drop the way it's dropped.
Thomas: I mean, it feels like nothing's sacred anymore, right?
Forbes was always the place that would always outrank you, no matter what niche you were in. And, you know, they would just write an article and outrank you. And HubSpot was the place that kind of seemed to be doing it right. You know, they had They had this incredible SEO, but they also had a product they were directly pushing.
It was like very clear how they were monetizing this stuff. And yeah, people would use this as case studies. You know, do if you're, if you're an e com brand, do what HubSpot does and you'll get tons of traffic and then you can monetize it with your own product and you're golden. So to see them drop and to continue to drop, I mean, it doesn't seem like they've hit the bottom yet.
It seems like these big. Names, these big shining examples in the industry are just disappearing.
Jared: I mean, you, you bring up the word brand, you said it. And while Google has never directly said, Hey, we want brands to win. You know, we had Cyrus Shepard on a couple of months ago. We've had many people talk about how that's basically, if you had to use a word to talk about what Google wants to rank nowadays, they want brands, right?
They want brands that people trust and et cetera, et cetera. HubSpot has a killer brand. Like I've gone to their conference many, many times. And I mean. I would call people who, who, who use the product almost like acolytes of the product. Like they love the product, they have a great brand. Certainly they've gone through IPO, they've gone through acquisition thing, you know, founders have changed or people have changed, but the company still has this wonderful brand that is very ubiquitous in the online and in the traditional marketing sense.
I have the Ahrefs graph up, um, again, from what I can see, uh, yes. Uh, according to the, uh, traffic chart, um, earlier this, uh, well, that's about a year ago, January of 2024, they were at about an estimated 12 and a half million traffic. And then, I mean, as of, uh, today, they've dropped below 5 million, you know, so that is well over 50 percent drop.
In one year and continuing to slide, you know, it looks like it was brought on here in, um, in September of 2024 and then there was, uh, some, some more volatility that started in November and December of 2024. And to your point, it really hasn't stopped yet. Um, here, like I said, no shortage of articles about what is happening and, um, and the why behind it.
Uh, and I cannot find my article. Uh, uh, I have too many screens open. That's certainly what we have here. So I don't have the article to share with you, but I will feature it and I will mention it. Um, uh, let me pull it up here. I mean, what I took
Thomas: away from it was that it's like Google wants you to have a strong brand.
But they also want you to stay in your lane. Increasingly. That is the, that's
Jared: that I got it right here. Prioritizing expertise and relevance, uh, rather, HubSpot ranked for high traffic, irrelevant keywords, like famous quotes and the infamous shrug emoji and how to type the shrug emoji in. Um, and this is what a lot of people are kind of talking about.
I'm, I'm pulling from, um, Alida Solis article on, on it as well. By the way, if you're wondering, I'll include a link in the show notes. But yeah, to your point, stay in your lane. That's the thing. Like you can be a big brand, but apparently you can be a big brand. But now we're starting to see that. You can't be a Forbes and just write about, um, anything.
You can't be a HubSpot and write about shrug emojis, you know? And, and so it kind of brings back to this idea of like topical expertise and, and, and all, you know, thin content and some of these strategies that gotten used against small publishers and are almost now being in the forefront for large publishers.
Thomas: I kind of wonder if all the feedback we gave to Google by filling out those forms, they asked us to fill out. Had something to do with this as an industry. I mean, maybe that's being too optimistic. Maybe they, they're not paying that close attention to us, but I just know so many people where there are sites got hit for this kind of stuff.
Okay. I straight outside my lane and I published and on topics I probably shouldn't have. And so I see why I got, I got hit, but Hey, why is Forbes allowed to do the same thing? Why is that a
Jared: week?
Thomas: And just saying that over and over and over again, and I kind of think maybe it's stuck. Maybe Google said, wait a second.
Why are they allowed to do that? They shouldn't be and went after them. And I don't know if we were just the canary in the coal mine, and we were the first ones to. Get hit, or we were the ones who were least likely to be able to complain at a substantial level, or if they just started with us and then, you know, people pointed out, Hey, this isn't fair.
And Google maybe agreed and went after some of these big brands for the same stuff.
Jared: Well, we're probably the easiest to target and take care of, right? You know, I mean, it's not hard to take out a DR 25 site that's been, uh, living on, you know, uh, search queries that are. 10 words or longer, we, we all did that.
We all knew it worked. And we, you know, many of us built entire websites around that, but unfortunately the people that created brands around their topics didn't necessarily fare any better. Right. So it's kind of like, yeah, they targeted that. But, and, and I think the flip side of this, and I liked that Alayda pointed this out.
Um, and, uh, you know, I thought this was really important because in my world and I'm running a marketing agency, traffic. And traffic numbers are nowhere near everything. As a matter of fact, they are sometimes very deceiving. And so most of the topics that HubSpot is getting dinged for, most of their traffic losses are on their blog.
And they're really actually pretty much mostly, mostly not entirely, but mostly isolated in terms of that, like, don't really bring them any value. Anyways, like the shrug emoji, that doesn't, doesn't bring them any business. You're not going to sign up for a CRM, uh, to the tune of a couple hundred dollars to a couple thousand dollars a month, because you learned how to use the shrug emoji from an informational article.
And so she points out. Um, in a, in a subset here, is this a disaster for HubSpot? She says, not necessarily most of their high value commercial queries like CRM software, marketing automation. They're still ranking very, very well. And here's the interesting thing. I didn't see where she got this from. I wish I had overall site traffic, not just the blog, but kind of the whole brand only dropped 3.
94 percent month over month in December, 2024. So their core business model. Remains very strong. You know, let's be honest. They're focused on leads, conversions and revenue. Um, not just the traffic component, not just the number of keywords they rank for, not just a rest estimated organic traffic, which brings us all back to like, Hey, It can still play a valuable role, especially if you're not just doing it, going after long tail keywords, or not just going after kind of SEO opportunities, but going after a whole complete brand, a profitable product, et cetera.
It looks like HubSpot will be fine, but this is certainly very interesting and only compounds on all that we've been dealing with in the content space for the last two years.
Thomas: Yeah. And I think it ties into our next story really well, because that's about the shift in what Google is looking for. And this is kind of evidence from the field that this is happening.
Jared: Great transition, Tom. It's great transition. You know, you better, you can't do too much of that or else they're just going to give you the, uh, the hosting seat and I'm going to be kicked out of a job here, but yes, that is the next story. The Google search quality radar guidelines. I always. I always feel like I'm going to mix those words up a little bit.
So I think I nailed it. Um, but Google updated those. They had not updated them in quite a while. Um, there's a lot here in this article, obviously, whenever they update this stuff, it's very nuanced and for a podcast, it's not really conducive for getting into the nitty gritty details. I've got a story from search engine journal.
I'm going to scroll to the very bottom. It's a good article by the way, but where they say key takeaways. So let's just go through these. I'll throw them over to you once I'm done reading them and we kind of talk through any of the big ones here, but, um, number one, AI content strategy. So the guidelines clarify that while AI tools can be used in content, content creation, the focus must be on providing unique value rather than mass producing generic content.
There's some interesting things there. That's a kind of over summarization of kind of some of the things they did. Number two, quality over quantity. The expanded sections on spam and low quality content emphasize Google's continued focus on rewarding high value original content. And number three, technical considerations, kind of not really as important in my opinion, in terms of some of the big takeaways, but, uh, this new ad blocker requirement suggests increased attention to how users experience webpages, including advertising.
The first two sound like more of the same. I think if you get into exactly what was updated, they defined things better. And I, I think that's interesting, but they really are going down this anti spam route. They're not taking a stance on AI. Is it good? Or is it bad? But they are taking a stance on spam related tactics or things that they.
Think our spam related tactics and trying to better define them. We saw mentions of expired domain abuse, site, reputation, abuse, scaled content, abuse, et cetera, et cetera. What are your thoughts on what was updated?
Thomas: Yeah, to me, the, the changes around scaled content are a piece of it, but I think that their focus specifically in on what they consider to be spam with reputation abuse really echoes what we've been seeing with.
Forbes marketplace. And now with HubSpot, where if you're going for, for keywords that you probably shouldn't be ranking for based on actual expertise, they're now telling quality raters, Hey, look for sites that are doing that. So I think we all kind of know that Google is unsure what to do with AI content.
They're okay with it in some contexts, they don't like it in other contexts. They're aware of the fact that, you know, you can use programmatic SEO to generate tons of valueless content without having to use generative AI. So I think they're not a hundred percent sure how to, how to handle that. But what they are doing is leaning heavily into this idea of spam and abuse.
And particularly the expired domains. We've seen that happen. That shift has happened that these are much less valuable than they used to be. But this is where I think that the two stories relate together is. The idea of reputation abuse, where there seems to really be cracking down on sites that have gotten out of their lane.
And so to me, as a publisher, it says, okay, really go for the niches, maybe split off if you have a chunk of your site that really went too far in a different direction. You know, maybe I shouldn't be creating that Starbucks review section of my Bay Area Telegraph site that I've hinted at before. Maybe that needs to be its own site.
So I think that's the big takeaway I got from this article beyond even the stuff about AI.
Jared: Yeah. I recommend everyone take a look at it, especially if you're curious, you know, what's going on in this world. I mean, we, again, just as our summary, like the search, the quality search quality radar guidelines, or I said it wrong, I knew I was going to do it.
The search quality radar guidelines are not the algorithm. They're not. Really related to the algorithm. They are the guidelines provided to the search quality raters who go and use the algorithm, use the SERPs or the search engine result pages, IE kind of the algorithms in real time to give improvements that they basically use for machine learning.
So we can. Pretty accurately assume that whatever they're updating here will eventually make its way into the algorithm just by nature of what I just shared in the process that it goes through. So that's why we pay attention to this. It's almost ironically. Sometimes it's, um, it's, it's backward looking, but.
It's almost a precursor of what we might see in the algorithm going forward, or might see more of, um, we're almost at time. I'm just going to read a quick article, a quick update on Tik TOK. I promised last week that we would have an update. This isn't really much of an update, but Hey, I said, we'd have an update.
So we, we had to find an update. Um, Oh, man, I keep getting bumped out of my logins here, but it basically is Trump says Microsoft is eyeing TikTok bid to keep the app in the U. S. And I'll include a link in the show notes, but I won't be able to share it here. Um, it's kind of ironic, kind of funny that I said, where's big tech and why are they not jumping all over TikTok because of eyeballs, because of short form content, because all this stuff and, um, anyways, Microsoft.
It seems has thrown their hat in the ring, not a lot more to report on. Still got, uh, uh, several months before would they have to ever, you know, tick tock has to figure this out. So it's going to be a bit of a slow burn, but yes, it looks like we're starting to hear some rumors about who's lining up, but who's interested in tick tock, any final thoughts on that before we kind of move out of the news and into side hustles.
Thomas: I think it's exciting because Microsoft has the deep pockets to make this work. And they really missed the boat on mobile. And so this is their opportunity to pivot back into that space. And they did that really successfully with AI. So there's nothing to say they can't do the same thing with social and mobile.
Jared: Yeah, I mean, MSN is, um, is not exactly, uh, the up and coming, uh, platform of choice. Uh, they did miss out on mobile. They did miss out on a lot of just even the content shifts. They nailed it with open AI. Let's see if they can nail it again.
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Jared: Speaking of nailing it, let's talk about side hustles, huh? I mean, uh, I don't really know exactly what you're talking about.
Uh, I see on our agenda, it's something having to do with medium. I'll go first though. Sorry. Did I just spoil your, uh, your teas coming up here? Um, I'm going to talk about, um, a couple updates here. Number one, uh, it's funny. I've gotten a lot of email replies to my calculator websites, um, ranging the gamut, by the way, I've gotten a couple of people who are like, what are you doing, you're wasting your time.
Yeah, um, which is totally fine. I'm, I'm open to getting those emails, but let me just give you an update. Um, calculator website. Number one went live on January 9th calculator website. Number two went live on January 15th calculator website. Number three should go live tomorrow. I really want to get it live tomorrow.
Cause then I can say I got three live in January. Uh, tomorrow being Friday, the 31st, which means I can squeeze it in. Um, you know, the first and the second, both indexed, both getting traffic, both ranking in the top 10 or on the first page for their target keyword. The first one is a much lower search volume keyword.
You would argue easier. The second one is a higher search volume keyword, but still not crazy. It's like under a thousand searches a month, but that's still not. You know, crazy small, both are ranking on page one. So there's, um, uh, I will say not much measurable traffic and certainly no money to be made out of these yet.
So happy, but also very tempered in that this is going to be a slow burn. Um, uh, number three goes live this week and, um, I'm excited about this one. I think out of all three of them, this one. There is a, there's a chance it could also not only from ad revenue down the road, uh, make money, but maybe also make money from some affiliate sales because it's really an affiliate.
Calculation you're trying to make your, it's around a product that you want to buy, whereas the other two are around like informational topics. Like I got to do something. How do I do it? Um, and yeah, there's products around it, but they're kind of secondarily related. This is really like, I need to buy something, which, how, what do I buy?
What do I use? What do I get? And so I think there could be an affiliate relationship here. So. We'll see. I'll keep checking in. I get my goals five, but I'm having so much fun with them. I don't know. I might do more.
Thomas: You know, I think that the traditional calculator site, that's pretty easy to put together.
You're seeing that those can be super successful if you choose the right niche and now you can build them really easily. And I know we've been talking offline a little bit about, can you take some of today's newer technologies, do even more exciting stuff. I won't go much deeper than that, but I know we've been, we've been talking about some stuff that might end up getting shared here.
So I think going in this tool direction, doing something with, with a website instead of just providing content seems to be the way to go. And the fact that you're getting these ranked and these are doing reasonably well for a brand new site. It shows, we've seen what Google doesn't want, and now we're starting to see a little more indication of what they want.
Jared: Also what users want, like we forget, I forget, I'm in AI, ChatGPT, I'm in it all day, every day, but like most of the general population still is not going to ChatGPT to like get answers to what I'll call complex You know, questions or queries. These aren't complex queries, but they're more complex than what people are used to Google being able to provide them.
If you go, you know, they're specific, right? And that's where a tool really helps. It's a very specific answer. Cause you can input something specific and then get a specific response. Whereas you don't go to Google and you're not like, you know, I won't come up with some analogy here live, but you know, I think a tool is a little bit more nuanced and specific, which is why they work really well.
You can get that out of chat GPT, especially the Oh one model for the record. But most people don't even have access to that. Let alone, are they using it on a daily basis? They'll go to Google, use a tool. It's, it's interesting. So, um, well, I thought also, since we haven't talked about our partnership, our project on the email newsletter, and, um, I think a month, I think it was December that we last reported.
I was, I thought we could also check in on that and give people an update. Um, this is an HCU hit site that was doing really well. Um, uh, making several thousand dollars a month from affiliate and advertising. Sound familiar to people got crushed in multiple updates and I had built up an email newsletter as part of that, right?
Pop up, Hey, get your free guide, put your name in the email address, welcome sequence. And wasn't doing anything further. Now it wasn't getting traffic for the last year plus. So it wasn't adding new people to that list, but that list was, I believe it was 13 people. You and I said, let's see if we can pick back up and start sharing content with this newsletter with the goal of growing the newsletter, but also driving.
Daily clicks back to the website where it's already on a premium ad network and we can start earning money that way. I didn't have the time or the bandwidth. You said, let's do it together. I said, great, let's do it. So we talked about it. Success is right. We got it from, it was making about five or 600 a month from a Pinterest traffic and being traffic and stuff like that.
And we got it in the month of December. Uh, let's see here. Where do we get that to? We got it all the way up to, I think it was 1, 400 basically. Um, a couple updates on that and I want to ask you a couple of questions actually for, for them to clarify for people. Um, uh, yeah, December was 1445 for the record.
Uh, 1445. Um, this month, so this month we moved from the old platform, the old email platform, which I believe was Flodesk, if my memory served me correct, over to Kit, or what was previously known as ConvertKit. And that gave us Let's just say a lot easier time with segmenting the list. Um, and the segmentation is proving key because then what you, what you've done is really sliced and diced the type of emails people receive, which has caused to, which has caused a lot more engagement.
Which has resulted in a lot more clicks to the website, which means that where we weren't getting the kind of traction that we wanted, we're now averaging 60, 65, 70 per day. And that's really only with the beginnings of trying to grow through Facebook ad traffic. We're going to depth a little bit more on some of the things.
I mean, I don't want to, I don't want to get. Two out of my, out of my, uh, out of my wheelhouse here.
Thomas: So I would say overall, yeah, it's, um, it's been very exciting. And if this, if we had the RPMs of December right now, we would be over probably 2, 200 for this month. So big part of that, the shift from last month to this month is the.
Terrible RPMs that you get in January. So take it with a grain of salt, but the fact that we're almost on par with where we were last month, uh, despite probably half on a lot of these RPMs shows you that this is growing pretty quickly. Um, but basically when there's a list that is growing, what I always tell people to do is go for segments and sequences.
And those are kind of two tools within kit, but you can do this with a lot of email providers and basically segments are, you're going to take your list. And you're going to break it down into people who care about sub niches within your overall niche. And we're not sharing what this, this is, but I'll give an example from my site that I do share, which is a, a Bay Area, you know, news and travel site.
I've broken my list down into regions. I've broken it down into people who care about food, people who care about real estate, people who care about travel outside of the Bay Area. So you create these segments of people who care about specific things, and that can be. By having different calls to action on different pages on the site, it can be driving people, as you mentioned, through Facebook ads, you know, lead ads and that kind of thing to, to different, with different calls to action, uh, within those ads that target specific segments.
And it can even be based on click data. So you can send a message to your whole list with a bunch of different topics in it. And based on what people click on, you can segment them and say, okay, you know, I sent a message about five Bay area topics. And you keep clicking on the one that's East Bay, you probably live in the East Bay.
I'm going to put you in my East Bay segment. So that's the first piece. The second piece is sequences. So sequences are automated sets of messages that you can have go out, you know, on a daily basis if you want to the individual segments within your list. And what it allows you to do is start to build kind of an automatic like flywheel or backlog of content where when a new person joins your list or gets added to one of these segments, They automatically land in the sequence and every day for however long you want to schedule these out, they're going to get an email, you know, that's exactly targeted to their interests.
And the cool thing with that is you can start to tweak this over time and say. You know, Hey, did email number five in my sequence under perform, take it out. No one gets it in the future. And the other nice thing with it is that it becomes very automated. So if you're continuing to grow the list and add people, you don't have to be worrying about, okay, I got to write six emails a day for, you know, for all of my different segments.
You can have these sequences that have handled basically all the new people for you. And you're just kind of topping up these, these sequences with new stories, you're tweaking things, you're popping things out that might no longer be seasonal. Putting something else in that's more seasonal and what you end up with is this kind of automated process that grows the list over time.
So that's exactly what we're doing here. And so far again, even though we're on par January versus December. If we had the, the, even our average RPM for the year, not the, not the terrible RPMs of January, this would be growing. And so I think what we'll see in the future is we continue to add more people.
This is really got a lot of growth potential.
Jared: And it's worth mentioning that we finally, we, you. That's the whole point of this partnership, but you, getting over to kit has now meant some of the bandwidth is going to go towards growing the list, right? To getting new subscribers. Cause we kind of been operating for the black of, you know, from an 80, 20 standpoint, we've been operating with just the existing list.
And you know, whether you like it or not, every time you send an email, you're going to get unsubscribes. And so if you're sending emails every day to drive traffic to the website every day, you're going to have. Hopefully a slow drip of people leaving, but which we do, it's been a very, very controlled and minimize like the people really, um, uh, have responded well to daily emails.
Um, but you have to have a process for replenishing that list over time and not just keeping it where it is, but if you want to grow it, if you're sending emails and monetizing via ad traffic, the only way to grow it is to get more people to open and click your emails. And the only way to do that. Aside from uncovering, you know, some incredible opportunity with content and what you're sending, the only way to do that is to just be adding more people to the list.
So not much to go in there. Maybe in the future month or two, we can report on like some of the, the, the methods that, that you're using with Facebook. And I've got a couple other ones. I'm going to try to see if I can get the hopper as well. Um, uh, and then I, down the road, this site is perfect for Pinterest.
Um, so, you know, um, and we're, I'm having so much success with my other site. Um, uh, the HCU hit site with Pinterest traffic. So only so many hours in the day, but I mean, um, there's still so much opportunity and yeah, if you're, if your RPMs have been awful, they have started to pick up the last week, at least for my sites and the sites I have access to, like they have started to look a lot better.
So hopefully the really awful season of RPMs is behind us. And like you said, that'll have a direct impact on earnings for all of our projects.
Thomas: Yeah. I think, you know, minimizing the number of unsubscribes is. Is big and that's again where segmenting makes a huge difference. And you think about again, using my own site as an example, if you live in the South Bay, which is 40, 50 miles away from the East Bay.
If I send an email, that's about the East Bay, you're going to be angry and unsubscribe. And if I send 1 to the East Bay people about the South Bay, they're going to be angry and unsubscribe. But if I send each of them an email targeted to their specific region, they're both going to stay in the list. And so that's the key to here is that.
If you're sending, and we were literally sending manual, I was writing, you know, two, two meals a day sometimes to the whole list and everybody was getting something they didn't like because it was, you know, it's, it's a segmented list and, uh, everybody was seeing something that wasn't relevant to them.
And so that means you get more unsubscribed. It was pretty minimal. It was pretty good. But even then you're having this drip back out. If you can do a good job of segmentation and deliver people only the content that they want, your unsubscribes drop, your click through rates skyrocket, the email providers see that you end up in the inbox instead of the updates and it just really, it really makes everything better.
So yeah, I'm excited about that as well as growing.
Jared: Well, let's stop talking about my side hustle, really our side hustle. Let's be honest, but, um, and start talking about yours. I'm really excited to hear you talk about, cause I have been seen. Kind of chatter about this and I want to hear, I haven't talked to you about it actually yet.
Um, uh, I wanna hear you talk about it so dive into your side hustle, but I'm all ears.
Thomas: Yeah. So I wanna update people on Medium, which has been one of my kind of long running side hustles. And there have been some big changes happening at Medium recently that really dovetail I think a lot with what we've talked about with Google and, and the changes there.
And basically, I think big picture Medium is doing what everyone is doing and trying to figure out how to deal. With AI content and they're, they're really, if people don't know it's a platform where it's really centered on human writing, you're not really supposed to be publishing and certainly not monetizing AI content there.
And yet people have been slipping content in, there's apparently been some fraudulent activity that's been happening, people artificially driving up. Their clicks and, and read time and that kind of stuff on medium. If you're not familiar with it, you publish stories there. It's a subscription based model.
People pay. And as a writer, you collect a portion of that subscription money when people read your stories, essentially. And that worked great in the era before AI. Now there's a big problem of it being flooded with AI content and them trying to deal with this and fraud where people are sending these fraudulent clicks.
So what I'm seeing big picture over at medium. It's that they've developed more of these human curation steps in their process. We talked about this on previous episodes a little more. There's a thing called Boost on Medium, where if you write a really good story, Medium's editors, certain editors there, who are basically volunteers on one of them.
Um, can nominate the story, and Medium's own team will read it, and if they decide they like it, they will boost it, it's called, and it basically is like a 10x increase in distribution and earnings for your article. And they just launched a new feature that kind of, kind of ties into that, where editors who are kind of curating and helping gather stories together on the platform, Can do what's called featuring a story and you get a certain number of these per month and feature stories and it kind of gives like a smaller bump, I would say, you know, maybe 2 or 3 X bump to the visibility.
And again, that's a human that medium has kind of selected in most cases, or somebody who's built some kind of a reputation on the platform vouching for the content. So that's been their response. And so big picture. I think I'm seeing the move towards. Much more of this human curation, human decision making as the antidote or the weapon against AI, which interestingly, I think is a lot what Google is doing behind the scenes, right?
We're seeing these manual actions, not relying on the algorithm to sort this stuff out. They're hitting subdomains of websites. So it's a very similar type of shift that's happening, but what this means for writers on medium is that a lot of the stories where if you just publish it on the platform, uh, and you didn't get it boosted and you didn't get it featured that would have done reasonably well before.
And by that, I mean, 20, 30 of earnings, maybe a couple hundred people seeing it, maybe a thousand people. It's getting a lot harder to monetize those stories. I've talked to a lot of writers. Who writes stuff that kind of falls into that category. It did great with their own audience. They never really got stuff boosted.
That has really fallen by the wayside to a large extent, because I think it's just hard for medium to know whether that's AI or not. You know, there's no human really sort of, uh, looking at it. So the algorithm struggled to identify it. So I've seen this bifurcation, you know, there's two different pathways.
People who are writing that stuff have said that their earnings have dropped in some cases as precipitously as HubSpot, you know, down to, to a tiny fraction, 5, 10 percent of what they were earning before. But if you're consistently getting stories boosted or even featured, depending on the type of content you're writing, it's basically smooth sailing business as usual.
If anything, it's doing just as well. So what I've done on my side hustle here. Is really leaned in to only writing stories that I feel have a good shot at getting boosted or at least that I can feature in my own publication and that strategy so far has been working pretty well. So, in December, I made eighteen hundred and seventy five dollars program.
Jared: Yeah,
Thomas: pretty solid. And the majority of that was one story, which was in kind of the artificial intelligence. Yeah, the AI kind of space. Um, I did though make about 200. This was a boosted story. I did make about 200 from a story that was declined for a boost, but that was featured. So again, that tells me that this featuring thing, it's not going to be this big bump where I made probably about 1200 of that, I would say was from, uh, the one story that got boosted a couple hundred dollars was from this, uh, this one story that was featured.
And the balance was just my, my stories that weren't featured or boosted. So you can see the boost and the featuring makes a huge difference. Again, leaning to that, um, so far this month I've published, I believe two stories and I'm right under, as of yesterday, right under a thousand dollars. I think I'm at 996, so a little bit less than last month, but I really haven't been writing a lot on the platform as I try to figure out my new strategy.
So that's the, that's the strategy going forward. I think we're seeing it's going to get a lot harder to get partner program income, still totally viable to grow a newsletter, you know, and get external traffic, grow a newsletter from that works fine, but I'm focusing in on the boost and the featured. And that's really where I'm seeing the value.
Jared: I am so glad you shared all those updates. Um, I have, I've kind of taken my eye off of medium. Uh, sadly I was really enjoying that in Q3 last year, but then as we went into Q4, I was like, man, I got to focus on like the stuff where my either Amazon influencer, because it's so product focused for Q4. Or the projects where that higher RPM bump, I'll kind of get the benefit from.
So that's why I took my off the prize. Um, and I, I was looking to get back into it, so I've got to kind of just make sure to retool my strategy as it relates to that. So, um, thank you for sharing. Uh, we've got, uh, call it 10 minutes. So we're gonna have to fly through our weird niches. Um, I'll be able to fly through mine because.
I'm just in the habit so far in 2025 of picking niches. I know nothing about Um this one I know nothing about because I haven't done it a long time. I'm married for so long. Uh, uh, we do go out on dates, but We just plan them together. We don't actually go online to try to find a date But this is interesting because I did my annual family trip to disneyland this month where I take the kids up there We my wife and I would take the kids.
We did the whole disneyland thing. So disney is Just a world of its own. Right. And it's so popular. And I got back every time I get back from Disneyland and you just see the cultural phenomenon that is Disney culture, Disneyland, people who go there. Um, uh, and, and all that. For many, for at least a subculture that it, how it impacts their life.
I'm like, I got to find some weird, um, some weird niches in the Disney space. And so I actually asked my business partner, Caitlin, because, um, uh, she, she loves going to Disneyland and, and, and knows more about that scene than me. And she came up with a couple for me. So I might have a couple of weeks of Disney weird niches coming up, but I'm.
Really interested to talk about it because I think it kind of Disney, certainly as a, as a niche is very prominent, but I think it underscores what you can do with that same topic in a different niche. Uh, let me explain. So today's weird niche that's Disney related is mouse mingle. com. Yes. The mouse is a reference to Mickey mouse.
And um, uh, site is not good looking. I feel like it could look so much better. In so many ways, but it is exactly what you think it is the dating site for Disney fans. And as soon as I saw it, I'm like, Oh my gosh, what a brilliant concept. Um, traditional dating sites. Don't understand the passion people have for all things Disney, but we do.
Mouse Mingle is dedicated to Disney, Star Wars, Pixar, and Marvel fans. You don't need to live near a Disney park to find someone you like. There are fans everywhere who want them. Find someone to share their Disney passions with. So create your profile, check your matches to find someone who loves the characters, the movies, the stories, the music, or the memories as much as you do.
That is not much to it. Uh, there is this article, uh, in the daily universe. About them it was published in 2016. So this site I think was if I remember from reading this it was yeah So I went live on December 1st 2015 and it's unforeseen success caused technical issues such as preventing people from creating account The creator Dave Taveras Said, I did not have any idea the site would go viral worldwide.
And so he quickly focuses efforts on working out the bugs. Um, uh, he had the idea for mouse mingle in 2011 after having luck finding women was a similar passion for Disney and other dating sites, but he didn't start working on until 2015. Um. All of the other hobbies and projects that I have, I honestly have not touched in the past few months because of this.
He said thousands of people each day have been signing up. The site has already garnered attention from shows like the tonight show, the view and NPR. Um, uh, this is back in 2016 and he goes on to talk about, um, you know, why it has such an impact for people and talked about Disney is a very family thing.
And. So it makes sense that if you're looking to get into a relationship and maybe, you know, start a family, you might be interested, you know, in somebody with similar qualities and that sort of thing, that people that are into Disney are kind of into, into the whole family thing. Um, I'll share this screen really quickly.
Uh, this is AH refs. Uh, it's. It's incredibly popular when it comes to organic traffic. It's a DR 35, um, got a good number of backlinks from 343 domains, only ranks for 127 keywords and a thousand estimated organic search, but I will say Disney dating site. It ranks number one for and it's only a search volume of 400.
Uh, sorry, 200 searches per month. I would have thought that'd be a lot more if you ask me. Um, uh, if you let's talk about monetization really quickly, if you poke around the site, it's kind of hard to find. But I will say that, uh, here I have in the notes, uh, I was able to find that. Let's see, where is it? Um, here we go.
It's free if you want to have a profile, uh, so they get your email and they can market to you. And with the profile, you can look at other people's profiles, but you can't message, you can't comment. Uh, it's 9. 55 per month. Or 99. 55 for a year for full access where you can kind of, you know, start interacting with people.
And I found that the 55 and the pricing is a reference to Disneyland opening in 1955. So, uh, so much to talk about and unpack here. I know we're a little short on time. I think from a high level, there's a group of people that are passionate about everything in the world. And I mean, you could take this idea and translate it to almost anything else and almost any other niche.
Thomas: Yeah, we need a Costco hot dog fan stating site basically is what it boils down to. I mean, I love this. I think Disney is a way of life. And people who are into it are really into it. My family is definitely a Disney family. We were actually at Disneyland over the holidays. So, I can totally see it. And I think Disney is kind of this total experience, right?
It's, it's the movies, it's the, the toys, the theme parks, people going cruises. There's all the trivia, like that little 55 reference. So, why not have it, you know, encompass this, this part of your life as well? It makes me think too, a couple things stand out. Yeah. Other niches that people could apply this to, where people have a passion within it.
Obviously this has worked if they got all this interest in traffic up front. I think this is also a great example of don't put the name, the, the, the trademark in your domain, the mouse mingle is, is a smart way to approach. You know, it's going to make sense to somebody who is a Disney fan, but you're not saying Disney in there, which you definitely wouldn't want to do.
So I think they're approaching this really in a smart way. And yeah, it makes you think, like, what other topics are people super passionate about? Like, a specific dog breed was one that would come to mind for me. People who care about their type of dog, cares deeply about their type of dog. Um, I, I think there's so many ways you could take this in, in a similar direction and probably honestly build the site a little better than they did here.
Jared: I mean, I'm thinking like, I have a certain sports team I follow, right? Like, there, dating app around that. I have, like, I love to hike. I love to be in the outdoors. I love certain national parks. Like, I'm just. I'm just thinking like, Oh my gosh. And the monetization path is so clear and so simple and so easy.
And this is a very common way for people to meet people nowadays. And it might not have been the way that, um, you know, uh, for me, I'm a little, it's a little foreign to me, but it's been a while for me, um, since I got married and stuff like that. But I'm just thinking like, you'd take this idea, do it better.
I'll be, it probably not as popular. As a Disney subset of people, but still like the riches are in the niches. I'm trying to think you could probably do this across a lot of different spaces.
Thomas: Yeah. I mean, I'm, I'm like you, I have no familiarity with this particular space, but what I've, I've heard about it is that people are going more for these kinds of niche.
Interests and topics and they're not using these, um, these big sort of monolithic, uh, dating apps anymore. People, those aren't doing as well as they used to. And people are kind of looking for their people and people select, I think, based on some really random and specific topics. So again. Disney doesn't surprise me, but yeah, sports team, like that, that can be a deal breaker.
I know people where that is, that is a deal breaker. That's like their life that they're going to be doing every Sunday. And if that's not your interest or you have a opposing team, then, you know, it's going to be a problem. So I can totally see how that would be very lucrative. And again, like you said, monetization, super straightforward.
And you don't need too many people to sign up. I mean, a couple of success stories. And you're charging, you know, 10, 20 bucks a month and you get, you know, a couple thousand people in there. You can, you could do really well.
Jared: We've got a few minutes left. Take it away on your weird niche.
Thomas: So mine is a completely different direction.
Um, I would say like an, an similarly interesting, interestingly similar level of passion here. This is Wild Turkey Lab. This is a content site about wild turkeys. I discovered it, um, because I was writing a story, there's basically wild turkeys that wander through the area where I live in the Bay Area and I wanted to do a story about it for my site.
So I did some research on wild turkeys in the area and how they got there and I found this. And this is a full content site and what I love is the level of commitment to this topic. There's not only on every aspect of wild turkeys. Like, why do they gobble? How often, um, how much does the turkey weigh?
Can turkeys fly? What do turkeys eat? Like all of your PAA type of questions about wild turkeys, but there's also, they have a podcast. Turkey Tuesday. It has 83 episodes. Oh, sorry. Turkey call rather is the podcast Turkey Tuesday. They have features, they have videos on all the socials. So they have a, uh, a tick tock and a, a YouTube.
They're not doing great on any of those, but they're creating every type of content on every type of platform. And it seems to be kind of one guy and his research, he seems to be an academic. Researcher in this space, but if you go to their, their about page, they've got this crazy E. A. T. All these like doctors and people that are have degrees in, uh, in related fields and they're all their photos.
If you make your way over there. Yeah, everybody's holding a turkey in the photo, a wild turkey. So talk about, yeah, exactly. Delicious. Um, but you know, I think this is, yeah. To me, just so hilarious because it is such a specific topic. It's a dr 24. It doesn't get a ton of traffic, 1. 5 K per month, organic, according to H drafts, but the funniest thing about the site to me is that once I visited it.
It started to show up all the time in my Google Discover feed.
Jared: Oh,
Thomas: they're crushing it on Google Discover, which
Jared: wouldn't show up in
Thomas: any of the
Jared: HR stuff.
Thomas: No, it wouldn't. And you know, so every like almost every day I'm scrolling through my feed and it's all the stuff I actually care about photography and AI.
And then it's like, why do turkeys gobble articles? I'm like, I don't know what your strategy is. Maybe it's the EAT that they have that they're really seen as an authority. But I'm getting this stuff in my discover feed all the time after landing on the site once so, you know, whatever, yeah, whatever you're doing while Turkey lab, um, on the discover side, keep doing it.
Jared: How are they monetizing?
Thomas: I couldn't find anything in terms of monetization. It just seems like they have this big team and it's this one guy. I don't know if it's just a passion project or, you know, maybe he's, he's selling some kind of consulting service or he's just trying to promote his own research.
I have no idea what the monetization, but I mean, they're doing it at such a, such a scale that it makes me think there must be some business model behind it, but I can't for the life of me figure out what it is. He has a,
Jared: uh, like a memorial foundation of some sort, he mentions here. Um, he doesn't even link to it.
Oh, yeah, he does. Okay, austinsway. org. Okay, he does link to it. Uh, yeah, I can't figure it out either. Um, well, I think clearly what we have here is that the best next step for anybody listening is to go start a turkey lovers dating site. Yes. That clearly would be the perfect marriage, like what I did there, of our two weird niches.
Thomas: Yes, absolutely. And obviously there's people who care deeply about wild turkeys. I'm looking at their about page. Everybody seems committed. So it's a small niche, but obviously one where people are quite passionate.
Jared: Well, I started the podcast and the intro with a pun I'm ending with a pun. We probably ought to stop now before I get too many puns thrown out.
Um, wow. What a week guy every week. Um, uh, like January has been such a month of news. And as we kind of released the last podcast here of January, I'm only. Wondering what more we could try to cover in February. You know, like there's just been so many news topics this entire month. And, uh, you spent a good part of January with us.
So thanks for being here each week. I'm excited to have more stories and more topics as we hit February and beyond. Everybody listening. Thanks so much for being here. Uh, have a great weekend and we will see you again next week to cover whatever latest has happened in this wild, wild world we're living in right now.
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