Runaway Parasite SEO! Google Penalizes Forbes!
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Welcome back, everyone, to a new episode of the Niche Pursuits News Podcast!
Like every week, weโre here to talk about the latest SEO news for publishers, inspire you with some stories about our side hustles, and shock you with some surprising niche sites.
Jared and guest host Thomas Smith kick things off talking about a recent article published by Lars Lofgren, which does a fantastic job of breaking down Forbes Marketplace (also known as Forbes Advisor), and Jared gives a quick summary of the scenario.ย
Forbes Marketplace is responsible for the main companyโs affiliate marketing play and the parasite SEO components of it.
Thomas shares his take on the story, and Jared points out the craziest twist to the plot: Forbes Marketplace is looking to buy Forbes.
Thomas mentioned the New York Times and The Wirecutter as an example of the โright wayโ to do affiliate marketing. How has Forbesโ strategy differed?
As they note, Forbes Marketplace has gone from zero to 27.7 million searches per month in less than 5 years while becoming experts in everything from CBD gummies and cockroaches to credit cards.
Thomas talks about how Google opened the door and allowed this to happen. Do you agree?
Is this a true Google heist by Forbes Marketplace, as the author says?
Watch the Full Episode
Moving along, they talk about how Google dislikes being taken advantage of, referencing an article that suggests that Forbes Advisor was hit with a search penalty.
Thomas talks about how this may be Googleโs new MO. Do you agree? Or did Google turn a blind eye all these years and is not playing catch up, as Jared suggests?
What other questions does this open up?
The conversation stays on Forbes Advisor with another article from Lars Lofgren with a somewhat shocking accusation about CNN and USA Today.
What do you think about the evidence he presents? Is it convincing?
Is there really a parasite SEO agency that everyoneโs going to, as Jared says?
Thomas makes a statement on behalf of niche site owners. Do you agree?
Last but not least in the news segment, Reddit makes an appearance in a tweet by Lily Ray. What do you think of the news?ย ย
Is Thomas right that this is not going to be a trend? Did Google change its mind?
When itโs time for some Shiny Object Shenanigans, Jared talks about an HCU-hit site of his that heโs been reviving.
He gives the siteโs backstory, talks about the niche, and says that it was decimated by the update. But itโs not all bad news.
The site has been surviving thanks to Pinterest and email marketing. But only is it surviving, itโs thriving, now surpassing its pre-HCU income.
He talks about his Pinterest strategy, his RPMs, and what he thinks the future holds. Thomas shares a good reminder for publishers. Do you agree with him?
When itโs Thomasโs turn, he talks about his new project, the 925 Newsletter. He talks about growing it and a trick he tried out to boost the open rate that has worked incredibly well. He also talks about using Facebook to get leads.
Then he shares that he started another hyperlocal newsletter. Listen to the episode to find out how itโs going.
Jared then shares his weird niche site: MC Broken, which shows where the Mcdonald's ice cream machines are broken.ย
He explains the site, and Thomas makes a very entertaining confession. And how does Wendyโs figure into the story?
Where does the data come from? What other observations do they share about the page?
Then Thomas shares his weird site for the week, Starbucks Melody. He was surprised to find a lack of Starbucks fan pages, so this one stood out in particular.
Itโs run by a woman named Melody and has close to 2000 pagesโa complete labor of love.
What does he say about monetization? How many keywords is she ranking for? Howโs her SEO? Whatโs surprising about this niche?
And that brings us to the end of another episode of the Niche Pursuits News Podcast!
See you next Friday for more of the latest news, some inspiring side hustles, and some very weird niche sites.
transcript
Jared: Hey, everyone. Welcome back to another week of niche pursuits news. My name is Jared Bahman. And boy, we have got a doozy of a story today. We're talking about Forbes. Specifically, we're talking about Forbes Marketplace. And really, the underpinnings of this story are all about I guess you could call it the dirty underbelly of the affiliate marketing world, at least in 2024.
I'm going to peel back the curtain on this Forbes marketplace and the situation that's developed and a lot of stuff's been brought out in the last couple of weeks. Uh, I got another story to talk through on Reddit. Uh, Reddit always in the news. Can't avoid the news. We are going to be talking about side hustles.
We're gonna be talking weird niches. Thomas Smith is back for another week of co hosting. Thomas, how are you doing?
Thomas: I'm doing great. It's fantastic to be back.
Jared: So let's dive right into it here. Um, I am looking for, though I will tease, your, uh, your weird niche is a fun one. And, uh, uh, I have a few comments on it.
Um, so we will get to that. Stick around. We're both talking about the food topic today in terms of our weird niches. Okay. And
Thomas: I, I didn't even tell you in the prep, but I have a, uh, a live component to, uh, talking about your weird niche. Oh, you do? I did some real world testing, so. Okay. Okay. I figured I'd surprise you.
Jared: Yeah, they're both kind of food dessert beverage related. So stick around for that, but enough teasing, let's get into kind of the feature story, um, of the day of the week, if you will. And it really does surround Forbes and Forbes marketplace specifically. So. You know, this idea of Parasite SEO won't go away, um, site reputation abuse.
Uh, this is a topic that was brought up many months ago by Google, but they were going to try to fix it. This is an article that was published actually about two weeks ago by Lars Lofgren. And it's this idea of, um, basically breaking apart Forbes Marketplace. Now, a lot of you will know Forbes Marketplace as the, the place where Parasite SEO lives, The best, the biggest, because Forbes kind of dominates for search rankings for a lot of topics that are just outside of their expertise.
Um, Forbes Marketplace, so I'm going to start getting into this story here and then, um, we'll pause to try to dissect it. So give me a minute or two to kind of break this story apart. Forbes Marketplace is the company behind Forbes We'll call it their SEO or their affiliate business. And that was actually launched in 2020.
This is all outlined by Lars here in this expose. Uh, they launched it in 2020 as a partnership with an independent company. Okay. And so that independent company is Forbes marketplace holdings limited. They manage Forbes marketplace and Forbes, a different company, the parent company holds a minority stake in this company.
I think it's something like around 40 percent or so. Um, that company is run by. Marketplace platforms limited. Um, they had revenue in 2021. That was estimated, I believe, at 29 million. The article goes on to talk about 2024, potentially 3 to 400 million. But basically, what is going on here is that? In essence, Forbes, um, uh, I guess you could say Forbes marketplace is what's responsible for controlling all of this affiliate marketing play that we see.
And the, the, the kind of the, uh, the, the, well, we'll call it the parasite SEO components of it. Um, I'm going to pause there. I want to scroll down to one part of the article. If you're watching on screen, Thomas, if you could step in and maybe summarize from your vantage point, where this story hit you and why it's so significant to everyone listening right now.
Thomas: Yeah, you know, I think it's, we think of Forbes as this big brand that has a lot of authority. And they have obviously leveraged that to appear at the top of a lot of searches where you wouldn't, you know, associate that with Forbes traditionally, which is sort of a business publication, right? So we see them for all kinds of stuff across all kinds of niches.
And I think there was a lot of anger in the community, but also a little bit of, um, maybe just jealousy or even just kind of feeling like, well, We don't love it. You know, we don't love it when they take away our keywords, but kind of good on them for figuring that out and being there. They figured out a way that to, uh, to sort of own those SERPs based on their brand, but this changes things cause it's kind of like, all right, it's not even Forbes, it's just some outside company that's dropped in on top of that very authoritative brand.
And, you know, at least according to this expose, which I think is well, well argued, they're just basically churning out the same kinds of affiliate content that, you know, honestly, someone in our space probably would look at and go, that's not even very good. You know, I didn't test the products. I don't have original images.
I don't have videos associated with it. It's kind of like a basic level of affiliate content in a lot of cases, it's not even necessarily Forbes, at least that's what Lars is saying from an editorial standpoint, and just dropping it onto that domain, you know, in huge quantities and ranking super well and kind of taking over those SERPs.
So to me, it kind of made me. Stop and think, all right, before I didn't love, you know, when Forbes ranked for like best things in San Francisco and competed with me, um, on a topic where I know I know more, but I kind of felt like, all right, you know, it's the game. They're playing the game. They're doing a good job of it.
I would probably do the same thing in their shoes, you know, hire a bunch of writers and write on these different topics. But the fact that it's all sort of outsourced and they're allegedly anyway, isn't really any editorial control. It, yeah, it, it kind of changes that it's more like, what, you know, what are they doing there more so than just, I don't love it, but you know, I kind of respect it.
Jared: It's fascinating because, and he goes on, this is a point I wanted to find. It is a long article. I just scrolled through them every time Thomas was talking to find this. To me, it says, Lars says, to me, Forbes Marketplace looks like a completely different company where Forbes is actually a minority shareholder.
He outlines how Forbes Marketplace is, I believe he said, looking to buy Forbes, and this is the fascinating development and the fascinating world of affiliate marketing when you're leveraging such a big site like Forbes. com. I mean, in essence, it's the parasite of all parasites. It's ironic because we put into perspective that Forbes appears to be a Basically a place for parasite SEO to happen a place where you can rank for best CBD gummies, even though it's Forbes Like why would they have any business there?
But the reality is is that in the greatest twist of irony of all an affiliate company is Parasiting off of Forbes itself the actual parasite aspect of it. The affiliate arm Forbes marketplace is a parasite of Forbes it's just such a fascinating
Thomas: term of events in many ways And I just think, you know, there's a, there's a right way to do this, right?
It's not that this is wrong to profit off of your brand. And I think the right way is Wirecutter, right? Cause New York times legacy media company, um, obviously has a huge brand that's known worldwide and they wanted to get into the affiliate space. Reasonably. And the way that they approached it was to buy Wirecutter and integrate that in so that it's now in New York times brand.
It's their own staff, people that are doing these reviews. They, I think they do a great job. You know, I buy a lot of stuff that they recommend. They test stuff extensively. They put all the resources of the New York Times behind their reviews. And they out compete people like me where, you know, I just can't afford to buy like every ice cream maker and spend a hundred hours testing them.
And they pay their staff to do that. And then they make recommendations and they clean up. They probably make, you know, tens or hundreds of millions of dollars a year from that affiliate business. That's the right way to do it, right? They're doing, they're applying their same resources and editorial standards to the content.
And as a result, it's great. It works. Right. You know, their recommendations for me have been pretty successful. Yep. Um, and I think everyone just maybe thought that Forbes was doing the same thing and at least putting some level of their own staff and their own editorial people on this. And that maybe that was why they were succeeding, you know, they were sort of the safe choice in Google's eyes because, hey, it's Forbes, you know, maybe they didn't test every single CBD gummy.
I mean, that would be an interesting job to be the person responsible for doing that. But I've read some pretty crazy Wirecutter articles where people tested all kinds of stuff. Um, so maybe they were really, you know, testing stuff out and using their own standards and their own staff. If it's just a bunch of freelancers, you know, at least allegedly, again, this is an expose, I don't know that Forbes has chimed in on it, but, um, you know, if that's what's happening and it's just the same kind of content that you could churn out with a bunch of freelancers or chat GPT and it's only succeeding because it's getting thrown onto this very authoritative brand and domain.
Yeah, that changes things. It definitely changes it up.
Jared: It's interesting because, um, I think this I'll read this out loud to your point. Uh, Lars brings up this, this point that you're alluding to, like, but maybe the Forbes marketplace team is doing the right thing on their own real experts and great content question mark.
Um, and then he goes on to kind of. Talk through this. Are any of us naive enough to believe that Forbes marketplace has gone from nothing to 27. 7 million searches per month in less than five years while also having the expertise to truly help people across such diverse topics as credit cards, roaches, CBD gummies, and sports betting.
It took nerd wallet 15 years to do that in one category. We're supposed to be that Forbes can do it in at least four categories within five years, and he says there's no feasible way to build a team with genuine expertise that fast. Perhaps the penultimate statement of this. Article is Forbes Marketplace is a Google heist.
I think he chose those terms on purpose. Forbes Marketplace is a Google heist of the highest order. It's generic thin content with. A single goal rank to generate affiliate revenue and Google has lapped it up. You know, it's, um, it is interesting to see that, uh, you know, obviously we've talked about how the challenges of, uh, policing the parasite SEO, or if you want to go by Google's name for it, the site reputation abuse, uh, domain abuse, um, uh, and how challenging that is.
But. At the same time, if like a kind of a single individual, clearly a smart guy, but if a single individual can figure this stuff out, like why can't one of the largest companies in the world figure this out?
Thomas: Yeah. And, you know, I think with a lot of this, um, it, it feels like this should be something where, yeah, you do have to put in all that effort to do it.
And, um, I, I also think it's shows that when you prioritize one signal over all of the others. That's when you start to run into this kind of problem. So, you know, I think about
Jared: domain strength, basically.
Thomas: Exactly. So, you know, we've seen this March over the last year towards brand being so important to Google.
And in a lot of cases, that's a good thing. You know, if you have a strong brand, you probably have real presence in the world. I've certainly seen on my own client websites, nobody got hit by anything. The HCU, they have no idea what it is because they have strong brands, the real businesses. And they do fine, so that's great, but I think it shows that when you put so much effort and emphasis onto this one signal above all the others, somebody is going to come along and either look into it, which seems like they've been doing this for a while, so I don't know that they planned, uh, for, you know, the HCU to be the big emphasis on brand that it has been, maybe they knew something that we didn't know coming into this, Um, but you know, they put all of their effort into let's leverage this powerful brand and Google put all of their eggs into that brand basket and that creates these opportunities for things to get really, really unbalanced where, you know, maybe, um, as I know we've talked about on the podcast before, you have a person who cares deeply about toasters and they try every toaster and they just live and breathe toasters, but they don't have a great brand around it and they produce amazing content.
But the signal has been turned up so far for a brand. That, you know, that just ends up winning over, over them. So I think the bigger picture here to me, in addition to just like, this shouldn't be something where a couple of people can come in, spin up this content, because that's one of the other interesting things he reveals in the story is that, The people behind this company that he's able to track, that's like four or five people.
So it doesn't feel like it should be like one individual writing or at least, you know, administering the writing of content about credit cards. And I love the cockroach example and CBD gummies and all this kind of stuff. And at the same time, you know, his ultimate conclusion is, all right, Forbes probably shouldn't have been, you know, Going into these waters, but also when Google prioritizes one factor over everything else, it kind of opens the door for people to come along and take advantage of that.
And we've seen this with plenty of other, you know, quote, unquote, parasite SEO sites, but to see it so, uh, closely integrated into such a prominent brand, it just shows you when you create those incentives. People are going to respond to it. And so I think overall to me, it just showed we need more balance, right?
We need more, um, emphasis on things other than brand and it can't be all just. How authoritative is your brand? How many branded queries do you get to make these calls? Because you're going to end up with stuff like this, where, you know, just on the strength of a brand, somebody outranks the toaster person who really knows what they're talking about.
Jared: Well, two weeks ago, we talked about how, you know, are there any real toaster experts in the world? Uh, last week, Cyrus Shepard kind of had an open letter to Google that said, here's a plan, right? It was two weeks ago we had the open letter about toasters. Last week we had an open letter from Cyrus, but with a plan.
Demote brand signals. And now here we have basically a situation where there's been an expose on the overreach of a single brand signal domain authority. Um, uh, it's, it's, it's, it's interesting to talk about that because, Um, It's we've always said on the podcast that I suppose the one argument you can make to Google's favor is as you're trying to combat spam as you're trying to combat AI, perhaps going with domain authority or domain strength is one way to kind of assure yourself you're serving up not bad results, right?
Maybe Forbes isn't the best result for CBD gummies, but at least they're not risking, you know, bringing up a result from some AI or some spam type site. Well, I think the fact of the matter is. If you buy into what Lars is talking about in this article, I guess at the end of the day that's, to some degree, they're serving up a result that isn't at least good enough to the name of Forbes, whether it's bad I don't know.
I don't even really read those articles, but we know that it's not of the brand quality that got Forbes to where it is. It's a third party company.
Thomas: Yeah. Interesting. Extend the extended metaphor you, you had on a previous podcast. It's like, if you went to McDonald's and you thought this is the safe choice on your road trip, which might become relevant in a later part of this episode too, um, and you thought, Oh, this is the safe choice.
And then you found out that, you know, McDonald's, I was actually taken over by, uh, some operator where you have no idea where they're from or where the food's coming from, you know, you would feel like, Hey, you know, I trusted that brand and maybe it led me astray. So yeah, I think, um, maybe it is time to tone that down.
I think it shows how that it's not a solution to this issue of spam and AI content and domain abuse. trusting the brand just creates an incentive to, you know, take that brand and tweak it in some new direction and, uh, and end up ranking for everything and cleaning up. Well, speaking of
Jared: solutions, Google, um, has not solved this problem, but we know from, uh, even just recent news, they don't love when someone gets in the news for taking advantage of something in their algorithms and, uh, case in point, uh, here is an article, the next article that we have up here.
By, uh, by Barry Schwartz, uh, and his title did Google hit Forbes advisor with a search penalty oversight, reputation, abuse. Um, uh, Glenn Gabe was the initial person quoted here on Twitter or X saying, quote, not sure if it is related to the spam policy documentation update yesterday. We covered that in the podcast.
That was a week or two ago. Um, and possible manual actions coming, or if it's tied to the algorithmic tremors we've seen since the August core update, Or, I'll insert this now, this is not in Glenn Gabe's tweet, or if it's tied to this article that got released two weeks ago. But, Forbes Advisor is dropping heavily as of yesterday.
1. 7 million queries have dropped in rank or are lost. And again, this is an AHRefs chart, so we know that that often is in the rears. Um, uh, he went on to say, I don't know if it's manual action or algorithmic, but it's very interesting to see timing wise. He then went on, Uh, to share details. And this would be a couple of days ago, uh, updates based on the 9 25 drop of Forbes advisor.
So again, this article on Forbes marketplace. What? The date was this released by large September 18th. So this 9 25 drop of Forbes advisor. Based on that, here are several directories of that section of that site. Some huge drops there across health, credit cards, banking, car insurance, and more. Um, and so he, he goes on to basically, uh, talk about this.
And the, the general theory here is that, um, They got a manual action of some sort from Google. We don't know if that's, um, I didn't research the extent of it. I'm sure we go look and, you know, see, uh, maybe the extent of that. And certainly rank trackers will show us more information about that as we go.
But I mean, I don't know, but it sure seems like, um, Google is doing what they do when they, you know, Apparently identify site reputation abuse. They don't have an algorithmic solution for it. The only thing they can do is hit with a manual action or a penalty of some sort. It looks like Forbes advisor has gotten one of those.
Thomas: Yeah. I think, you know, it shows that if you publish something and call, call this stuff out, There's a much more manual feedback loop, I think, to Google's actions these days, perhaps more than ever. Like, I think before they were much more, trust the algorithm, build the algorithm, run it, it's perfect, it'll, it'll fix everything.
It really feels like, um, you know, with, with Danny Sullivan connecting with people and the form we were all supposed to fill out about our problems and these kinds of things and, you know, people with prominent, uh, Uh, what websites or YouTube channels where they're calling out Google and saying, Hey, I tricked you.
You know, I scaled up tons of AI content and look how well I'm ranking. And then suddenly they get these manual actions. It feels like there's a lot of, um, behind the scenes, you know, manual tweaking of that algorithm. And maybe that's the plan going forward. You know, if it's not really possible to solve it.
To spot all this stuff algorithmically, you know, with the quality of AI content and the strength of some of these brands, maybe that's the new plan is sort of let people in the industry, figure it out for themselves. And then when something comes out, you know, act on it with literally, you know, someone going in and, and, and giving a manual action, they've kind of said that, right?
Like we didn't, we wanted to figure it out algorithmically to deal with site reputation abuse, couldn't do it, it doesn't work, we're just going to do it by hand. And this seems like an example, maybe they went in and read that article and went, Oh, you know, that's not right. And, uh, and fixed it.
Jared: Yeah, but this isn't new.
It's not like Forbes advisor just started doing this last month. And they're like, Oh, we gotcha. This has been going on for five years. They've just turned a blind eye. Right. This is like, you know, the parent who doesn't parent unless they're in public. And then they put on the show of force in front of all their friends, but then behind the scenes, they're not parenting.
I mean, at least that's what it feels like, right? Like it just feels so closely tied to this article and to kind of the public, um, Uh, the PR problem, right? And who knows, maybe it is as, as, as Glenn said, it could be related to their updated spam policy, you know, fair play, they did update their spam policy, it could be related, it just doesn't add up, because this has been going on for a long time, and we know they've known about it, because they brought up site reputation abuse, they gave it a name, they gave us a target date that it would be resolved by back in May, um, and so it does feel like, hey, cool, but man, a little bit late on, uh, you know, to join the party here,
Thomas: um, you know, Um, and it also opens the question, you know, where else is this happening?
Is this something that's more widespread? Like, is this just this particular instance of this happened to get detected? Um, I think, you know, the content quality maybe would have been a giveaway to people in our industry, maybe not to others. But it really begs the question, how much more widespread are these practices?
Jared: It's tough. They are more widespread. And that's because our final story connects all of this back together. You thought we were done. You thought we were done talking about the Forbes situation. You thought we were going to move on. I do want to move on and talk about Reddit, but we're not done yet. We now have to talk about two more massive brands and their connection to Forbes marketplace.
Those two massive brands. And I'll just go ahead and pull the article up here on the screen or CNN and USA Today. And, uh, yeah, uh, this is an article released by our favorite Lars Lofgren, who's been probably getting tons of press with these two articles. This was released on September 26th. So if you're following along at home, we had the original article September 18th.
We then had the apparent manual action on Forbes, um, uh, uh, advisor. On September 25th, this published one day later and it opens with this question. What if I told you that Forbes marketplace, the affiliate company operating on forbes. com also had in green agreements with CNN and USA today. Um, I won't dissect this entire article.
Like we kind of did the last one because it's a lot of the same. It's more nuanced. And it's more detail oriented. Um, and so I think it's worth a read. We'll include these links in the show notes. You'll want to read it, but in essence, uh, Lars has gone on to claim that Forbes marketplace is behind the affiliate content on both CNN and USA today.
Um, and he basically Forbes marketplace. It looks like operate sections like CNN underscored money and the USA today blueprint under hidden arrangements. Um, he does provide a lot of evidence. He does say, I don't know any of this, but he does provide a lot of evidence that these sections are run separately from the main editorial teams of CNN and USA Today.
And he goes into all sorts of stuff that I have to say makes a pretty compelling case. Um, he looks at the authors and their emails, our contractor, uh, emails that are linked to Marketplace. He kind of just Undoes this whole web and basically points everything back to the people that are behind, um, uh, Forbes Marketplace, including some of the individuals, the names, all this sort of stuff.
And, um, I mean, it's a really good read, but it's also fascinating to see that, you know, like CNN, for example, they already had an affiliate section and they, it looks like just I don't know, a pure money grab just kind of went to, to, to this company that's now starting to provide. It's like the, it's like the agency of parasite SEO affiliate marketing in essence, and, um, uh, again, now we maybe even start to see why Forbes marketplace as a business is, is gaining so much traction if they're doing this across the board.
Other platforms and not just Forbes.
Thomas: Yeah. I mean, what I would love to see in place of this is somebody doing the same thing, but doing it right. Doing it for real. Like, you know, I feel like there's so many people in our community that do all of this work. Reviewing products. I mean, I have a YouTube channel where I talk about everything toasters being one of them, one of the things, um, and you know, I will buy products and review them.
I know you do that with Amazon influencer. Yeah. Um, and we have all this expertise in, in doing these kinds of things. Why not, you know, hire people like us to do this kind of content, people who can actually put the effort into it. I feel like if I had access to the Forbes domain and I took the content I created on my own, you know, tiny YouTube channel and connected those things together, it would work out great for everybody.
You know, everyone would get my top toaster recommendations. So I wish that this same model. Could be expanded in the way that it, it has been here, but just with content. That's like what we all know how to produce, we've been producing it for years, was valuable for many years. You know, that was kind of taken away from us, uh, about a year ago, but, you know, there's this whole group of people that could probably create amazing stuff and to do amazingly well with access to these domains.
So, you know, Forbes and CNN. If you want to move away from your current setup, you know, hire a bunch of niche site creators, I feel like there'd be a big opportunity there.
Jared: Huge opportunity. I mean, here's basically what he suggests happens. I'll just briefly read through this and then we'll kind of camp this because who knows if CNN USA today, who knows if they're next in the, you know, the line of, um, of, of manual actions from Google, I got to imagine if they saw the first article, they're going to see this one, but here's what he surmises happens based on everything I've seen.
Marketplace wanted to expand. Running an affiliate program on Forbes just wasn't enough. They reached out to CNN and offered to run a section of their website. For some unfathomable reason, CNN agreed to the deal. Uh, they, you know, already had a ramped up affiliate program, so why? Uh, folks involved decided that CNN would install a completely unique site under Forbes.
Uh, the CNN underscored for a marketplace to operate. He even talks about how they have a whole separate wordpress install for this place, which again, why would you do that? Well, maybe if you need a whole separate company to log in and handle it, marketplace then went to absurd levels of efforts to make that site look identical to the normal underscored website.
Now that partly I feel like, okay, um, you know, you want brand continuity. So, uh, Maybe a little bit of a devil's advocate there. Uh, but he does go on to point out that it is a little over the top, a little absurd as he calls it. Um, and he says there's no way CNN didn't realize what was going on. And so his, his insight is I believe marketplace has been, has since been running CNN underscored money with little if any oversight from the main CNN team.
Um, and, uh, uh, he goes on to say, I hope I'm wrong. Please tell me I'm wrong. And then outlined their success and how they're ranking number one for topics like best mortgage lenders. Um, Number two for best loan apps, uh, same thing for USA Today. Um, it's, I think to your point, you know, this stuff's personal for a lot of people who are listening to the podcast because a lot of people lost their hard earned traffic and their hard earned money.
To these results right here. And I think this one probably really hits home for a lot of people listening, you know, because a lot of people listening lost their traffic to stuff like this.
Right. They lost their rankings and thus their earnings to stuff like this. Maybe, maybe people weren't competing for best mortgage, right? Like huge term. Highly competitive term, but nonetheless, like this spirals and spills over into all the different topics that each of us were experts on and apparently no longer have helpful content.
And these sites are the ones that have the helpful content. And yes, I'm being tongue in cheek. Um, you know, we'll leave that one there. Um, there's so much to unpack, right? And it just, in many ways, this is the culmination of over a year's worth of frustrations that people listening have had. With what's going on in search.
And, um, certainly we can all disagree about what should rank, but then we get scenarios like this where it's a little bit more blatant, a little bit more obvious at what's going on. Um, Hey, really quickly though. Can't go a week without at least touching on Reddit. Here's a tweet. Um, and then we'll move on into our side hustles, but, but here's a tweet by Lily Ray.
Um, maybe many of you will consider this to be a shred of good news. Um, but in essence, uh, Hey, it's finally happened. It looks like Reddit is reversing course. For the first time in a very long time, they have, uh, lost visibility in the Serbs. This was a tweet by her on September 30th. Um, I haven't followed up since then, but, um, I mean, again, There's, we keep saying there's no real place for them to go, but down because, oh my goodness, they keep going up.
This chart is insane as we always referenced, but, um, it would appear that some of the after effects from that, that August core update and the tremors that keep happening throughout the month of September in the rankings, uh, and the volatility, it looks like one of them might have caught up with Reddit for the first time.
Thomas: Yeah. I mean, my take on this is that we saw some gains. On sites that had probably lost traffic to read it, including mine, that, you know, my own site has maintained that, which has been great. Um, some people had a little bit of slippage on that, but I think fundamentally a lot of sites are up and traffic had to come from somewhere.
And where was all the traffic going before to read it? Yep. Um, so, you know, if they even went down like one or two places for a bunch of different queries that they were ranking really well on, you know, cumulatively, Even that little adjustment in SERP position to put some of our sites higher. It had to come from somewhere.
I think it came from Reddit. I don't think this is like a big trend where Reddit is going to tank and Google changed its mind. Still everywhere. It's just, again, you know, SERP diversity. And, um, I think we've seen them slip a little and other sites come up a bit. It'll probably stabilize. It's not going to be that, you know, that huge drop that we, a lot of us saw.
Um, but I think it shows that, you know, maybe there's some staying power to these little recoveries that a lot of us have seen.
Jared: Good point. You know, there's only, well, there's not even 10 spots anymore, but there used to be 10 spots on page one. Uh, we'll continue to use the analogy, but there's only 10 spots on page one and they've got to go to someone somewhere.
And so if someone gains, if we see. If we see industry wide, that some of these HCU hit sites are recovering a bit and recapturing some rankings. Well, they have to come from somewhere. And to your point, it looks like Reddit was the one to shed some of those, but not much folks. If you, if you're listening, you're wondering how big these drops were.
If you're like, ah, I can't see how big the drop was. We're really featuring that graph. Don't worry. It's, it's not much, it's not much. They still are back to where they, where they were in June, you know, something like that from this year. So. Okay, big news topics today. Definitely some big stories to go through.
Um, you know, I, I, I wonder if Spencer's gonna make, he made a, a great video this week on a story that we covered a couple weeks ago. Um, uh, uh, on the, the, the, the site and the brand that got, that got banned from Mediavine and the, the AI kind of heist behind that. I wonder if we're gonna get a, Good expose video from Spencer on that coming up.
So I have to pay attention to that. But, um, yeah, let's move into side hustles. Um, I will go first. I know last time you were on, you talked about one of your newsletters. Excited to hear about that. But before we do that, I thought I'd share the results since, uh, since, uh, you know, September's done and dusted.
Now we're in the first week of October. Um, and I talked a couple of weeks ago. About a website that we were reviving from the helpful content updates. This is a site that we owned. Um, and actually I brought some stats on it to talk through in terms of, of what happened, we bought this site back in December of 2022, we actually bought it from a former podcast guest of the niche pursuits podcast, if you can believe that.
So someone had struck up a relationship with, so we bought that in December, 2022. Our biggest month, uh, of earnings, our previous record for this site was January, 2023. This is a. Fairly seasonal niche. Um, and, uh, and so the, the earnings for January of 2023 were 1, 930. I love this story because this site got decimated in the helpful content update.
I don't like that part to be clear, uh, got decimated, I mean, destroyed. I've shared on the podcast a couple of weeks ago. It only ranks, it ranks for under a hundred keywords at this point. And so this site got annihilated and basically its earnings went down to zero. I love this story though, because it was doing really well through a combination of Pinterest and email marketing.
We have an email newsletter component to this that drives traffic to the site every single day, uh, lead generation through Facebook ads and then Pinterest. And it's a, it's a visual medium, so it does pretty well on Pinterest. And I was surmising and hoping, depending on where we landed for the rest, the second half of September, we'd crack 1, 700 or so.
Well, it's really cool because the site, not only did the site earn, um, over 1, 700, it actually came in at 1, 939. And that's cool for a couple of reasons. Number one, if only we had one more day in September, we would have cracked 2, 000, which would have been really fun to say. But what I love about this is that it actually eclipsed the previous record by 9.
Um, and how cool is that? And again, in terms of like, All the negativity around the helpful content update. And obviously we've talked about how frustrating that update is, but it is pretty cool that by pivoting traffic sources, this site has now eclipsed its earnings when it was relying on Google traffic alone and exclusively.
Thomas: That is awesome. How, how much are you penning for that? Cause that's the question that people immediately ask about Pinterest. Like what's the, what's the lift on, um, on getting that much traffic?
Jared: Yeah. So this hadn't all a Pinterest. Site for a Pinterest account from previous, you know, and we hadn't been pinning to it since the helpful content update I think we'd actually stopped painting to it before that because it wasn't getting as much traction At so we ramped it back up at current stead We're trying to pin as many as we can per day, you know And so we're using a native Pinterest scheduler and so as many as we can put out feasibly in a day But I mean some days dozens and dozens and dozens We're publishing a lot of new content on the site, which gives us a lot more opportunities You Um, again, I talked about seasonality wise, it kind of peaks in Q4, Q1, which just means like there's so many more content topic ideas to address right now.
Um, and so we're publishing more content, giving us more opportunities to pin more about more topics, about more things. And so, yeah, as many as we can in a day, I mean, uh, the Pinterest scheduler lets you get up to, you know, several dozen per day.
Thomas: Yeah. I mean, the other thing that stood out to me is the RPM that you had on that.
It was like 62 RPM. That's amazing. Um, you know, it must be a very, like, these must be longer articles or you must be in a very lucrative demographic, but I mean, that's part of the strength there and it's still, this was in Q3, right, which is traditionally the lowest RPMs of the year. So what's this going to look like if this is a Q4, Q1 niche, getting into Q4, when you're already at 62 RPM and Q3, you know, you could be at like, 90 RPMs and double that traffic.
That's huge.
Jared: To your point, like this was on 31, 000 sessions in September. And so 2, 000 on 31, 000 sessions at 60 RPM on average, like it's just an, it's pretty high RPM. not finance, it's not health, you know? Um, uh, but to your point, like traffic picks up in Q4 and Q1, and we know ad rates are higher, at least in Q4, not so much in Q1, but yeah, pretty bad in Q1.
So we'll have to see, but like. I don't want to get ahead of ourselves. It's only, you know, been a month. I mean, you know, bearing in mind this site made, I think I said in the tweet, let me pull back up, uh, 558 in August and 311 in June, uh, July, you know, so, um, I don't want to put the cart before the horse.
We'll see. But to your point, like, wow, what if we could hit 50, sessions? And what if RPM did go up to 90?
Thomas: Yeah, I mean, I think it's a reminder that you don't have to be in finance, you don't have to be in one of those, you know, crazy lucrative niches. If you have a very visual site, and it sounds like this is a very visual niche, you were saying. And you have a lot of images, um, I don't know, you know, the structure of your articles, but if you've got a bunch of images, images take up a lot of space on the page and, you know, a lot of ad, um, ad density is how much, how much spaces are total, how many ads can we put in, in there without exceeding some number.
So you fill up more space with stuff that isn't ads, you kind of buy yourself the right to put in more ads. And so these very visual niches where there's a lot of images and people are going to scroll through a lot of them. You can do really, really well, even if it's lifestyle or travel or something totally unrelated to these, these lucrative niches.
So, you know, think about that. Like, what can you put on your page? If, is it a lot of images? Is it a lot of other features, maps and that kind of thing? In some cases, infographics, even just like more headings, bigger font. Um, you could tweak something and increase the RPM and yeah, you must. I mean, it was have either long articles or a lot of images or both, uh, and 62 in Q3 is phenomenal.
I,
Jared: I'm so excited, you know, I mean, we haven't even gotten into kind of like tweaking, optimizing that sort of thing, which is where my brain, my brain really, you know, that's what I love doing. That's where I really get excited is to optimize something that's working, but make it that much better. So hopefully I'll have a time to do that maybe in the months leading up to, you know, November, December, right?
We got about a month and a half until it really gets kind of, um, kind of fun. So. Um, yeah. Well, uh, Thomas, over to you. Uh, I can look at a running order here. We're talking, we're talking newsletters.
Thomas: Yeah, so I shared on the last episode that I co hosted that I had started this 9 to 5 news newsletter, the 9 to 5 being a chunk of the Bay Area.
And the epiphany there was if you went much more local, You could get a lot more interest and excitement around your newsletter and much, you know, more people who want to sign up for it. And that was exactly what happened with this. I had been trying and trying and trying to build a newsletter for my Bay area site, and it just, nobody wanted to sign up.
And then when I went hyper local, I Um, and this isn't even super low. I looked up, you asked me last time, the population of this area, it turns out it's actually almost a million people. So there's a lot, that's a lot of people in this audience, even just localizing it to basically like driving distance.
Um, suddenly there were a lot more people signing up and it became so much easier to build it organically. And it's just continued to grow. Um, I, one thing I found out though, that's really helped with, uh, Is I figured out one little trick that I've been applying to this to kind of boost my open rate, and that's then I think fed into more clicks, better deliverability, and it's so simple that I kind of didn't believe that this would actually work, but I was around, like, a 40, 50 percent open rate, which is pretty solid.
And people care a lot about local content. These are daily emails, sometimes even more than once a day. Um, so I was already doing well. I thought what would happen if I put emojis in the subject line? So I experimented, um, each subject line is like the lead story for that particular email. I found that works better than like putting multiple stories.
Into the subject line, kind of, if you say this is about this new restaurant that opened, people are more inclined to click that. So I started taking the subject line each day, putting it into chat, GPT, asking for some ideas of emojis, and then literally choosing the best one. Copy pasting it in. And I just put one before and one after the subject line and it has boosted the open rate by about 20%.
Wow. So I'm now up over 60%. Um, so 20 percent change, um, up about 10, 15 percent of the, in the actual open rate. And, um, you know, all that then feeds into like better deliverability, more clicks. Um, it just. Everything does better the more people you have opening the emails because the email providers are more inclined to put it in the primary inbox and not a promotions folder and that kind of thing.
So, so simple. It takes me 10 seconds. It's kind of fun. Like I'm terrible at coming up with emojis, but Chachi Petit is great at it. Drop that in there. It's a story about the best date night restaurants in Walnut Creek. A story we just did. Maybe it's a little champagne emoji or a little heart emoji. That little piece of visual, I think just kind of distinguishes it from the rest of the emails that people wade through, and that's been a huge boost to the open rate.
Also started doing some Facebook lead campaigns. To see how I could do with paid, uh, leads for this. It's very simple. It's just join nine to five news. It has a picture of a local landmark that everybody in the area would know. Um, no like incentive or anything like that, or lead magnet. I'm getting leads now that are pretty high quality for about 60 to 80 cents per lead.
So that's pretty good under a dollar. I'm pretty happy with that. And again, without a lead magnet, it's just literally people who want to be on the list. So that's also probably going to help boost that open rate. So that's been going really well. And I also decided to do something maybe a little bit crazy with this.
So I kind of thought, okay, well, I already went from this big region where there's a ton of places. Down to this little sub region, but still as a million people, it's an area that's pretty saturated with media. There's a lot of people covering the same place. And I was driving recently to go apple picking up in the mountains.
People in the Bay area do this. It took my family, went apple picking up in the mountains, drove past this little tiny town. And I thought, you know, there's probably 10, 000 people living in the area around this town. What if I created a newsletter for this town? Without actually having necessarily gone to it.
And, uh, just if I created a newsletter, I'd have this very, very hyper specific audience, no one else is serving them. So if I, if I publish content about this place, then probably I'm going to be the only game in town that might make it that much easier to get subs. So I decided to do that experiment. I started publishing content.
It's fairly easy. Um, once you've identified an area to find. Content that works for it. So I'll go to, like, the local sheriff's department, Facebook page, the fire department, Facebook page, the town website where they post, like, upcoming civic events. I'll find the, um, the Reddit for it. If there's people talking about it on Reddit, I'll find the next door for it.
And I'll just go through that each day for this town. I've started picking out a story. I write it up, 500 words, very short. I'll find a photo that somebody has shared freely, or I'll just choose kind of like a stock photo for it, drop that in there, publish it. I have a call to action to join this newsletter that I've created around it.
And in about two weeks, I've gotten over 200 subscribers to this newsletter. Wow. Publishing one story a day. A little bit lower open rate than on the local one I built here, but it's increasing, it's already up to about 40 percent and I've earned about 112 so far. 112. 87 to be exact in ad earnings from this newsletter in the last two weeks.
What ads? So I went to zero. So it's basically. Uh, a combination of the Mediavine ads that are on my site when people click through and these get republished to a couple of, um, aggregators where they have their own ads on top of it. So I'm taking the newsletter content, putting it in the newsletter, but also putting it on my site.
People click through, I get money from the Mediavine ad, and then I republish it to these aggregators and they'll pay me an ad rate on that too. So yeah, about 112. Dollars. And I think what it shows to me is like, if there's a place that you want to do this for, maybe it's your hometown, maybe it's not, maybe it's just a place that you enjoy covering, there's so much opportunity here.
And I kind of did it as a proof of concept. Like I know the area and the Bay area very well. I knew I could build a newsletter here, but does this model really work anywhere? And I think if I can go in and provide. People with relevant, useful content for a town I've never visited. It just shows that if you actually live there and have the original photos and have the on the boots on the ground reporting, you can start this kind of newsletter literally anywhere.
Jared: Well, I sense more Apple picking in your future, Thomas, and you might have to make a visits there, get your camera out. Uh, that's amazing. Um, How are people joining this list?
Thomas: So I publish stories about this town. I try to do one a day. It takes me about 10 minutes, I would say, to find a story, write it up, publish it.
I actually dictate a lot of stories with my voice at this point, so it's very fast to write these sort of local news stories. I do a call to action to a ConvertKit landing page for the newsletter. I have a logo and a whole sort of brand that I built around it. Using, uh, AI and some of my own Photoshop skills.
If people hit that landing page, they're subscribing at about 70 percent rate. So again, the thesis that people care about their hyperlocal area. And if it's so small and it's such a, you know, 10, 000 person audience in this tiny town, they'll carry even more. Seems to be true, the convert, convert, uh, kit rate on my, uh, my landing pages for 95 news, but 40%, so 70 percent for this, this particular one, uh, people end up on the list, I've got the same kind of welcome sequence you would do with any list I'm sending out, um, you know, content that's more like evergreen on a sequence as well, but otherwise it's the same automation that I did for the 95 news, it's a convert kit, RSS feed automation.
I have a specific tag for these articles on Bay Area Telegraph, my Bay Area site. And I create a feed for that tag, put that into the ConvertKit RSS automation. And every day at 10 o'clock pulls down the new article that I've written, puts it in there, sends it out to the, uh, the ever growing list of people.
And then again, it's got that call to action at the end. So if it gets play beyond that, or people forward it to a friend or one of these aggregators that I'm tied into publishes it. Then that brings people back to the newsletter. So that's been a hundred percent organic. And again, for, you know, a hundred, a hundred subscribers a week.
For something that's a 10 minute lift per day. I'm pretty happy with it.
Jared: Congratulations. That's wonderful. Newsletters are getting lots of conversation. Point is I'll touch on one quick thing. Since you're here, this happened this morning. I have a hundred followers on medium now. Nice. Congratulations.
That's awesome. Not here to talk about medium. I have talked about in the past, still putting some effort there, but. We'll save the medium details for a different day. But yeah, there you have it. Um, Hey, we still got some time to get into our weird niches. Um, uh, we've got a couple of weird niches to go through.
Both of ours kind of in a similar space. I'll say not, not directly related, but kind of similar, kind of odd how we landed on both those today. Um, I'll go first. Um, and, uh, the, the, the weird niche that I have was shared with me. Thank you again for those that share these with me. I really appreciate it. Um, I've got a few in the, in the queue right now, so.
Um, that one is mcbroken. com This is a map, this is a website that is a map, uh, that is, I'll say all about the, I, question mark, is the McDonald's ice cream machine broken? Apparently these are things that we hear about. In the world that that we're that are concerning for some and apparently for this content creator for this website creator, um, there.
This is a big concern. Uh, and so you can tell it's regionalizing to my area, which is the San Diego, California area. Um, it's a nice attractive site. Very clean and simple. All white. If you're not watching on the screen, it's all white background. Very You know, kind of minimalistic design, but attractive and on the right hand, it's got a map with a bunch of dots.
Green dots signify that the That McDonald's location, the ice cream machine is working fine, and then red dots signify that it's broken. And then, um, it has some inconclusive, but I don't see many of those dots. It seems like somehow they get data on all of these. We'll talk about that here in a second. On the right hand side, I also think it's interesting that, according to their stats, 14.
72 percent of McDonald's right now, across, I presume, the country, have broken ice cream machines. 32 percent in New York, 20. 51 percent in San Antonio, 20 percent in San Francisco, that's up by you there, uh, Thomas. Uh, and on and on down the list it goes. Um, there's a, there's a twist to this that I want to get to.
If you're listening, this is the funny twist that I will get to in a second. But, but first glance, what do you think of this, uh, of this concept, Thomas?
Thomas: I think it's awesome. I mean, this, the, the broader context here, I think is that this ties into this whole question of right to repair. There's some kind of complicated thing about, you have to get a license to repair these.
You have, there's like, there's a whole backstory to the broken, broken ice cream machines, but yeah, I think it's awesome. It's such a cool programmatic. Type of play there. And, um, I wanted to see, my first question is, you know, how accurate is this? So I looked at my own local McDonald's and in the morning, when I looked at it, uh, it said it was broken.
And then I looked later in the day and it said it was fixed. I thought, no, there's no way. Like it just must've been a glitch, you know, in the, in the data. So I went over on my lunch hour and, uh, visited the local McDonald's and I asked them and sure enough, they had fixed their ice cream machine. So I don't know how, maybe, you know, how they, how they're pulling this, but, uh, it is now working.
They confirmed to me that, uh, I could order an ice cream. I didn't, um, but you know, if I had wanted to. I would be ready. I also looked at long time viewers will remember the Buttonwillow McDonald's. Yeah. Uh, that you discovered was the halfway point between the two of us. If we ever want to meet up to do an episode, it's in the middle of nowhere in California and you'll be pleased to know that their ice cream machine is working.
Jared: Ah, Buttonwillow can't escape the Mitch Pertuzzi podcast. They're inextricably tied together. You know, it referenced New York as being The place with the most broken ice cream machines. A third of the ice cream machines at McDonald's are broken in New York. So I just navigated over to the New York area, and if you're looking on screen, you'll notice something more prominent than the first time that we looked at it.
And that is, I talked about the working, identified by green dots, the broken, identified by red dots, the inconclusive, identified by gray dots. There's a fourth marker on the map, and that is the location of every Wendy's in the area. Hmm. You also can't help but notice that there's only one advertisement on this page, and it is a banner ad at the top for Wendy's Frosty Fix.
Thomas: Nice. So,
Jared: straight up, these guys are taking what amounts to a pot shot at McDonald's. I mean, they're not, they're just using data that's apparently real. But in essence, they're kind of like talking about the underlying product. point is that McDonald's ice cream machines break down enough that we need a tracking system for it.
And then they've gone and sold advertising space to the competitor Wendy's. And it, it, it would appear that Wendy's is investing, is actually paying money. Wendy's found this site and struck a deal with the owner to put their 1 frosty banner on there. I mean, that is just the ultimate in wonderful, amazing marketing.
If you ask me.
Thomas: Yeah. Talk about sponsorship deals. I mean, that's, it shows like, I can't even imagine how much they're paying for the fun and the PR element to being able to do this, but you can find that one perfect, perfect sponsor, which this clearly is, you know, this whole thing. They don't need to have ads.
They don't need to have affiliate stuff. It's like one page. And I'm sure they're doing great with it.
Jared: I mean, let's at least spend 30 seconds on it. How the heck are they getting this data? Where are they getting this data from?
Thomas: My best guess, there must be some endpoint where you can see what you can order at a McDonald's.
Right? Like there's a whole app. There's a whole online ordering system. So I don't know, but my best guess would be that there's some developer tie in to that. Yes. And that they're, or they're scraping the data out of that app and showing, okay, can I order the, you know, whatever it is, the McFlurry, I think it's the McFlurry, um, can I order that?
Can I order a McDonald's shake? And if they see it in the menu, then they assume that the machine is working. If it's not in the menu. It's not. That would be my guess. I don't know. Maybe you know, but I, that's my only only way I can think of, you know,
Jared: it's interesting because yes, as occasionally I'll go like work from a Panera, um, with my laptop just to kind of change locations and stuff.
Um, and so I went to order yesterday in the app to order my coffee because it could be busy in the morning, skip the line, walk right up, get my coffee. Right. And I noticed that I couldn't order coffee. But the app was working fine. I thought that's bizarre. So I showed up at the Panera and they're like, Oh yeah, our coffee machine is broken.
And so we actually took the coffee off the ability of you to order it cause we can't give it to you right now. And I was like, Oh, so that's interesting that we're now talking about this site one day later, that that's actually happened yesterday to me.
Thomas: So that's probably what it is. They're probably somehow, I don't know if it's a, And API access.
Yeah. Or they're just doing it, you know, for every McDonald's they have a script that's running in the background and scraping the stuff out, or, you know, a headless browser that's going to the app and then screenshotting or pulling up, you know, whatever JavaScript that comes out or JSON data that comes out and parsing through it.
I mean, it's either one programmer. Who just decided to sit down and build this thing for fun, or they have like a great dev team behind it. And Wendy's is throwing a lot more money at this project than we, when we were thinking there.
Jared: Final observation, if this is accurate, look at how many more McDonald's there are on the Eastern half of the United States than on the Western half.
Thomas: Yeah. You know, it's, I see it's concentrated around Los Angeles. We don't have so many in the Bay area, I guess. It's a shame. I love McDonald's. I love their McFlurries and all their shakes and stuff. So this is a useful resource. I'll definitely be using this to plan out, you know, which McDonald's I'm going to go to.
Fantastic.
Jared: I love the investment, folks. Thomas went down to his McDonald's today to fact check. You truly are a journalist.
Thomas: Had to make sure it wasn't just made up, you know? Oh, it's so good. All right.
Jared: Um, sticking in the general food Uh, niche, if you will, uh, I'll pull up yours and, and, and let you walk us through your weird niche.
Thomas: Yeah, so this is starbucksmelody. com, and I originally found this because I started writing about Starbucks on my own sites and my own YouTube channel, and it has zero relevance to the topic of my site. But I just like Starbucks and so I would like review when they had a new product out a new drink and weirdly Google decided that I was the authority on Starbucks.
I started getting all this traffic and I still get traffic for Starbucks and it seems so weird. Why would I be chosen there? So I started looking and relative to the size of the brand. There's so few people writing about it. So few fan sites around Starbucks. And that really surprised me because going way back, um, Costco hot dog, a hot dog at Costco has its own fan site.
So I thought there must be Starbucks fan sites. And I look and there really aren't. And one of the only ones I was able to find is this it's Starbucks melody. It's called Starbucks Melody. I couldn't figure this out. The person who runs it is named Melody. So that's the reason for that. And this is one woman who appears to have just done this as a labor of love.
She has written, it looks like, around almost 2, 000 pages, 1, 975 pages. Wow. This goes all the way back to 2010. Her bio describes her as a lawyer by day. Starbucks enthusiast, vegan, lover of Seattle and Orange County, and Air Force veteran. So, quite a bio, quite a backstory, I'm sure, there. Somebody I would love to know more about how she ended up in the Starbucks review space.
And thank you for your service, Melody. Um, but, you know, it seems like it's just something that she started blogging about for fun. I didn't see a lot of monetization on here. Um, and it's just been going on for a long time. And so as a result, she's ranking for, it looks like about 16 and a half thousand keywords.
It's a DR 48. There are stories going all the way back to 2010 that she's still ranking for. And some of these are really big, the names of really prominent Starbucks drinks. And she's in pretty high position for them sometimes. Yeah. Ranking number one. As we're seeing on the screen here, like, you know, upside down, caramel macchiato, almond milk ingredients at Starbucks position one for that outranking Starbucks itself.
I'm sure on that query. So Starbucks birthday rewards. She is doing an amazing job with SEO on a site that's clearly not optimized for it. It's just one person who happens to be, you know, quote unquote, Starbucks enthusiast blogging about this. So I thought it was super interesting because you'd think with this big brand, there'd be more buzz and interest and fan sites and presence around it.
But what I see here is a huge opportunity. So she actually stopped, um, blogging about this in July of this year. She didn't shut the site down, but wrote a post basically saying, Hey, I'm done with this. A bunch of personal reasons. It sounded like she changed her, um, her lifestyle and eating choices and things and decided not to continue to write here.
But I think this would be a huge opportunity. For somebody to come in and make an offer and purchase this site or to create something similar, but with more of an SEO spin to it. Because again, there's so much interest, so much search traffic, if I'm considered an authority on Starbucks, or I barely ever write about it, think how well you could do if you really put in place a great content strategy for something like this, either, you know, someone wants to reach out to Melody and see if she wants to sell and you want to hire me to write the articles, um, I'm all in on it, but you know, it's, uh, I'm It seems like there could be so much potential here, given how far this one person has gotten with what's basically a hobby.
Jared: Well, Thomas, it's a great site and you want to know why I think it's such a great site to share? Why is that? It's finally happened. Ironically, I recognize the site as I pulled it up and you started talking about it and I just went back and it's true. This is the weird niche site I shared on the very first niche pursuits news podcast we ever did on March 13th, 2023.
And I had to check cause I'm like, this looks so familiar. And there it is.
Thomas: That is so funny. So great minds think alike. So consider this an update on Starbucks melody. Nobody went and purchased it from her. Then it has survived, uh, all of the HCU stuff that has happened, um, in the meanwhile, cause I'm looking at this, this was March 17th, 2023, it seems to have gone, you know, strength to strength through the HCU and all the updates.
So it's a probably an even more appealing site than it was when you looked at it back then. And now Melody's stepping back. So maybe it's time for somebody to come in. Maybe Spencer needs to say, we've covered you twice now. Um, why not become a member of the Niche Pursuits family?
Jared: I mean, to your point, look at that March, 2023 was almost one of its low periods.
It's really, um, gained quite a bit and then certainly had its struggles this year, but, um, but, uh, yeah, I mean, to your point, it's, it's, I mean, compared to other sites that are content heavy, like it's done pretty well. We've been joking about someday we're just going to end up crossing over. It's too much to keep track of.
I'd even thought about it. It's not even like I've always been saying, I'll make a mistake. I'm going to feature the same weird niche by accident a year later or something, but we don't really check these things ahead of time. That's kind of the novelty of it. That's the fun of it is I kind of get to see your site.
You see my site. We kind of. Maybe see it in the agenda 10 minutes before we hit record, but, um, it's bound to happen and there it is. Well, that's a perfect, perfect end. I do agree with you. If she shut the site down, there's absolutely no reason why somebody who to your point, like What a great opportunity.
What a strong brand name. Um, I was getting nervous when the name of the company is actually in the URL or in the brand. Um, so, you know, maybe she shut it down for personal reasons. Maybe that might be part of it too, but I guess to your point, it's been going for so long. It seems to be helping the Starbucks brand.
So, you know, maybe they're not really concerned. Is that, but, um,
Thomas: yeah. And the thing that stood out to me too is, you know, like you showed there, It's seen a little bit of a decline in traffic. None of it seemed to be HCU related. It seemed like she just maybe took her foot off the accelerator and writing this content.
Um, so yeah, maybe there's some other, uh, story behind the scenes we're not aware of, but if she literally just sort of lost interest in the project over the time since you last covered it, that's a perfect time to, you know, have somebody else come in and maybe make an offer.
Jared: I love it. I love it. Boy, what a day.
What a news session going to be interesting to follow along in the unraveling or maybe lack thereof of all this Forbes information. Keep an eye on the story. Is it a manual action? Is it not? Are the sites associated with it going to going to follow like it's such an intriguing storyline. Congrats on your success in the newsletters.
Great to have you back. I'm sure we'll see you again in the future.
Thomas: Absolutely. Yeah, it's been great to be here and I look forward to sharing more updates.
Jared: Have a great weekend, everyone. Thanks again. We'll see you next week.
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